Last night we had a chance to talk with my daughter Jessica, nice to hear her voice. She asked us an interesting question...she wanted to know if we missed being in America...it's not like we haven’t been out of the country before, we've gone on the occasional vacation for a week or two. But this really is the 1st extended amount of time we’ve been gone (with lots more ahead of us). The politically correct answer would be we really miss the USA and can't wait to get home. But honestly, even with all the funny inconveniences we’ve written about, we loved being here and would probably be happy living here. I think people who believe America is the only nice place to live haven’t really been anywhere else. There are great differences for sure. The general population have no where near the standard of living we do, but they also lack the stress of wanting everything. They live mostly in small apartments that are adequate, but not roomy, their personal possessions are minimized because of space, and they lack our modern conveniences. For instance everyone hangs their clothing out, I’m sure the dryer has been introduced here, but no one seems to own one, or maybe they simply don’t have the room for it or don’t want to pay for the power to run it. But even so, their clothes still get dry.
Since we’ve been here we have fixed our meals maybe 65% of the time, and we have not purchased any canned or frozen food ...we’ve put a few pieces of meat in the freezer, but if meat were more readily available in the village we wouldn’t even do that. We usually just buy what we need for the day. Today the main ingredients to our diet were spinach and rice...toast for breakfast and then at lunch we had rice and spinach quiche (delicious) and for dinner, a breaded spinach patty with rice (again delicious) and a salad. Very tasty. At home its very likely we might’ve eaten something frozen, canned or fast food from a place that gives zero importance to our well being or nutrition...
People might say, well your on vacation, you have all the time in the world, not true, we spend about 8 hours a day wandering around the country, so we have about the same time we had at home to take care of the necessities. The truth is, without the distraction of TV, there is plenty enough time for everything else...the boob tube sucks up your life if you allow it to and, by design, makes you want (or think you need) everything. It wants to define happiness, beauty and importance for you and makes you believe it is your best source of entertainment.
We love America and the life we’ve been allowed to have their, our country is beautiful and its people amazing. The freedoms we enjoy are precious and have served to make us a rich and prosperous nation. But we are not alone in beauty, riches and prosperity...it really only matters how you define those things!
No comments:
Post a Comment