(This is the fifth part in a five-part series.)
Thing We Will Miss #1: The People
Now the sun has risen over our last day in Lithuania. We have packed and weighed our luggage. We have scrubbed our toilet and emptied our refrigerator and swept our floor. Tomorrow at this time we will be somewhere in the airspace between Vilnius and Frankfurt, and by midnight Michigan time we will finally have arrived in Detroit. And so it is at this moment that our thoughts naturally turn toward exactly what it is we will miss most: all the people here whom we have come to know and to love.
I will miss my students: their humor, their kindness, their intelligence. I will miss being in the midst of all that potential and determination and having the opportunity to give it shape and direction. And as time continues to march onward, I will miss watching them do all of the tremendous things that they will undoubtedly do.
We will miss all the long-termers at LCC who taught us the ropes: people like Jared and Carrie, our appointed “buddies” and now friends, who gave us an in-depth introduction to the supermarket, the outdoor market, the bus system, the currency, and the cell phone situation. People like my boss and friend Robin, who, despite that she is a volunteer herself and has been here for years, welcomed us graciously to Klaipeda, fed us, took us on trips with childlike gusto, and made us feel unique and appreciated. People like our neighbor Geri, who made us cookies when we were stressed and soup when we were sick and graciously put up with us borrowing her furniture and wiping out her Internet. People like Steve and Laura, two generous souls who have an entire Lonely Planet’s guide worth of travel advice and the kindness to share it.
We will miss our co-volunteers, the others who came last August to commit a part of their lives to this remarkable place: Grace, my office mate and best bud, who became as close and comfortable as family to both of us. Mark and Sherry, our musical cohorts. The VanderArks, who, between the three of them, have read more books than everyone in the state of Rhode Island combined. Becky and Erik, who were crazy enough to invite everyone over to their apartment at 7:30 each Friday morning for a homemade breakfast and a time of communal thanksgiving.
And we will miss all of the other Lithuanian and non-Lithuanian staff and faculty at LCC who keep the place running: Scott’s IT colleagues Antonius, Aurelius, and Roman, along with his lovely wife Ksenija; our Lithuanian professor Radvyda, who should probably be sainted for her profound patience; the eternally cheerful Ilona, the gracious Robertus; the accommodating and affable Vaida.
As we leave these people, along with many others I failed to mention, we leave a community that has taken us in unconditionally and supported us beyond any of our expectations. We move forward with an emptiness in the impressions they have left upon our hearts.
Thing We Will Not Miss #1: Missing Other People
Although we will greatly miss all of the people over here, we do look forward to not missing all of the people over there. It seems as though, with all of the advancements in technology, living overseas would not feel like such an insurmountable distance, but still it does. There is e-mail, Facebook, Google chat, and endless variations on these themes. There is even Skype, a program that allows you to video chat for free with anyone anywhere who has a webcam and an Internet connection. These are wonderful things, and they do make distances seem considerably shorter. But does anyone else out there find each of these methods, especially Skype, to be strangely unfulfilling sometimes?
Before Scott and I left for Lithuania, I told myself that Skype would be sufficient for communicating with family and friends. It didn’t take long to see how far off I was. Don’t get me wrong; Skype is a precious invention. Still, it can also be extremely awkward.
The problem with Skype is that we tell ourselves it’s just like being in the room with someone. I guess it’s that expectation that makes the actual experience so disappointing. Sometimes I find myself thinking: Wow. Does it really feel this painful to be in a room full of family and friends? And the answer is, inevitably, no. One time we Skyped during a friend’s birthday party. Our friend called us up, then put us on a table. People would accidentally walk in front of the computer and then realize that they had been caught. The problem is, after you get stuck on the screen, you can’t just walk away and leave the computer people with no one to talk to, regardless of whether or not you know them. It’s kind of like answering a phone call from a very persistent salesperson or not walking fast enough past one of those Mormon missionaries. You have a moment where you think, “Dammit; why didn’t I stay in the corner where it was safe?” or “Next time I’ll make sure to walk across the other side of the room.” But you realize that there’s nothing you can do at that moment, so you’re just going to have to stand there for several blundering minutes and flounder for questions to which you don’t care to hear the answers. The aforementioned birthday party was particularly painful.
(A man who is married to someone’s high school band teacher, after he has inadvertently scratched his nether region directly in front of the webcam, glances down to see us grimacing out.)
Man: “Whoa! Hey! How you guys doing over there?”
Us: “Good.”
Me: “Great, really.”
Scott: “Yeah, great. Lovin’ it.”
(Man looks around for someone to save him; no one appears.)
Man: “Well, so….how do you like it over there?”
Us: “We love it.”
Scott: “We love it, but it sure is different.”
Me: “Yeah, it is different. We love it, though.
Scott: “Boy do we.”
(Man takes a long drink of beer, reaches for crotch, then reconsiders. Man drinks again. Looks back and forth. Party seems to have become strangely unpopulated.)
I would ask the man questions, but within the past minute I have become socially retarded. Plus, I do not actually know who the man is.
Man: “You guys are probably seeing a lot of things you wouldn’t see over here, huh?”
Us: “Yeah, sure are.”
Scott: “Yeah, you wouldn’t believe it, dude, seriously.”
Me: (in a whisper to Scott) “Wait. What’s his name? Dude?”
Dude: “What? I can’t hear you. You’re cutting out.”
(Skype hangs up. We breathe a collective sigh of relief. Then we feel guilty and call back. The person who answers creates some lame excuse and leaves the screen. After a couple of minutes, another unsuspecting victim, a cousin this time, gets caught in the webcam tractor beam. Looks over, realizes his mistake, tries to conceal his disappointment. Shakes it off.)
Cousin: “So, you two. How’s it going in Lebanon?”
