I didn’t go to bed until about five this morning. I was occupied with bleaching a bathroom, taking a shower for the first time in days, and pumping up an air mattress. We found an extremely nice and inexpensive trailer about two miles out of town and this was the second night I spent here. The air mattress was much better than sleeping on the floor again.
The effect of the sun is practically instantaneous here. The short hours of darkness are vastly colder than the daytime, and if I am outside when the light suddenly brightens from breaking over the eastern mountains, I have to stop and pull off a layer of clothes within five minutes of the event. If it is not raining.
This is my first day off from work since arriving and I can not express how happy I am about that. This is not the worst job I have ever had, but neither is it the best. It is certainly the easiest job I have had in relation to pay scale before, though. Grocery stores are strange places; I have never spent hours and hours at a time in one before. They have had me in the customer service/video booth/tobacco counter all week, and I find myself glad that I have previous retail experience. Its a great spot to stand and watch the locals and the tourists, and I’ve concluded that they are both a very strange sort of folk.
It seems that movies are the ultimate past time here, which I don’t quite understand, but I’ve never lived in a place this small or isolated before. The grocery store has a pretty nice monopoly going, though. They charge another day’s rental, per movie, for every day a movie is late. Customers have to pay their fees before renting again, so I have found myself charging up to thirty dollars for one movie for one night before. The strange part is that 90% of people don’t bat an eye at that amount of money. I have a hard time understanding that.
People are different here in so many ways. Some of the differences are fairly overt, while others are more subtle. Yes, the accent is completely different, but there seems to be some whole new dialect of tone and body language and over all mannerisms that I find myself having to learn. I have never seen so many people switch from raging mad to perfectly happy and content in a split second. That was disconcerting at first, but there seems to be a rhythm to it for each person that I just have to observe and keep in mind.
Yesterday evening was exciting. I asked a customer a question about the brand of soy icecream she had bought, which isn’t available back in Texas, and we ended up in a conversation about being vegetarian that concluded with promises of recipe exchange and to go out for tea some time. I like it when my eating habits make friends for me.
