Go for Weird

When you live in another country you get used to doing weird things. And eventually those weird things just get normal. But once those things become normal, other things happen that are, hmmm how do I put this? Well, they are weird. You want stories?

I have a blonde streak that goes through my bangs and it desperately needed a touch up. I can cut my own hair, but dieing my own hair is another story, so thankfully there is a girl here who can. So I was at her house and we decided to get it done. Problem, was we didn't have foils, but we did have...plastic bags! Yes, so we went for weird and we used plastic bags. It worked! Not as well as foils would have, but that doesn't matter. 

The other odd things within all of this was what the bleach said. So as I mentioned in my last post Chinese prefer lighter skin and whitening creams are not uncommon. But this bleach said, “Hair and Skin whitening”, at first we thought it was some funny Chinglish. But then the scary thought hit us...what if it was fairly correctly translated? Ahhh!

Other weird things are movies. Movies take on a whole other meaning. When you buy a new movie or if you stream a movie/show skipping, pausing, no English and the like are all common. The longer you live in another country the better you get at guessing. 

Along with guessing comes a certain smile. Everyone gets it. It gets tiring to continually say you don't understand. Especially after awhile the meaning of one sentence doesn't matter if you can understand the rest. So you develop a very polite smile a nod that you hope communicates “Oh yes, wow, very interesting!”, while underneath you are thinking, “I have no idea....”

So living in another country means you go for weird, you hope things come out okay and you learn to laugh at all the bumps along the way.