It’s funny, the things that make you feel adjusted. When I first got here I felt that getting used to a cold shower meant I was making progress. Later I realized that it was switching back to hot ones despite the heat that really signified we were adjusting. In this environment of constantly suffering from NOT adjusting quickly enough, it is fun to see some of the ways that we have.
One is we have stopped seeing ants as ‘bugs’. They are everywhere and in everything. We sometimes win our fight to keep them at bay and sometimes we don’t. Shortly after arriving, ants got into my favorite cereal. Our helper stuck it in the freezer to kill the ants and the next morning brought it out for me to eat. Try as I might, I couldn’t eat it. I wasn’t going to be able to get past the knowledge of all the dead ants. I waited until she was gone to throw it out because to her that was an extreme waste and I was embarrassed to do it. Today we regularly eat ‘around’ ants. They crawl onto our plate as we are dishing up and we just wipe them off and keep going. Yes, there is probably a microscopic ant smear left in their place, but like I said, they’re not ‘bugs’ anymore. I have picked them out of my coffee, milk, and juice and more often than I care to think about, NOT picked them out. The staff here joke about how ‘nutritious’ they might be so I have realized I am not alone in this adaptation to life here.
Another sign of adjustment is our use of local terminology. Right away we started calling the living room a 'sala'. It is so easy to say and our helper was constantly referring to it as that. We also call the bathroom a 'CR' now. Short for 'comfort room', adopting this term came from necessity. If you ask a Filipino in a store where the bathroom is, they will just shake their head at you in confusion. So we learned to use the local term quickly. It is still funny, though, when the kids use it at home. “Mom, I have to go to the CR.” lol
Another phrase we have completely adapted is AirCon. I think it is one that will stick when we return to the states though. It's much harder to go back to the longer version of words once you have started using the shorter ones. Tyler made me laugh the other day because he was putting aircon units into his lego buildings. Now there is someone who is truly thinking 'Pinoy'. ;)
