So in honor of the past three years that we have spent in Nepal and the excitement we have about coming to America in just 6 days we have been spending some time "reminiscing" about life here and our adjustment back to America for a while and we have come up with a great list of things that will NEVER happen or that we WILL NEVER DO in America that happen here or that we do here in Nepal (thanks to our great friends Jesse and Shanee and Jo for help with this)...
(in no particular order)
In America...
1. We will never see people riding on the roof of buses, trucks and cars because the inside of the bus, truck and car is so full.
2. We will never go into a video store (picture Blockbuster...do they still have that??) and ask, "Is this a pirated copy?"
3. We will never go to a friend's house for dinner and have to hide the food they give us in our pockets, bag or better yet, have to throw it off the balcony when they are not looking because they give us WAY too much and it tastes SO bad we can't eat it if we tried, just to make them happy because food is so important here and in this culture you definitely DON'T leave food on your plate even though THEY served you a GIGANTIC portion.
4. We will never have to bargain to buy things like toilet paper, jackets, taxis, light bulbs, etc. And we will never have to ask a salesman if he is giving us the right price or if the price is just high because we are foreigners.
5. We will never have to boil or filter water.
6. We will never eat with our hands, lick our fingers after a meal, lick our plate or drink soup from the bowl without using a spoon.
7. We will never find a piece of hair (or glass or a bug) in our food in a restaurant and just pull the hair out, not say anything, and continue eating the rest of the meal like nothing happened.
8. It will never just be OK to show up 1 hour late for a meeting, church, sporting event, conference, lunch date, etc and not give an excuse, call or even mention it.
9. We will never see a blind person (or multiple blind people) leading another blind person down the road (I PROMISE this happens here).
10. We will never see a family of 4 (or 5 or 6) all riding on the same motorcycle.
11. We will never have to carry our own toilet paper with us to our friend's homes because they don't use toilet paper and don't have it in their homes.
12. We will never have to use a squatty potty.
13. We will never have to soak our vegetables in iodine water for twenty minutes before we eat them because they are so dirty.
14. We will never sit in traffic for 20 minutes and after it dissipates see that the reason for it was 4 cows lying in the middle of the road (or a man crossing the street with his goats or sheep).
15. We will never eat cheese SO hard that we have to keep it in the side of our cheek until the hot tea we are drinking melts it.
16. We will never drink tea with butter and salt in it.
17. We will never have language barriers. We will never be walking down the street and not understand 95% of what is being said.
18. We will not be able to talk about anything we want to in English in front of people because they have no idea what we are staying.
19. We will not see a lady making and selling tea on the side of the road.
20. We will not have to wonder if the place we are going to for lunch has wild monkeys there that take away your food.
21. We will never be driving and have to turn around because a riot has begun without notice.
22. We will never have a "shoot-to-kill" order on our street and be stuck in our home for 22 days straight because there is a mandatory curfew called by the government.
23. We will never find a person who will work with all of their might for $1 a day and be completely happy about it.
24. We will never hire "professional" movers and have them show up with a dump truck filled with an inch of sand to move our stuff in.
25. We will never be allowed to drive on the wrong side of the road, on sidewalks, through traffic, etc.
26. We will never get away with SO MUCH just because we are "white" (or a foreigner)like driving right past police check-posts, not having plane tickets to board an airplane, etc.
27. We will never be able to schedule very important meetings involving many people hours or one day before hand.
28. We will never see parents in America cover their child's head completely with a plastic bag to shield him from the rain.
29. We will never carry an umbrella on a bright sunny day so we don't get tan from the sun (people here love having "white" skin).
30. We will never choose to use the bathroom outside because the "public restrooms" inside are SO nasty and clearly HAVE NEVER been cleaned.
31. We will never be invited over to our friend's home for dinner and be placed in another room completely separate from the family who invited us so we can eat alone.
32. We will never have the option to go to the grocery store and buy the head of the chicken, goat, buffalo or cow.
33. We will never have a cold and have one of our American friends say it is because we drank cold water the day before or that we have a fever so we need to drink hot tea to get rid of it.
34. We will never have diarrhea for a week straight and think it is "normal".
35. We will never drive by the street that our house is on and see 5 men lined up peeing in the field.
36. It will never be OK to pick our nose or spit in public.
37. We will never go to some one's home and have them serve us pure cooked fat as an honor.
38. We will never see 3 year olds playing with matches and fireworks or 12" kukri knives that their parents gave them.
39. We will never look out our window and see 20+ children flying kites off of their roofs.
40. We will never be able to drive without our license and get away with it.
41. We will never have to filter the water for our babies bath.
42. We will never be able to buy prescription drugs without a prescription.
43. We will never wear clothes for multiple days without washing them.
44. We will never have to binge buy when imported goods from America are available at the supermarket because we don’t know when they may come again.
43. We will never have to buy gas on the black market from the local supplier as there is none available at the pump.
44. We will never have to wait for 1 month for cooking gas as there is severe shortage of essential goods.
45. We will never feel like we are "off-roading" while driving on the main road.
46. We will never drive in a car holding our babies in our laps.
47. We will never pay $5 per month for cable TV.
48. We will never have a porter carry our new refrigerator on his back for 3 miles to deliver it to our home.
49. We will never have to point and tell the butcher which part of the meat we want to take home.
50. We will never take ½ day just to get money out of our bank account.
