Cultural Seasickness

I have been to places that are really different from places I have called home. Smack you in the face, loud and clear different. Japan, for example. Japan just looks different from the United States. Different colors, different writing system, different kinds of establishments, from the pinball-like parlors to the capsule hotels. Throw in a temple or bright pink bulldozer, and you've got clear visual cues. You're not in Kansas anymore. (A place I admittedly have only been once, but you get the picture.)

Then there's Chile. The oddest thing about Santiago, Chile is how similar it seems to other places I've been. In many ways, Santiago is not so dissimilar to New York, a city I called home for 17 years. The rhythm of the city can be hectic, busses and taxis swerving and jockeying for fares. There are malls, movie theaters, pedestrian shopping strips, stores, stores, stores everywhere. Nice neighborhoods with glitzy glassed-in towers, and poor neighborhoods with ill-kept houses and snarling dogs. It's just like so many places I've seen, visited, even lived.

In Santiago, there are few visual cues that I am not in the United States. For five years I lived in a neighborhood in Washington, DC where I was just as likely to hear Spanish on the street as English. The people in Santiago range from short to tall and indigenous to European. A big-city mix, in this city of 6 million people. Starbucks, Bennigan's, Ruby Tuesday's, Pizza Hut, dare I admit it, even a Hooter's. Where does everycity, the world end, and Santiago begin?

And why do I care? I care because I get totally disoriented. It is supposed that seasickness is the product of your eyes seeing the world as still, and your inner ear perceiving it as moving. The disconnect between the two produces a profound feeling of nausea. Being in Santiago, and seeing something that looks so familiar, but yet is so very different, produces a strange feeling of unsettledness. Somewhere between queasy and well. Without the strong visual, auditory and olfactory cues to remind me that I'm in Chile, I am routinely confused when things go "wrong." When things are different than what I expect.

Because when you scratch the surface, nothing is what I expect. Let's take food. You can get fried empanadas (cheese pastries) at McDonald's. The national junk food is the hotdog. Sounds familiar, right? Not this version. It has the sausage, the bun, a huge stripe of mayonnaise, chunks of avocado and diced tomatoes. Pizza has muenster cheese on it, and barely any sauce. Popcorn is heavily dosed with sugar, without a grain of salt.

Now consumer goods. Go to SODIMAC, the local chain of Home Depot-like stores and find orange-aproned slackers wandering the aisles avoiding customers. Yet, in this Home-Depot clone store, you will find a panoply of products you'd never find in the states. Items like rack after rack of paños con ojales, which are little blanket looking things that fit over the head of your broom. This you use to clean your floor. You prefer a mop, you say? Sorry. Wrong country. And here's more. Yesterday I went to the local version of a marriage between Pier 1 and Crate and Barrel called Casa & Ideas. I bought a dresser, and they saran-wrapped it before they let me take it out of the store. The whole thing. Top to bottom and side to side. I'm in another world.

Social interactions. When you are invited for dinner, it's a snack. Lunch is a four-course meal. Plan accordingly, with both your appetite and your schedule. Hospitality is a must. A three-hour visit would seem terribly rushed and rude. Classless, even.

It's disarming how little Chile is like the United States sometimes. And because Chile considers itself similar to the States, and sort of aspires to that cultural largesse, both economically and socially, it just seems all the more bizarre when you have to stand in line three separate times at the pharmacy to get a cold medicine that would be sold over the counter in the States. And then it comes without any dosage information, just blister-packed pills in an empty box. The pharmacist will give you instructions, but only if you ask.

And lest you should think I'm rose-colored glasses-ing this experience, I should write a diatribe on physical space, and the tendency to crash headlong into people, with hardly a glance of apology. And how people who you believe to be well-read and socially agile open their mouths and spout anti-black, anti-brown-skinned, anti-other slurs like they're telling the weather. More than once I have had to push my lower jaw back into position, after standing gape-mouthed for too long after an egregious comment. Or a television commercial that trivializes Hinduism, portraying the deity Shiva as a calm but stupid guru that recommends sugarless gum. Or pictures a black woman with a kerchief on her head, washing the family's laundry by hand, singing.

So much the same. And just so different.

After nearly two years, I'm beginning to expect the unexpected. Surprises are fewer and farther between. But the first 30-plus years of my life were spent in another hemisphere, a world away. And some of my hard-wired expectations are just that, hard-wired. My biggest struggle to date has been realizing that since there are 16 million Chileans, and only one Eileen, I'm the one that has to adapt. In this place, my new place, my opinion does not control, and it may not even count. I have a complicated formula in my head regarding the tolerability of the difference and the likelihood that it might change. I do the math, and decide if it's worth the hassle and heartache to take a stand. So far things that merit discussion have been of the racism/classism/intolerance variety, leaving my pharmaceutical, architectural, culinary, fashion, driving and whistling-on-the-street complaints to fall only on the ears of the other gringos, among whom we have built a brother and sisterhood of "why is this place so strange?" And yet we stay. So I guess we're getting our sea legs.