SEPTEMBER 11, MONDAY

MY ARTIFICIAL CULTURAL BUBBLE

After a month of living by myself in Montevideo and Buenos Aires and not being able to speak Spanish or to know how to do even simple things like how to catch and pay for a bus and spending an entire day getting my coat customs I am now back to doing routine things. I spent the day, today, fitting back in, making appointments, signing up for vaccines, booking an extra bag on Easy Jet and reassuring Efi that I was going to stay at her place in Naoussa.

When I landed in Fort Worth I bought a bottle of water and thanked the girl working in the 7 Eleven for speaking such good English as if it were a major achievement. I was so relieved that I could finally speak to someone.

So now I am back to fitting in again. But not quite. Because my inability to fit in in Montevideo showed me again how complicated and arbitrary and seemingly artificial the culture of Uruguay is. I wasn‘t aware of any indigenous people there, most people seemed to be a mixture of races with most people looking and acting very European, speaking a colonial language, Spanish, just as we speak a colonial language, English. Their culture is a mixture of cultures, one they have invented for themselves, just as the culture of the United States is an invention of a mixture of cultures.

The point for me is that the culture of Uruguay is a made up artificial culture that the people of Uruguay have agreed upon, similar but not quite the same as the made up culture of Argentina. Both seemed to me to arbitrary and artificial.

And before I forget it, the culture that I have slipped back into where everyone is fluent in American English, is equally arbitrary and artificial. I learned how artificial even the way Americans use the word American is, also, since everyone in North and South America is American, but I can‘t find a substitute (USAian?).

So while it is still fresh in my mind I am quite aware that everything that “Americans” take for granted, the whole giant fragile cultural bubble that we live in and take for granted as being absolutely real, is just a artificial construct that those of us living in mid North America, often excluding whole groups of people, have invented in order to communicate together and to be able to cooperate with each other, our practical way of doing things that is no different from the five hours of bureaucracy I endured while picking up my coat in customs in Montevideo.

The only reason that mid North American culture seems so real to me is because I was brought up within it. It is no more real than Uruguayan culture where I was so often lost. But for just a moment the high school girl in the 7 Eleven shocked me with her command of English, which was no more surprising than my command of English or my inability to speak Spanish. We each live in our own artificial cultural bubble.