These are unique and exaggerated examples, but you get the point. How many people in your immediate “community”, whatever it consists of, can you sit down and have a meaningful conversation with? Honestly? We have this idea that if we share words, especially if images come with those words, then we have communication. Many people, especially the older generation, despair about how people don’t have real relationships anymore, about how youth would prefer to communicate via computer and cell phone rather than face-to-face. It is perfectly acceptable for teenagers and twenty-somethings to answer a phone call right in the middle of a conversation now; I’ve done this myself. I’ve even facebook-messaged someone rather than walk 20 feet and knock on their door. But I realize now that the older generation has a point. Real community, real intimacy, even real communication is not just about saying the right words at the right time. And it’s not about saying enough of the right words. It’s also about being in one another’s physical presence. It’s about listening to my dad play guitar in the morning over coffee and helping my mother feed the horses and chasing my parent’s demonic dog around the backyard and taking a long walk with my brother and hoisting my nephews up on my shoulders and driving with my sister to the gas station for a disgusting cup of coffee because we have a Beantown Coffee Club card and think it’s hilarious. It’s about sitting next to people and sharing the same food and laughing at the same jokes even if you are falling off the left wing in your “Marriage is so gay” t-shirt while half your extended family members own entire walk-in closets full of firearms.
This is what we will miss, and this is what we will not miss. This is why we are so sad to leave and why we are also so indubitably glad to come home.
Because of you.
Sunday 9 May 2010
Saturday 8 May 2010
Captain Duona Versus the Ceburekine
(This is part four of a five-part series.)
Thing We Will Miss #2: The Food
No, Lithuanian cuisine is not as renowned as, say, Italian cuisine or Japanese cuisine, and it’s easy to understand why. Yet there are still certain foods that you can only get here, foods that my digestive tract will remember with a vaguely confused nostalgia. I think it must be similar to the psychological state of falling in love with one’s kidnapper.
Item #7: Koldunai: chewy, palm-sized noodles folded around nuggets of gray mystery meat. I know that sounds horrible. In fact, maybe they are horrible. I’m not sure if I like these because they are actually palatable or because you can buy them frozen at the store and boil them up in less than 10 minutes.
Item #6: Saltibarsciai. Don’t let the chalky pink hue of Pepto Bismol fool you, or the fact that “saltibarsciai” translates to “cold beet soup”. Just close your eyes, plug your nose, and swallow.
Item #5: The Pomelo. These hefty, golden orbs are the patriarch of grapefruit. In fact, the grapefruit is Mr. Pomelo and Lil’ Ms. Orange’s famous baby. Imagine a grapefruit, double it in size, and extract all the extra juice. Also imagine that, when you split it open, its insides look just like the guts of that snow creature that Luke Skywalker slaughtered and slept inside at the beginning of “The Empire Strikes Back.” On second thought, leave that part out.
Item #4: Karstas Sokoladas, or “hot chocolate”, but without the extra liquid. Break up a dark chocolate bar, boil it down, and then drink it before it hardens. Now your esophagus has officially taken a figurative dip in Willy Wonka’s chocolate river. Hopefully you can still breathe.
Item #3: Chocolate Varske Surelis Bars. Lithuanians have discovered the inbred lovechild of ice cream and cream cheese, and it is as stupidly beautiful and delicious as you could ever hope it would be.
Item #2: Svyturys Baltas. This unfiltered Lithuanian brew, to our taste, leaves German wheat beers in the dust. Scott has even written meticulous letters to distribution companies in Michigan. Yes, that’s right, all you family members who have longed in vain for a letter from Scott. Maybe you should have been distributing Lithuanian beer instead. (To be fair, Scott was inquiring where we could get Svytyrus Baltas for the Lithuanian party we’re planning to throw after we get back.)
Item #1: Kepta Duona. Literally “fried bread”, these buttery rye sticks are sprinkled with garlic, then drowned in mayonnaise and cheese. They are also the inspiration for Scott’s alter ego, Lithuanian superhero Captain Duona.
Thing We Will Not Miss #2: The Food
I have already whined at great length about the food in Lithuania, so I need not wax eloquent here. I need not reiterate how my stomach convulses when I consider the heaps of boiled and fried potatoes I have reluctantly consumed, the lugubrious cement-colored slabs of what I hope is 100% meat, the virtual buckets of sour cream sauce, which is actually (Tada!) just sour cream. I need not ruminate over my failed attempts to recreate my mother’s recipes, nor do I need to restate just what has to happen psychologically in order to get to the point where you see “pig neck” on a menu and decide to order it because at least then you know which part of the little porker you will be hesitantly masticating upon.
No, I have already dwelled on such things enough. Instead, I will simply describe one Lithuanian entrée that I have heretofore tried my best to forget: the ceburekine.
Tell me: What comes to mind when you think of elephant ears? Cinnamon sugar? Fruit toppings? That luscious combination of soft and crispy textures that melds your mouth into a sweet and doughy bliss? Yes? Good for you. I’m glad that you have such positive associations. I, too, would like to think of elephant ears as you do, but, alas, I cannot. Not after my run-in with the ceburekine.
The ceburekine looks like an elephant ear. It is delightfully doughy, deep-fried, even ear-shaped. But this, my naïve friends, is where the similarities end. The ceburekine, for all I know, is actually the ear of an elephant. That is, it is stuffed with heavily-salted meaty gray rubber. And I ate one. In its entirety. Please don’t ask me why. It could have something to do with the fact that the ceburekine stand looked like a mini-circus tent. It could be that I have a deeply misleading belief that absolutely anything is delicious when lathered in batter and deep fried. Or it could be that I, in the early days of my Lithuanian experience, was determined, literally, to take everything in, and, what’s more, to do it with a blind, untasting, unquestioning glee.
Now, as Scott and I move into our final Saturday in Klaipeda, Lithuania, we can happily say that we drank our Lithuanian lives to the dregs, regardless of how much retching it took to get parts of that greasy gray potato milkshake all the way down.
