Breaking Point 1

So, when living in a foreign culture, your environment is, clearly, foreign. Your life is suddenly inundated by a mass of traditions, customs, behaviors, and lifestyles that you must evaluate carefully as you become aware of them. If you don't go through this evaluation process, one consequence is that you will have very little understanding of the experience you are living. The other is that you will never be able to hybridize your foreign self with your new foreign land so that both can lose the "foreign" tag and just become pleasantly different.

Part of this process is picking out the traits in both yourself and your new culture (and the interaction between the two) that you love and want to heighten and encourage. For myself, the first thing to come to mind is the affectionate aspect of the culture here. No, I don't ever see myself calling up a friend and telling her, "te quieeeeeeeero si muuuuucho! beeesooos!!" But I'm all about the kiss hello, the freer use of compliments, and just plain old letting people know that you care about them. I recognize that there's a very reserved aspect of my character that I am slowly abandoning. We gringos tend to be more open with new people than chilenos, but ironically we keep our close friends at more of a distance. Well, chau to that. I'm going sudamericana on this one if I can help it.

Another aspect of this evaluation process is figuring out the "agree-to-disagree" issues. One such example is the piropos as discussed in yesterday's post. Ok, piropos, if no one here minds you you can go about your business....I'm not going to try to convince people that this is a disaster if they don't see it that way. But when I become involved, I reserve my right to respond as I see fit, because it still violates my ideas of moral and respectful behaviour.

The third side of this evaluation, is picking out the things that you simply cannot introduce into your life. Essentially, you need to make rejections. It is all well and good to say that as an immigrant I should go out of my way to accomodate my new culture, and I would say that I and most other internationals worldwide do just that. But there are things that just cannot jive, and there's nothing wrong with that as long as the rejection is made in a respectful way. I have reached the point where I need to make the first of mine. I am stepping down from the chileno diet.

I have been living with a family (as mentioned below) for 6 months, and as part of my rent they feed me three meals a day (although I'm a 2-a-day ticket in general). The food is delicious, absolutely wonderful; the mother is a very talented cook. But this relationship, chilean food and I, well, it's just not working out.

I haven't fully experienced this before in my other foreign travels because no matter how long I lived away, I was still cooking my own food. I'd eat the local cuisine at restaurants and friends' houses, but the majority of my diet was an altered version of what I would eat at home. In my case, this means loads of vegetables and very little red meat or poultry. Plus, of course, the side benefits--I believe in a well-stocked spice cabinet. As a result, I would develop an opinion of the local diet, but never really had to make a decision about it.

Now that I have been totally immersed in a foreign diet, I feel a much greater understanding for my grandmother, who immigrated to the US from the North Sea. She never gave up cooking German food, which she still eats to this day. I thought this was stubborn. Now I see that there are some changes that are just too much to handle, and your internal environment is probably the first area where one might find these.

Consider one example of a meal in my Chilean life (not pictured: soup and bread on the side):



Meanwhile, I live in a country with plentiful, fresh, cheap produce:



For the first few months, going out and supplementing picture number one with picture number two managed to keep me pretty happy. Recently though, I've come to feel so unhealthy that I'm conscious of it pretty much all day long. It's not a cardiovascular thing--the hills here are enough to keep anyone in good shape. It's the extreme overload of calories, particularly given that those calories come in the form of a lot of meat and a lot of carbs. There are two main reactions I've noticed. At times, this diet makes me feel famished all of the time, because even with my vitamins I'm clearly lacking nutrients that I am used to. The second is that sometimes I never feel hungry, and every meal feels like it's following directly on the one I ate previously.

Last week my parents were visiting, and so I ate a lot of restaurant food and drank a lot of wine. I have found that this, on top of 6 months of not-my-kind-of-food, was the breaking point. For years I've played around with vegetarianism but never gone all the way with it. Well, I'm done. Good-bye carne and mountain of potatoes. At the moment I am fasting (family: don't freak out, I do this on occasion and it isn't dangerous) to allow my body to recuperate a bit from the inundation of calories. When I finish my fast at the end of this week, I'm going to cut red meat and poultry out of my diet. For the moment I'm going to hold on to fish, but we'll see.

So Chile and I have had our first real fight, but I'm confident that our new compromise will pull us through.