Slowing down

A funny thing happens when you can't communicate very well with the world around you: you slow down. Waaay down. My favorite thing to say these past few days is, "lentement, s'il vous plait". Which means, slowly, please.

Things that take much longer in a new country:

grocery shopping:
where is all the frozen chicken? No rice chex. Meat costs HOW much? The store closes at 7:30 pm EVERY night?

laundry:
when the washing machine can only hold roughly three and a half pairs of jeans, it just takes a long time to do the laundry! That and the fact that one load takes over an hour to run.

gasoline-uh, the machine won't take my credit card? Uh, what do I do now?

ordering a pizza-I haven't even tried this yet because figuring out the menu took so long that we just ate cereal for dinner instead.

All in all, it's pretty nice to slow things down a little. Now, if I could just get the day going before 10am, that would be nice. But that's another story altogether.