Thing We Will Miss #2: The Food
No, Lithuanian cuisine is not as renowned as, say, Italian cuisine or Japanese cuisine, and it’s easy to understand why. Yet there are still certain foods that you can only get here, foods that my digestive tract will remember with a vaguely confused nostalgia. I think it must be similar to the psychological state of falling in love with one’s kidnapper.
Item #7: Koldunai: chewy, palm-sized noodles folded around nuggets of gray mystery meat. I know that sounds horrible. In fact, maybe they are horrible. I’m not sure if I like these because they are actually palatable or because you can buy them frozen at the store and boil them up in less than 10 minutes.
Item #6: Saltibarsciai. Don’t let the chalky pink hue of Pepto Bismol fool you, or the fact that “saltibarsciai” translates to “cold beet soup”. Just close your eyes, plug your nose, and swallow.
Item #5: The Pomelo. These hefty, golden orbs are the patriarch of grapefruit. In fact, the grapefruit is Mr. Pomelo and Lil’ Ms. Orange’s famous baby. Imagine a grapefruit, double it in size, and extract all the extra juice. Also imagine that, when you split it open, its insides look just like the guts of that snow creature that Luke Skywalker slaughtered and slept inside at the beginning of “The Empire Strikes Back.” On second thought, leave that part out.
Item #4: Karstas Sokoladas, or “hot chocolate”, but without the extra liquid. Break up a dark chocolate bar, boil it down, and then drink it before it hardens. Now your esophagus has officially taken a figurative dip in Willy Wonka’s chocolate river. Hopefully you can still breathe.
Item #3: Chocolate Varske Surelis Bars. Lithuanians have discovered the inbred lovechild of ice cream and cream cheese, and it is as stupidly beautiful and delicious as you could ever hope it would be.
Item #2: Svyturys Baltas. This unfiltered Lithuanian brew, to our taste, leaves German wheat beers in the dust. Scott has even written meticulous letters to distribution companies in Michigan. Yes, that’s right, all you family members who have longed in vain for a letter from Scott. Maybe you should have been distributing Lithuanian beer instead. (To be fair, Scott was inquiring where we could get Svytyrus Baltas for the Lithuanian party we’re planning to throw after we get back.)
Item #1: Kepta Duona. Literally “fried bread”, these buttery rye sticks are sprinkled with garlic, then drowned in mayonnaise and cheese. They are also the inspiration for Scott’s alter ego, Lithuanian superhero Captain Duona.
Thing We Will Not Miss #2: The Food
I have already whined at great length about the food in Lithuania, so I need not wax eloquent here. I need not reiterate how my stomach convulses when I consider the heaps of boiled and fried potatoes I have reluctantly consumed, the lugubrious cement-colored slabs of what I hope is 100% meat, the virtual buckets of sour cream sauce, which is actually (Tada!) just sour cream. I need not ruminate over my failed attempts to recreate my mother’s recipes, nor do I need to restate just what has to happen psychologically in order to get to the point where you see “pig neck” on a menu and decide to order it because at least then you know which part of the little porker you will be hesitantly masticating upon.
No, I have already dwelled on such things enough. Instead, I will simply describe one Lithuanian entrée that I have heretofore tried my best to forget: the ceburekine.
Tell me: What comes to mind when you think of elephant ears? Cinnamon sugar? Fruit toppings? That luscious combination of soft and crispy textures that melds your mouth into a sweet and doughy bliss? Yes? Good for you. I’m glad that you have such positive associations. I, too, would like to think of elephant ears as you do, but, alas, I cannot. Not after my run-in with the ceburekine.
The ceburekine looks like an elephant ear. It is delightfully doughy, deep-fried, even ear-shaped. But this, my naïve friends, is where the similarities end. The ceburekine, for all I know, is actually the ear of an elephant. That is, it is stuffed with heavily-salted meaty gray rubber. And I ate one. In its entirety. Please don’t ask me why. It could have something to do with the fact that the ceburekine stand looked like a mini-circus tent. It could be that I have a deeply misleading belief that absolutely anything is delicious when lathered in batter and deep fried. Or it could be that I, in the early days of my Lithuanian experience, was determined, literally, to take everything in, and, what’s more, to do it with a blind, untasting, unquestioning glee.
Now, as Scott and I move into our final Saturday in Klaipeda, Lithuania, we can happily say that we drank our Lithuanian lives to the dregs, regardless of how much retching it took to get parts of that greasy gray potato milkshake all the way down.
Friday 7 May 2010
My Carbon Footprint Just Kicked My Carbon Footprint's Ass
(This is part three of a five-part series.)
Thing We Will Miss #3: Living a More Eco-Friendly Lifestyle
Living in Lithuania, in many ways, forces you to be kinder to the Earth. Scott and I don’t have a car, nor do we need one. We walk to and from school, or we use public transportation. There are local buses (the ones I wrote disparagingly of in an earlier post), and there are slightly more upscale minibuses that you can flag down wherever you want. There are also incredibly cheap taxis. Plus, if you want to get to any nearby-or not so nearby-cities, all you have to do is hop a train or a bus. Scott and I have not had to purchase one tank of gas since we got here. We haven’t had to get tune-ups or pay monthly insurance bills. Now, as we consider our plans for home, we realize that a vehicle is going to take up a large percentage of our monthly expenses. We’re committed to purchasing only one car, which Scott will use for work. I will be using the Ann Arbor bus system, a bicycle, and my own two legs to get around.
Lithuanian food, I suspect, is also better in many ways than food in the states. It doesn’t have to travel as far, and, as a result, it doesn’t need to be pumped full of preservatives. The food doesn’t seem to be soaked in pesticides either, judging by the fact that bugs can, and sometimes do, make their dirty little homes in our produce. This, although it might seem off-putting, is actually a good thing if you think about how many insects couldn’t get near your standard American apple without dying. When living things can’t live near your food, maybe you, another living thing, shouldn’t be eating that food. But I digress.
