Tag Archives: expat life

Blending In Again

1st
Apr. × ’10
By Sarah
“What is it that made them so American?” my friend asked on the phone. “Well,” I hesitated, “I don’t know…they played volleyball shirtless on the beach?  They had this cheery, earnest quality spiked by a pip sort of sarcasm?  Their clothes?  The way the intonation of their sentences always so definitively went down at the end [...]
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The Never-Ending Cycles of Cultural Adjustment

7th
Feb. × ’10
By Sarah
The stages of cultural adjustment have been written about a lot.  It’s nothing new to highlight the honeymoon stage, the hostility stage, the acceptance stage, and the (somewhat dubious and too often too early too triumphantly declared) home stage.  Here in Oaxaca that might be called the mole-n’-chapulines stage, the WTF traffic/construction/machismo/why-does-it-take-30-minutes-to-get-that-coffee-I-ordered? stage, the oh-Mexico [...]
Posted in Culture, identity | Also tagged , , | 16 Comments