When I first saw this blog assignment, I was a little disappointed. I didn't really get it. I've been saying forever (please imagine Clara, mouth wide open, blah blah blahing self-righteously at some poor coworker) that I was so frustrated that these "people" (taxi drivers, shop owners) don't stop trying to scam me because I'm white and foreign. "I'm not a TOURIST," I say (mouth open, eyes bugging slightly), "I mean, I LIVE here, I WORK here." 

A friend once told me that a measure of intelligence was knowing how much you don't know. Thinking about this now, I had NO IDEA how little I knew about Malaysia for the first two months. I have barely even scratched the surface. My blog a few weeks (days?) ago shows the moment pretty well when I was finally like, "waaaiiiiit a minute, this ISN'T WESTERN CULTURE!?" aka the first tinge of culture shock. And that there is no possible way for me to pick up on the cultural intricacies that are in Malay, for one thing, and that I was totally reading people's messages wrong though I thought it was correct just because they were speaking English. Silly silly know-it-all Clara. My first night here I met an Irish guy who said that Culture Shock didn't really hit until you've lived somewhere for like 6 months, and now I can totally see why. Your cultural bubble is pretty thick. It's hard to tell what you're even missing until you've been there for a loonnnggg time. And telling from my teeny weeny little tinge of culture shock, I bet real culture shock is ROUGH. 

It really hit me, though, when I was coming back from Thailand and I got a little bit of "yay I'm going home!" glee. But I wasn't going home. I was just coming back to my temporary hide out in KL. Everytime I return to KL I have the "yay I'm going home!" up and then immediately after the "but just to KL again" down. Living in KL is just utterly exhausting. I have to be on my toes all the time, and I'm constantly alert, looking for something I need to know to make it through the city, whether it be cultural or learning that that car WILL hit you if you go in front of it. Or that that snatch thief WILL grab your bag if you don't make it clear that you're not to be reckoned with.  And what food will make you feel like you're dying. 

Because in the States and Canada, I know all those things. They're instincts. I don't have to think about my bag when I'm in New York because I'm so fimiliar with what to look out for that it's just second nature.

But more than that, I don't even know what people are hearing what I am saying. I am a tourist in the sense that cultural integration is very nearly impossible even though I have friends. It's more like my friends are fimilar enough with the west that they can talk to me, rather than me being fimilar enough with their culture to communicate with them. So all I can really do is just look around and take in superficial things about the country and people. And isn't it just the superficial things that tourists are interested in? Or at least, isn't that the only thing that they can really come home with?

But at the same time I wonder how it is possible to communicate across cultures, then, if it is SO complicated, and if it takes so long to even start to see the differences between cultures. Is it knowing that you don't know that facilitates that?

Oh, the things that I do not know....

 :) 

Clara  

PS I added pictures just for fun :P