Not only do transportation and food live up to a greener standard; so too does our laundry. We don’t have a dryer, so instead everything gets hung on drying racks after it spends two monotonous (but energy-efficient) hours in our miniature washing machine. Of course, our laundry doesn’t always dry quickly because sometimes (like right now, for example) it is bitterly cold in our apartment. This is due to another “green” government strategy: When it gets up to a certain degree for a certain number of days, the heat is unceremoniously cut off, and regardless of the frigid temperatures that follow (and the fact that we’re still wearing three layers underneath our winter coats), there is no chance of the heat getting turned back on.
Thing We Will Not Miss #3: Living a Less Eco-Friendly Lifestyle
I have adjusted well, I think, to all of these changes; I would even say that I appreciate them if you don’t count my whining about being persistently cold or my drying off with a towel that feels like a thin slab of frozen concrete. But there are other elements that undo all of the good I like to imagine we’ve done.
When we first arrived, we quickly figured out which types of things could be recycled and began to faithfully collect and separate materials, just as we used to do in the states. Then I found out that everything we painstakingly sorted into the corner recycle bins was picked up by the trash truck and dumped in a landfill. Take that, Earth!
In addition to this, Scott and I, being practically illiterate in Lithuanian, often buy food that turns out to be unendurably disgusting. I am ashamed even to hint at the inedible goods purchased and then thrown almost directly in the garbage. One of our biggest problems is that we are both suckers for a picture. This is because pictures are the only things we can understand. Cute cow=dairy. Cute pig=pork. A couple of months ago, Scott was certain he had found patty sausage. You should know that no one else here in Lithuania has ever found patty sausage. Scott based this, yes, as you may have guessed, on an adorable drawing of a pig in a chef’s hat and apron. Scott is a sucker for cute pigs. I desperately hope that this is not a reflection on me.
“Chell!” Scott called, breathless with excitement. “I found it! Patty sausage!” He triumphantly pulled his find from the grocery bag. It was shaped like patty sausage. Plus it had a picture of a pig. Excited, we cut through the sleeve of paper. Underneath was a pink slab that looked like a cylindrical organ.
“It’s ham,” I conjectured.
“No, it’s spam,” Scott guessed. After cutting off the smallest piece, we discovered that we were both wrong and right. The pink slab was most likely an entire ham thrown, bone, gristle and all, into a food processor, then wrapped up like a giant Good n’ Plenty.
“I know!” said Scott, reluctant to admit defeat. “I’ll make ham salad! It will be delicious.” He mashed up the pink eraser in a bowl and put it in the fridge. Immediately our apartment took on the odor of salty pig mangle. Two days later, once our disgust had surpassed our guilt, salty pig mangle found its proper home in the garbage bag.
In fact, earlier today, this very issue sparked a heated debate. I was cleaning out the kitchen while Scott was programming on the couch. I had already had to throw a few things away, which notoriously puts me in a very guilty mood. In other words, I turn into mega-bitch. After finishing cleaning out the fridge, I continued on to the freezer where I discovered a family size bag of fish sticks. Neither Scott, to my knowledge, nor I had ever eaten fish sticks. Why, then, was there a huge bag of them in our freezer? I held them up in two hands and waggled them across the room at Scott, who was peering into his computer screen.
“What are these?” I asked.
“Ugh,” Scott said, glancing over. “Pitch ‘em.”
Mega-bitch reared her ugly head. I dragged the garbage can across the room and thrust the fish sticks into his hands. “No,” I said. “I want you to do this.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I would never buy fish sticks; I have standards.”
“I have standards, too! That’s why I couldn’t eat them!”
“Then why did you buy them?”
“I was hungry for something familiar!”
“And you couldn’t have gotten a smaller package? Or settled for something else familiar? Like an orange?”
“Fine! If it bothers you so much, let’s sit down tonight and finish them up, all of them, you and me!”
“No! Why should I have to eat fish sticks just because you, in a moment of idiocy, stocked up on a lifetime supply of them?”
Why, indeed?
The fish sticks, as you probably guessed, are no longer with us; they are heading over to hang out with salty pig mangle. I can only hope that the love we’re leaving here in Lithuania more than makes up for our piles of unnecessary garbage, but I do know one thing: No pig or cow or fish, no matter how cute or well-dressed, is going to lead us astray in the US of A.
Thing We Will Miss #3: Living a More Eco-Friendly Lifestyle
Living in Lithuania, in many ways, forces you to be kinder to the Earth. Scott and I don’t have a car, nor do we need one. We walk to and from school, or we use public transportation. There are local buses (the ones I wrote disparagingly of in an earlier post), and there are slightly more upscale minibuses that you can flag down wherever you want. There are also incredibly cheap taxis. Plus, if you want to get to any nearby-or not so nearby-cities, all you have to do is hop a train or a bus. Scott and I have not had to purchase one tank of gas since we got here. We haven’t had to get tune-ups or pay monthly insurance bills. Now, as we consider our plans for home, we realize that a vehicle is going to take up a large percentage of our monthly expenses. We’re committed to purchasing only one car, which Scott will use for work. I will be using the Ann Arbor bus system, a bicycle, and my own two legs to get around.
Lithuanian food, I suspect, is also better in many ways than food in the states. It doesn’t have to travel as far, and, as a result, it doesn’t need to be pumped full of preservatives. The food doesn’t seem to be soaked in pesticides either, judging by the fact that bugs can, and sometimes do, make their dirty little homes in our produce. This, although it might seem off-putting, is actually a good thing if you think about how many insects couldn’t get near your standard American apple without dying. When living things can’t live near your food, maybe you, another living thing, shouldn’t be eating that food. But I digress.
