Cliché Shower Thinking

2/6/14

I’ve found myself reflecting in the shower this past week.  Cliché, I know, but hear me out.  Whereas introspection in the shower makes sense for someone at home, finding a few moments of peace, free from social connection, work related problems, and left to simply clean themselves (physically, of course, although maybe a mental cleanse is part of the ritual too)…I found myself reflecting on my life for another reason.  When I look up in the shower at the Rodríguez household, my principle focus is on the mammoth showerhead.  The size of a large grapefruit, this showerhead makes mechanical flushing sounds loud enough to hear from any part of the house.  The origin of the noise is an encased heating coil, connected by two flimsy black wires that float up to the raised heating.  Water is pumped in from a skinny pipe, and quickly heated in the grapefruit-showerhead before it trickles out.  I use the words “quickly” and “trickle” because the process isn’t instantaneous; I’ve got to open the shower valve enough to activate the heating coil, but not so much so as to overflow the unit and induce a tepid downpour; the result is a very loud, somewhat unsatisfying trickle of warm water. 

I’ve been here for almost two weeks now, and keep waiting for the day where I look at my calculated shower routine and get that wave of “culture shock;” I’m anticipating a wave of sadness, anxiety, or even just alarm with the fact that the life I’m living now is exceptionally different from the one I had 14 days ago.  But then, that “It’s considered rude to spend more than 10 minutes in your host family’s bathroom” reminder kicks in, and I quickly dry off and fully dress myself before exiting the bathroom (shoes and all). Maybe culture shock will hit me in a non-cliché setting.

(Note: This is the graphic that I caught my mother looking at a few days before I left home.  I’ve been wondering where I am along this “too detailed to be completely off base” line.)

Tomorrow marks the first full two weeks of the ICADS program that all Pitzer students studying in Costa Rica partake in before heading to the Firestone Research Center.  When I last updated this blog, I had anticipated that this program would be too difficult, too time consuming and intellectually taxing to return home and whip together a few witty pages for you to see.  I can’t tell if I’m lucky or not, but I’ve seemed to avoid this problem almost all together; the lectures are introductory, sometimes at the 9^th grade humanities caliber, and in discussions I’m given the liberty to speak my mind freely with no challenges from students or professors.  Indeed, I feel like I could teach the class half the time, or if nothing else review lesson plans before their débuts.  There are little things that should be restructured, like an interview assignment where, us rich, mostly white, entry-level Spanish students were tasked with interviewing mostly illegal immigrant vendors working in the informal economy.  We did NOT have a discussion about how to approach these workers from a point where we acknowledge the multi-tiered levels of privilege we had (let alone question WHY exactly we had to impose ourselves on one of Costa Rica’s most economically and socially disadvantaged populations), but WERE provided with a rather informal questionnaire sheet that asked questions like “Do you make enough money to cover your living costs” and “Would you prefer a more stable job that would guarantee social security for you?”  I’ve started to take a back seat and just add commentary that challenges the learning material. 

Although the class isn’t all that intellectually demanding, the daily routine here is.  I wake up at 5:30 every day when the host sister leaves for school, and try to get a few more minutes of sleep before my 6:10 wake up and shower.  After breakfast, I head out on my 45-minute walk to school, meeting students along the way (as my house is the farthest from school).  Once at ICADS, I have 4 hours of Spanish class (one of the most difficult adjustments given the fact that my last Spanish class didn’t reach 4 hours in a week).  Following lunch is another 3-5 hours of class before the long walk back to the house, dinner, and homework before my 10 pm bedtime (I’m hitting around 7 hours of sleep a night).  Because of such a packed day, I’m leaving my updates to once or twice a week, at least until I head down to Dominical.

I’ve grown up with a native Spanish speaker only conversing with me in her first language for the first 19 years of my life, so adjusting to a household and society where Spanish is the primary means of communication hasn’t been difficult.  I suppose I could still be in this honeymoon period, but honestly I just think I’m used to the adjustment process after the last few years moving about on my own and living in different cultures. 

I’ve been trying to take walks every day by myself and really cherish my awkward shuffle to get warm in the shower, but the only travel-related and poignant realization that I’ve come to is that maybe I’m really just a transient being.  Friends have probably heard me say this as a joke when I tell them I’ve traveled a lot, but I’m sure those friends have heard me say, “Every joke has an element of truth.”  I could be confusing this sort of acceptance of my self-proclaimed title for what it means to grow up, and that the rush of culture shock just dissipates with every new place.  It’s impossible to tell, but living in this new “home” just makes it more difficult to really conceptualize where my true “home” really is.