Day 14: Wash and Effect

Friday, July 5

Because nothing much happened this day, it's time for another exciting episode of Cultural Adventures!!

Part 5: PDA. (Or for those of you less abbreviation savvy: Public Displays of Affection)

Now, this is the type of thing that would get you a detention visit in high school, or in extreme cases, a very intense slap on the wrist from Professor Umbridge.

"Boys and girls are not permitted to be within 8 inches of each other." 

So, you all know what public displays of affection are like in America: people hugging, couples kissing or holding hands, etc.

I guess this counts too...?

But it's a bit different here. When platonic friends greet each other, two men or two women, they oftentimes kiss each other on each cheek. They do not, however, do this with members of the opposite sex. The only PDA between men and women is between boyfriend or girlfriend, or husband and wife, or family. There is none between a man and woman not in a relationship together (whether romantic or familial). As you know, this does not reign true in America. You can go anywhere and see young lads and ladies showing all the "friendzone" affection for one another: dancing, playful shoving, hugs, being stupid in general, etc.

"I don't even know you, lol!"

Another interesting thing that I have seen here is the hand-holding. It is quite normal to see pairs or groups of friends of the same sex holding hands. Girls especially hold hands with their friends when they are out in public. My conversation partner often grabbed my hand to direct me around the market so that I wouldn't wander. And during my stay, (though it is less common,) at least twice I have seen two pairs of elderly men holding hands while they walked down the sidewalk together. It doesn't mean anything here. It's not strange.

This simple gesture is so simple, and yet it carries so much weight in a place as judgmental as America. We are so quick to assume that two people are together if they are holding hands, but that same gesture doesn't hold the same meaning here. It is simply a gesture of kindness and friendship. Nothing more.

"What about Han-Holding?" 

So, onto my boring day.

I had that test in the morning. As it turns out, all I really had to study was the vocabulary. And, if you can believe it, THEY GAVE US A WORD BANK. Omfg. We haven't had a word bank the entire time we've been at UT. It was like Christmas came early. (The teachers did that for the one student in my class who wasn't from UT and who is used to word banks. The rest of us didn't complain.)

 After class, my roommate and I went to the market all by ourselves! We were so proud. I bought a couple things, things I had been looking for, and they were very cheap. (I shan't say what. But I will say that the same thing in America would probably have cost me around $100+ or so each, and I didn't even pay half that, and I got two of them!)

After we got home, my roommate fell promptly asleep, so I decided to do laundry, because it had been FAR, far too long. I washed about 60% in the washing machine (which was a bit risky to put anything together because almost all of my clothes are new and were likely to bleed on each other). The other things I feared for I washed by hand: i.e. anything that had white, and then all my dark stuff.

Because I'm a privileged white kid, I had no idea what I was doing.

Unlike this baby, here.

Bewildered that I had never washed anything by hand, Noura helped me. Once everything was done, I hung them out to dry. The heat and the wind took care of them in a very short amount of time. They were done by nightfall, and some of them were super wet when they were hung out there. I even hung some of them on the lines outside of the balcony, where they hang out over open air 4 stories above the ground, because I am a risk-taker. (I used liberal amounts of clothes-pins on those. They dried the fastest.)

Then I lived on the internet for the rest of the night, unwilling to even glance at any form of homework for the weekend.