Not only do transportation and food live up to a greener standard; so too does our laundry. We don’t have a dryer, so instead everything gets hung on drying racks after it spends two monotonous (but energy-efficient) hours in our miniature washing machine. Of course, our laundry doesn’t always dry quickly because sometimes (like right now, for example) it is bitterly cold in our apartment. This is due to another “green” government strategy: When it gets up to a certain degree for a certain number of days, the heat is unceremoniously cut off, and regardless of the frigid temperatures that follow (and the fact that we’re still wearing three layers underneath our winter coats), there is no chance of the heat getting turned back on.
Thing We Will Not Miss #3: Living a Less Eco-Friendly Lifestyle
I have adjusted well, I think, to all of these changes; I would even say that I appreciate them if you don’t count my whining about being persistently cold or my drying off with a towel that feels like a thin slab of frozen concrete. But there are other elements that undo all of the good I like to imagine we’ve done.
When we first arrived, we quickly figured out which types of things could be recycled and began to faithfully collect and separate materials, just as we used to do in the states. Then I found out that everything we painstakingly sorted into the corner recycle bins was picked up by the trash truck and dumped in a landfill. Take that, Earth!
In addition to this, Scott and I, being practically illiterate in Lithuanian, often buy food that turns out to be unendurably disgusting. I am ashamed even to hint at the inedible goods purchased and then thrown almost directly in the garbage. One of our biggest problems is that we are both suckers for a picture. This is because pictures are the only things we can understand. Cute cow=dairy. Cute pig=pork. A couple of months ago, Scott was certain he had found patty sausage. You should know that no one else here in Lithuania has ever found patty sausage. Scott based this, yes, as you may have guessed, on an adorable drawing of a pig in a chef’s hat and apron. Scott is a sucker for cute pigs. I desperately hope that this is not a reflection on me.
“Chell!” Scott called, breathless with excitement. “I found it! Patty sausage!” He triumphantly pulled his find from the grocery bag. It was shaped like patty sausage. Plus it had a picture of a pig. Excited, we cut through the sleeve of paper. Underneath was a pink slab that looked like a cylindrical organ.
“It’s ham,” I conjectured.
“No, it’s spam,” Scott guessed. After cutting off the smallest piece, we discovered that we were both wrong and right. The pink slab was most likely an entire ham thrown, bone, gristle and all, into a food processor, then wrapped up like a giant Good n’ Plenty.
“I know!” said Scott, reluctant to admit defeat. “I’ll make ham salad! It will be delicious.” He mashed up the pink eraser in a bowl and put it in the fridge. Immediately our apartment took on the odor of salty pig mangle. Two days later, once our disgust had surpassed our guilt, salty pig mangle found its proper home in the garbage bag.
In fact, earlier today, this very issue sparked a heated debate. I was cleaning out the kitchen while Scott was programming on the couch. I had already had to throw a few things away, which notoriously puts me in a very guilty mood. In other words, I turn into mega-bitch. After finishing cleaning out the fridge, I continued on to the freezer where I discovered a family size bag of fish sticks. Neither Scott, to my knowledge, nor I had ever eaten fish sticks. Why, then, was there a huge bag of them in our freezer? I held them up in two hands and waggled them across the room at Scott, who was peering into his computer screen.
“What are these?” I asked.
“Ugh,” Scott said, glancing over. “Pitch ‘em.”
Mega-bitch reared her ugly head. I dragged the garbage can across the room and thrust the fish sticks into his hands. “No,” I said. “I want you to do this.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I would never buy fish sticks; I have standards.”
“I have standards, too! That’s why I couldn’t eat them!”
“Then why did you buy them?”
“I was hungry for something familiar!”
“And you couldn’t have gotten a smaller package? Or settled for something else familiar? Like an orange?”
“Fine! If it bothers you so much, let’s sit down tonight and finish them up, all of them, you and me!”
“No! Why should I have to eat fish sticks just because you, in a moment of idiocy, stocked up on a lifetime supply of them?”
Why, indeed?
The fish sticks, as you probably guessed, are no longer with us; they are heading over to hang out with salty pig mangle. I can only hope that the love we’re leaving here in Lithuania more than makes up for our piles of unnecessary garbage, but I do know one thing: No pig or cow or fish, no matter how cute or well-dressed, is going to lead us astray in the US of A.
Thursday 6 May 2010
The Customer Is Always an Idiot
(This is part two of a five-part series.)
Thing We Will Miss #4: Being Different
Ever since puberty, I have tried to distance myself from groups. At first, this was because large groups of people made me hyperventilate. But as this tendency continued into adulthood, my panic attacks receded. Instead, I just chalked my militant individualism up to the fact that I do not like being lumped in with any group of people because being lumped in interferes with my ability to be perceived as an individual. I am aware that this implies negative things about my maturity level. It’s also counterproductive: When you use other people’s behavior to determine your own, whether by seeking sameness or opposition, that still means you are basing your decisions around the decisions of someone else and, as such, any goal of autonomy is consequently destroyed. Nonconformity is a wonderful thing as long as you’re being creative and authentic rather than reactionary. And it’s hard not to be reactionary, especially when you’re an American living in and traveling through Europe in the post-Bush era of politics.
But enough of that. Suffice to say, being an American in a sea of Americans was getting mundane, and it’s refreshing as a narcissist to be someone that doesn’t fit: not in beliefs, language, mannerisms, musical taste, haircut, or even dress. Living in Lithuania makes being an American seem unique, interesting, perhaps even frumpily exotic. And, surprisingly, it’s given me a more objective perspective on Americans that generally improves my opinion of being lumped in with such a bunch. Americans, from an Eastern European’s point of view, are overly eager, overly friendly, and overly, almost stupidly, happy. We are idealistic and generous. On the negative side, we are loud, uninformed, wasteful, and badly dressed (or, as we call it, comfortable). From this side of the ocean, I can see how these things are true of me, especially the things I like. I’ll have to see how this newfound appreciation changes when I go to Cedar Point and am herded like a hot, queasy cow through 3-hour lines that I will undoubtedly share with a bunch of loud, uninformed, and badly dressed compatriots.
