I am at the juncture of being away from the United States for just long enough that, beyond appreciating differences, I am actively chafing at them. Wouldn't you know, even someone fraught with a case of wanderlust can show signs of having roots. Let's dive in.
- Food and the Culture of Eating Outside of the Home
The wide variety of flavors and textures from all over the world available in a matter of minutes, from which there is yet another array of options in which to take them is something I take almost for granted in the United States. If I want Vietnamese soup or Punjabi curry or sushi or soul food or Mexican dishes, whatever it is I'm in the mood for, it's available and not a hassle to come across there. Here, not everything is available—Vietnamese food is essentially nonexistent, Mexican food is Lusified to the point of not really tasting anything like Mexican food, and many of the other things I normally consume on a whimsy are either expensive or more of a hassle than they're truly worth it to find. Despite the fact of there being new and interesting things to try here, I miss being able to be bored by too many gastronomic options around me more than almost anything else. I miss being able to order things on menus with near-infallible reliability and the ability to order with minute precision; it is not uncommon for cafés and restaurants to be out of just one ingredient for something here, leaving options unexpected.
- One-Stop, 24-hour Shopping
Stores of almost any sort, any business enterprise for that matter, are not legally allowed to operate 24 hours a day in almost all cases in Portugal and across much of Europe. In the United States, the idea of a regular grocery store not being open 24 hours a day is something of an absurdity: take Wal-Mart, with its ubiquitous (if derided) presence in the country. Seldom is their modern store that is not open all hours of the day. 24-hour service is the norm, not the exception, and this has extended to the most common and largest grocery stores across the country, be they in the Kroger family, Safeway, or otherwise. Whole Foods is the only major exception I can find to this. Not only being able to go to the store at 2 AM on a whimsy, I can also find a surplus of varieties of every basic item I could possibly need at almost all of these same retailers, from personal hygiene and pharmaceutical needs to home goods office supplies, food, and everything in between. When we complain about a grocery store not having something in the United States, it's usually either because they don't have a particular brand of what we were looking for, or because we wanted a more obscure, niche-market item. I sometimes wonder about the availability here of things I wouldn't blink an eye about in Denver. I miss being able to get every small thing I need easily, without having to go to several stores, worry about the time of day it is when I'm going, worry about going on the wrong day of the week, or anything else along those lines.
- Sociability
The friends I have abroad are fantastic people doing interesting things in a plethora of fields, to the extent that my life is much the greater for having them in it. The day to day reality of living abroad, however, is that a lot of my interactions with friends and people in general involves surface-level linguistic interaction, difficulties in communicating, and in certain circumstances, contenting ourselves with the company of each other without actually communicating very much at all. I revolve around constantly learning from my environment and am prone to causing situations from which to learn from, to diving headfirst into things, and this includes language and the process of self expression, but perhaps the most valuable lesson I've learned recently is that the art of communicating with someone who speaks the same language natively and similarly shares your culture is not to be taken for granted. The way I speak English is entirely different with non-native speakers out of reflex because I find it grating to have to repeat myself because I talk too quickly in my particular accent or my Americanisms are lost on even very competent English speakers. I miss having a cultural and linguistic foundation from which to be able to better get into the nitty-gritty aspects of my character and connecting more closely with friends.
All of this and I still can't seem to want to stay put for very long at a time.
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