the biggest barrier to intercultural harmony is produce
I have come to the conclusion that the major obstacle in the way of complete intercultural (at least in Western society) harmony is produce. I think that my sister would agree. This is based on my recent experiences, which, due to the fact that I never listen to anything anyone tells me or pay attention to anything I read, very closely resembled hers.
The K-man canonized the importance of fresh fruit when he got banned from his local fresh food market. People just can't live without it. It's healthy, it's fresh, it's delicious! It's 1/8 of the 4 food groups. And as a single man used to living in New York City, it became one of the few things I looked forward to when coming home from my mind-numbing job.
In an earlier post I related my run-in with the supermarket folks here after not labeling my apples properly which is evidently very not cool, both here and in Athens. Since then my Portuguese has improved a good 0.0037% so I have still not bothered to try to figure out how to properly label the fruit there. Luckily for me, on Thursday we had a class field trip to the produce market that was closest to the school, which is now my de facto fruit source. The cool thing there is that the guy follows you around and does the labeling himself. The uncool thing is that he follows you around. I don't like picking out fruit under pressure. I can't closely inspect the surface of a pear with some dude breathing down my neck. I mean, like, what's the rush? I'm the only one here at 8:30 in the morning. Whatever.
And that's another thing. More than in New York, people here are easily annoyed when you hold things up while trying to be polite. I was in Shopping Barra an hour ago (yeah, I found it, and it is sweet) and as I'm approaching one of the escalators a woman approaches at the same time, so I pause to let her go in front of me. Apparently that's not cool, or I'm some sort of sucker, because then the group of 2 women and 1 man behind me all try to cut in front of me. As if the frozen yogurt stand they're on their way to is going anywhere.
The K-man canonized the importance of fresh fruit when he got banned from his local fresh food market. People just can't live without it. It's healthy, it's fresh, it's delicious! It's 1/8 of the 4 food groups. And as a single man used to living in New York City, it became one of the few things I looked forward to when coming home from my mind-numbing job.
In an earlier post I related my run-in with the supermarket folks here after not labeling my apples properly which is evidently very not cool, both here and in Athens. Since then my Portuguese has improved a good 0.0037% so I have still not bothered to try to figure out how to properly label the fruit there. Luckily for me, on Thursday we had a class field trip to the produce market that was closest to the school, which is now my de facto fruit source. The cool thing there is that the guy follows you around and does the labeling himself. The uncool thing is that he follows you around. I don't like picking out fruit under pressure. I can't closely inspect the surface of a pear with some dude breathing down my neck. I mean, like, what's the rush? I'm the only one here at 8:30 in the morning. Whatever.
And that's another thing. More than in New York, people here are easily annoyed when you hold things up while trying to be polite. I was in Shopping Barra an hour ago (yeah, I found it, and it is sweet) and as I'm approaching one of the escalators a woman approaches at the same time, so I pause to let her go in front of me. Apparently that's not cool, or I'm some sort of sucker, because then the group of 2 women and 1 man behind me all try to cut in front of me. As if the frozen yogurt stand they're on their way to is going anywhere.
posted by n10471 at 12:10 PM
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