Thing We Will Not Miss #4: Being Different
Yes, that’s right. Being different is not all it’s cracked up to be. The truth is, we are Americans, and we have American expectations. When I pass one other person walking down a deserted street and flash a toothy grin, I expect that person to at least nod back, perhaps even to smile. When I hold the door open for someone, I expect that he or she will react with the same overly-eager enthusiasm that I would show had someone done the same for me and not, as we both leave the store five minutes later, to slam that same door in my hopeful face. And I expect, when I enter a store, that someone there would be happy to answer my questions and take my money. Despite the disappointments we’ve experience here, Scott and I still have especially American expectations when it comes to customer service.
In America, everyone who works in the customer service industry is taught the same rule: The customer is always right. In Eastern Europe, customer service representatives are apparently taught a different set of rules. Some stores, if they were to qualify their tenets, would probably write things like “The customer is always less intelligent than you,” or “The customer should be treated as if he/she hasn’t bathed in days,” or “We don’t need the customer’s money, so feel free to ignore said customer until he/she forces interaction.” Actually, I can’t read most store signs, so maybe it does say this somewhere.
The upside to this is that I am no longer intimidated by people who, seen through American eyes, would be considered very rude. A couple weeks ago, I was trying to find a substitute for vanilla extract so that I could make chocolate chip cookies for my students. I found a small dropper bottle that smelled like cake and said something vaguely similar to “vanilla aroma.” I stopped one of the stockers to ask if the bottle could be added to food. That is, I tried to stop one of the stockers. “Atsiprasau,” I said in my enthusiastic Lithuanian. “Ar jus kalbite angliskai?” (“Excuse me, do you speak English?”) Without stopping, she looked me up and down, sneered (or so I imagined), and continued past. Nine months ago, this would have made me want to run home and nurse my wounded pride with a Victorian flick and a giant chocolate bar. Now, however, when things like this happen, I am nonplussed. “Uh! Uh! Uh!” I cried. She turned around to see if I was hurt. “This?” I held up the bottle. “Eat?” Then I threw back my head and pretended to down it like a shot of vodka. She blinked, then nodded. I happily purchased my vanilla aroma and went home, only to discover that, after licking a dab from my finger, it tasted like toilet bowl cleaner. She was a tricky one, I thought. Or perhaps she was just obeying the supermarket’s customer service protocol. I imagined a laminated sign hanging in the employee break room: “If the customer is an American and wants to know if he/she can knock back small bottles of harmful household chemicals, simply nod and continue on your way.”
Although we have had some less-than-favorable experiences with Lithuanian customer service, we must also include a couple of disclaimers. First of all, the key difference here is not that Lithuanians are less polite but simply that they have a different culture, one that has been greatly affected by the recent 50-year Soviet occupation. Secondly, we can’t say that these experiences represent all of Eastern Europe. In fact, the further north we travel, the more we begin to think that there is an inverse relationship between customer service quality and how good looking everyone is.
Okay, this is almost entirely in jest, but two of the most obvious things you notice when visiting a new place are the friendliness level of the people and the attractiveness level of the people. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Lithuanians, women more than men, are, to quote Zoolander, “ridiculously good looking”. And, as I just mentioned, Lithuanians tend not to fall all over themselves for strangers. In Latvia, however, one country to the north, people in general go down a notch or two in super-model potential and up at least two notches in friendliness to foreigners. Then, from what we’ve seen, once you get to Estonia, the attractiveness level kind of bottoms out (no offense, Estonians), and the friendly factor explodes. They even over-compensate by giving all the beautiful young women jobs as serving wenches, although this is at least partly due to the medieval motif. This observation is based on very little data, and the relationship, if accurate, is probably correlative rather than causative. Still, it makes you wonder: Why are we Americans so damned friendly?
Thing We Will Miss #4: Being Different
Ever since puberty, I have tried to distance myself from groups. At first, this was because large groups of people made me hyperventilate. But as this tendency continued into adulthood, my panic attacks receded. Instead, I just chalked my militant individualism up to the fact that I do not like being lumped in with any group of people because being lumped in interferes with my ability to be perceived as an individual. I am aware that this implies negative things about my maturity level. It’s also counterproductive: When you use other people’s behavior to determine your own, whether by seeking sameness or opposition, that still means you are basing your decisions around the decisions of someone else and, as such, any goal of autonomy is consequently destroyed. Nonconformity is a wonderful thing as long as you’re being creative and authentic rather than reactionary. And it’s hard not to be reactionary, especially when you’re an American living in and traveling through Europe in the post-Bush era of politics.
But enough of that. Suffice to say, being an American in a sea of Americans was getting mundane, and it’s refreshing as a narcissist to be someone that doesn’t fit: not in beliefs, language, mannerisms, musical taste, haircut, or even dress. Living in Lithuania makes being an American seem unique, interesting, perhaps even frumpily exotic. And, surprisingly, it’s given me a more objective perspective on Americans that generally improves my opinion of being lumped in with such a bunch. Americans, from an Eastern European’s point of view, are overly eager, overly friendly, and overly, almost stupidly, happy. We are idealistic and generous. On the negative side, we are loud, uninformed, wasteful, and badly dressed (or, as we call it, comfortable). From this side of the ocean, I can see how these things are true of me, especially the things I like. I’ll have to see how this newfound appreciation changes when I go to Cedar Point and am herded like a hot, queasy cow through 3-hour lines that I will undoubtedly share with a bunch of loud, uninformed, and badly dressed compatriots.
Thing We Will Not Miss #4: Being Different
Yes, that’s right. Being different is not all it’s cracked up to be. The truth is, we are Americans, and we have American expectations. When I pass one other person walking down a deserted street and flash a toothy grin, I expect that person to at least nod back, perhaps even to smile. When I hold the door open for someone, I expect that he or she will react with the same overly-eager enthusiasm that I would show had someone done the same for me and not, as we both leave the store five minutes later, to slam that same door in my hopeful face. And I expect, when I enter a store, that someone there would be happy to answer my questions and take my money. Despite the disappointments we’ve experience here, Scott and I still have especially American expectations when it comes to customer service.
