What is culture?

On this day in Rey Curré, I sat out by the bus stop watching the afternoon going by, thinking about all the nuances of this culture that still take me by surprise.  I've been living here for 9 months, but there are some things that I will always think are strange.

 

-There is a name for the slightly crunchy, toasted rice at the bottom of every pot of rice.

-It's common practice to throw salt on fruit.  "To kill the tartness," they say.

-Blue eyes are rare and strange.  One little boy looked at me today, probably seeing a white person for the first time in his conscious life, and asked, "What's wrong with your eyes?"

-Sour cream is for sweet things like bread and pastries.  It's unheard of to eat it with savory things like ground beef.  (Even though my host mother adamantly refused, she tried it on the tacos that I made one night and mentioned offhand that it wasn't bad.)

-On any given day, the police department in the nearest city might have speakers set up and Latin music playing to liven up the streets and entertain the passerbys.

-I just put on bug spray:  I'm in my room.   

-If we are approaching late afternoon, any given person will invite you to coffee, but they won't ask if you'd like to drink coffee; they'll just simply ask you if you have drank coffee yet and that's the cue for "come and get it."  It's just assumed that you drink it.  Even babies are served coffee.

-I can't even count the number of children, youth, adults, and elderly for which I have introduced peanut butter.  Meaning, they had never tasted it before.  They didn't know what I was talking about.  They didn't know what peanut butter was.  Did you hear me??

-Tamales are a specialty.  It's a dumpling made of rice and chicken or pork.  They wrap it up in palm leaves and boil it for 3 hours.  They make it for all the special occasions: birthdays, holidays, celebrations.  Someone once asked me, "Well, if you don't make tamales for Christmas, then what do you eat?"

-The soups are always made with large pieces of potato, beef, yucca, carrots, and whatever other type of vegetable.  But, the food on a plate is always served finely diced.  Isn't that backwards?  That must be the reason that I always end up with a sprayed shirt when I'm eating soup, feebly trying to make bite size the hand-size portions.

-"nhuv"  A chicken left me this message today on my computer as it took off running and tripped over my keyboard when I was chasing it out of the house.

-My host niece of 15 months waddled past me the other day gnawing on a cooked, seasoned chicken foot.

Culture:  It's something you might overlook until some young, white girl from the U.S. moves in for a year and cracks up laughing at every little thing.