In America, everyone who works in the customer service industry is taught the same rule: The customer is always right. In Eastern Europe, customer service representatives are apparently taught a different set of rules. Some stores, if they were to qualify their tenets, would probably write things like “The customer is always less intelligent than you,” or “The customer should be treated as if he/she hasn’t bathed in days,” or “We don’t need the customer’s money, so feel free to ignore said customer until he/she forces interaction.” Actually, I can’t read most store signs, so maybe it does say this somewhere.
The upside to this is that I am no longer intimidated by people who, seen through American eyes, would be considered very rude. A couple weeks ago, I was trying to find a substitute for vanilla extract so that I could make chocolate chip cookies for my students. I found a small dropper bottle that smelled like cake and said something vaguely similar to “vanilla aroma.” I stopped one of the stockers to ask if the bottle could be added to food. That is, I tried to stop one of the stockers. “Atsiprasau,” I said in my enthusiastic Lithuanian. “Ar jus kalbite angliskai?” (“Excuse me, do you speak English?”) Without stopping, she looked me up and down, sneered (or so I imagined), and continued past. Nine months ago, this would have made me want to run home and nurse my wounded pride with a Victorian flick and a giant chocolate bar. Now, however, when things like this happen, I am nonplussed. “Uh! Uh! Uh!” I cried. She turned around to see if I was hurt. “This?” I held up the bottle. “Eat?” Then I threw back my head and pretended to down it like a shot of vodka. She blinked, then nodded. I happily purchased my vanilla aroma and went home, only to discover that, after licking a dab from my finger, it tasted like toilet bowl cleaner. She was a tricky one, I thought. Or perhaps she was just obeying the supermarket’s customer service protocol. I imagined a laminated sign hanging in the employee break room: “If the customer is an American and wants to know if he/she can knock back small bottles of harmful household chemicals, simply nod and continue on your way.”
Although we have had some less-than-favorable experiences with Lithuanian customer service, we must also include a couple of disclaimers. First of all, the key difference here is not that Lithuanians are less polite but simply that they have a different culture, one that has been greatly affected by the recent 50-year Soviet occupation. Secondly, we can’t say that these experiences represent all of Eastern Europe. In fact, the further north we travel, the more we begin to think that there is an inverse relationship between customer service quality and how good looking everyone is.
Okay, this is almost entirely in jest, but two of the most obvious things you notice when visiting a new place are the friendliness level of the people and the attractiveness level of the people. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Lithuanians, women more than men, are, to quote Zoolander, “ridiculously good looking”. And, as I just mentioned, Lithuanians tend not to fall all over themselves for strangers. In Latvia, however, one country to the north, people in general go down a notch or two in super-model potential and up at least two notches in friendliness to foreigners. Then, from what we’ve seen, once you get to Estonia, the attractiveness level kind of bottoms out (no offense, Estonians), and the friendly factor explodes. They even over-compensate by giving all the beautiful young women jobs as serving wenches, although this is at least partly due to the medieval motif. This observation is based on very little data, and the relationship, if accurate, is probably correlative rather than causative. Still, it makes you wonder: Why are we Americans so damned friendly?
Tuesday 4 May 2010
Cultural Refinement and the Techno-Colored Nightmare
(This is the first part of a five-part series.)
As most of you know, Scott and I have finally come to the last week of our time here in Eastern Europe, and as we set our sights toward home, we have been debating about how to write the blog’s finale. After throwing around a few half-assed ideas, we have decided to post a top-five list of things we both will and will not miss about leaving Lithuania and returning home to the states. Although there are many smaller things that could make the list (Scott dancing around in his boxers while singing the theme song “Captain Duona”, elderly men cracking open coolers of beer on morning bus and/or boat rides, and unsuspecting ex-pats crunching down on strips of pig ear that have been snuck into long-awaited bowls of soup, to name a few), I will bypass those and focus only on the most major pillars of our Lithuanian journey: both the mythic enjoyments and the irksome annoyances.
Thing We Will Miss #5: The Opportunity to Experience Different Cultures
Since we’ve come to Lithuania, Scott and I have tried hundreds of foods we never would have eaten, traveled to four countries we probably never would have traveled to, heard several languages we never would have heard, and visited countless museums and historical sites that we never would have visited. We have learned, just through casual conversations and a bit of reading, a wealth of Baltic history and the deeply harmful and personal impact of the USSR. We have experienced a different way of being in the world; we have seen a different way of doing life.
Thing We Will Not Miss #5: Certain Aspects of Experiencing Different Cultures
Although Scott and I are deeply grateful for these opportunities and would gladly pay a large amount of money to experience them again, there are some cultural experiences that we, in our ethnocentric snobbery, will not miss. A couple of days ago we were again reminded of this, this time in a particularly intrusive way.
As Scott and I were walking home after LCC’s Graduation, we spotted several lovesick-looking young men and women splayed out over street corners and folded under doorways, caterwauling and strumming their badly-tuned acoustic guitars. Scott hypothesized that, since this was highly unusual in Klaipeda, it must be National Shiftless Musician Day, and since the shiftless musicians were not particularly good, we proceeded home to take an afternoon nap. As we neared our apartment building, we heard a dull, lifeless thumping that grew louder and louder with each step until we finally realized that a shiftless musician of the worst sort, a techno DJ, had set himself up in the square directly underneath our window. And it was loud. I mean loud as in it made our apartment sound like a night club bathroom. Our dreams of an afternoon nap destroyed, we proceeded to do what disappointed people do: we began to indignantly mock our newfound enemy. We noted how he bent over and touched levers and switches without actually adjusting any of them, just to appear, we supposed, responsible for the intricate nuances of the endless bludgeoning. We noted how people kept approaching him and shaking his hand, as if to congratulate him for the carnage he was wreaking on our good taste. Then we started playing “Would You Rather?”, which is always a sign that we are about to get really mean. I think we should swear off “Would you Rather?” altogether, but I fear my family would probably disown me for that.
Scott: “Would you rather have to listen to this music for a whole week without stopping or set the plight of women back 40 years?”
Me: “Well, I’d take one for the team, but it would probably prevent me from doing anything helpful in the future seeing as I would have to live out my days in a psych unit.”
Two more minutes of the dreadful thumping.
Me: “Would you rather listen to this music for a whole week or punch your mother in the face without being able to say why?”
Scott: “Uh…could I write her a letter?”
One more minute.
Scott: “Would you rather have to listen to this music for a whole week without stopping or get diarrhea far from home and lose control of your bowels? In your pants? In public?”
Four more minutes. During this time, the music changed from standard, oatmeal techno to a Neil Diamond ballad accompanied only by a metronomic bass drum. The effect was unbearable.
Me: “Sorry, Scott, but I’d have to shit myself.”
The music ended about thirty minutes later, after we had exhausted our criticisms and tried to drown out Mr. Techno with a combination of broken fan and an episode of “Bang Goes the Theory”. I realized, once again, what a bitchy snob I can be and said a silent prayer for forgiveness. There’s something about aural assault that brings out the worst in me. The same thing happens when there’s a car alarm going off. I have these delicious images of me bashing in the windshield with a baseball bat. But no, it’s not just that. I’m a snob. And so is Scott. And we are working on this. We are, however, looking forward to working on this less as soon as we get back to a place where techno music doesn’t have such a stronghold. I will gladly return to criticizing the tasteless chauvinism of ZZ Top in its place.
As most of you know, Scott and I have finally come to the last week of our time here in Eastern Europe, and as we set our sights toward home, we have been debating about how to write the blog’s finale. After throwing around a few half-assed ideas, we have decided to post a top-five list of things we both will and will not miss about leaving Lithuania and returning home to the states. Although there are many smaller things that could make the list (Scott dancing around in his boxers while singing the theme song “Captain Duona”, elderly men cracking open coolers of beer on morning bus and/or boat rides, and unsuspecting ex-pats crunching down on strips of pig ear that have been snuck into long-awaited bowls of soup, to name a few), I will bypass those and focus only on the most major pillars of our Lithuanian journey: both the mythic enjoyments and the irksome annoyances.
Thing We Will Miss #5: The Opportunity to Experience Different Cultures
Since we’ve come to Lithuania, Scott and I have tried hundreds of foods we never would have eaten, traveled to four countries we probably never would have traveled to, heard several languages we never would have heard, and visited countless museums and historical sites that we never would have visited. We have learned, just through casual conversations and a bit of reading, a wealth of Baltic history and the deeply harmful and personal impact of the USSR. We have experienced a different way of being in the world; we have seen a different way of doing life.
Thing We Will Not Miss #5: Certain Aspects of Experiencing Different Cultures
Although Scott and I are deeply grateful for these opportunities and would gladly pay a large amount of money to experience them again, there are some cultural experiences that we, in our ethnocentric snobbery, will not miss. A couple of days ago we were again reminded of this, this time in a particularly intrusive way.
As Scott and I were walking home after LCC’s Graduation, we spotted several lovesick-looking young men and women splayed out over street corners and folded under doorways, caterwauling and strumming their badly-tuned acoustic guitars. Scott hypothesized that, since this was highly unusual in Klaipeda, it must be National Shiftless Musician Day, and since the shiftless musicians were not particularly good, we proceeded home to take an afternoon nap. As we neared our apartment building, we heard a dull, lifeless thumping that grew louder and louder with each step until we finally realized that a shiftless musician of the worst sort, a techno DJ, had set himself up in the square directly underneath our window. And it was loud. I mean loud as in it made our apartment sound like a night club bathroom. Our dreams of an afternoon nap destroyed, we proceeded to do what disappointed people do: we began to indignantly mock our newfound enemy. We noted how he bent over and touched levers and switches without actually adjusting any of them, just to appear, we supposed, responsible for the intricate nuances of the endless bludgeoning. We noted how people kept approaching him and shaking his hand, as if to congratulate him for the carnage he was wreaking on our good taste. Then we started playing “Would You Rather?”, which is always a sign that we are about to get really mean. I think we should swear off “Would you Rather?” altogether, but I fear my family would probably disown me for that.
Scott: “Would you rather have to listen to this music for a whole week without stopping or set the plight of women back 40 years?”
Me: “Well, I’d take one for the team, but it would probably prevent me from doing anything helpful in the future seeing as I would have to live out my days in a psych unit.”
Two more minutes of the dreadful thumping.
Me: “Would you rather listen to this music for a whole week or punch your mother in the face without being able to say why?”
Scott: “Uh…could I write her a letter?”
One more minute.
Scott: “Would you rather have to listen to this music for a whole week without stopping or get diarrhea far from home and lose control of your bowels? In your pants? In public?”
Four more minutes. During this time, the music changed from standard, oatmeal techno to a Neil Diamond ballad accompanied only by a metronomic bass drum. The effect was unbearable.
Me: “Sorry, Scott, but I’d have to shit myself.”
The music ended about thirty minutes later, after we had exhausted our criticisms and tried to drown out Mr. Techno with a combination of broken fan and an episode of “Bang Goes the Theory”. I realized, once again, what a bitchy snob I can be and said a silent prayer for forgiveness. There’s something about aural assault that brings out the worst in me. The same thing happens when there’s a car alarm going off. I have these delicious images of me bashing in the windshield with a baseball bat. But no, it’s not just that. I’m a snob. And so is Scott. And we are working on this. We are, however, looking forward to working on this less as soon as we get back to a place where techno music doesn’t have such a stronghold. I will gladly return to criticizing the tasteless chauvinism of ZZ Top in its place.
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