When We Were (Not so Young as We Used to Be, But Still a Bit Younger than We Are Now)

Oh, Sing! of Galveston.  Jewel of the Texas Coast! That Shining Seashell among Dull, Wave-washed Pebbles. Galveston, where my Heart was, briefly, for a few Days at least, There.

I'd like to think that my short visit to Galveston was a sort of warm-up to the trip I will someday take to Key West, and the other Keys (presumably, North, South, and East).  You know, places connected to actual land by bridges.  Where people go to pretend that the rest of the world doesn't exist and all they have to do for the rest of their lives is fish and drink Coronas.  That day is a long way off.

But where was I?

Ah yes, the wedding.  I don't attend many weddings.  Being an introvert, I have little interest in the lives of others, in formal, mandatory fun affairs.  In pursuit of this, I keep my circle of friends small.  But this wedding was different.  Mainly because of the food.  And the fact that I was allowed, nay encouraged, to wear pajamas.  My good friend, who I met in Astana, who shall remain nameless, except to the two people who actually read this story and also know me from Astana, who is from Texas (honestly, getting a Visa to go anywhere from that crazy country must be a nightmare), is also, in a roundabout way, from India.  In that her parents are.  Normally, other than a passing interest in places that are something other than the country backwoods where I grew up, I pay little attention to background, ethnicity, culture, except to studiously avoid situations in which I might have to converse with people.  Any people. (Introvert!).  But.

For those of you unaware, Indian food is the best food.  And my friend, for all her faults as being a person who is not me, quietly sitting in a room by myself, is a pretty awesome person.  And she told me to wear traditional Indian attire, which is incredibly more fun and pretty and comfortable than the usually expected tiny cocktail dress—because all of us, everywhere, couldn't possibly be going to a wedding with the expectation of fun and eating a lot, instead of seducing everyone who looks at us—that is usually worn to weddings in countries in which (or next to which) I have grown up.

I also got to meet her husband, who stands as one of the tallest people I know.  He also seemed quite nice, and looked at my friend as though he would take those giant tall-man-hands of his and cut a swath through any and all people who ever dared be an ass, or otherwise mean, in any way, to her.  Which is an acceptable quality in a new husband.

These (those?) aforementioned circumstances, though enough to tempt me off to the strange land of Texas, were not the only lure I was chasing.  I also was looking forward—in that theoretical way that introverts do to social interaction, before it actually happens—to once again seeing some of the people I knew in Astana.  I'll admit, nice as it was to know a whole table-full of people at a wedding (who were not my family), contextually it was quite weird.  But I suppose I can grudgingly say that it was also fun to talk to them again, and also the wine helped very much.

My trip to Galveston was defined, in most part, by an excess of something I've not had much of since I returned to ye olde States: free time.  We spent much of our time in and around Galveston just killing time.  Wandering.  Looking for places to eat.  Eating.  Digesting.  Wandering back from where we'd just eaten to mope around wondering where our next meal was going to be.  Sightseeing.  There isn't a lot to see, besides ocean, at a tourist attraction during the off-season.  But we made do.  I took off my shoes and stuck my toes in the sand.  Walked down the beach briefly before cold and a fear of stepping on something rusty and pathogen-covered became too much for me.  Fantasized about what would happen if I stuck a piece of rebar through the spokes of one of those four-person-bike-carriages that annoying and/or drunk people kept driving(?) down the sidewalks at us and by which we were nearly run over countless times.

Toes in the Sand

All in all, it was a leisurely trip.  And it's glad I am to be back up in the Industrious North.  But I still have my pajamas.

Luxury and Necessity

Not long after I arrived in Astana—who are we kidding, even six months in I can talk about the present as “not long after I arrived”—I decided to take a shower.  I shower every day, of course, but this day is mentioned as, well, noteworthy.  (On a side note noteworthy as a descriptor for events has also undergone quite a change in the past six months).

This shower happened in the dormitory in which I was living for my first month in Astana.  I had basically the room in which you would expect to spend the next nine months with a complete stranger if you were a freshman at a mid-size state university in the United States.  Plus a private bathroom.  I’m led to believe that in some university dorm rooms private bathrooms are standard.  In my state university, alas, this was not so.  But anyway, it was a dorm room—large, angular (read: lots of corners, ouch!),modular furniture, littler leftover floor space, and a window that didn’t always open and close the way it should have.  Oh, and no curtain.  Not even a curtain rod to hang a sheet over.  I saw many windows in that building with newspapers taped to them to block out the daily frown of the sun. 

I lived on the sixth floor.  Though there was an elevator, a passcard was required to operate it, which you were required to purchase, and which “ran out” after a certain number of rides, and you had to pay more money to use again.  My American sensibilities—what, you have to pay for an elevator, a basic service to which I’ve grown accustomed?  What about the disabled?—of course, precluded my from purchasing said elevator card.  (I’ve since revised my opinion of elevators and cards, but I’ll get to that another time).

At any rate, on the day in question, which was likely about three days after I arrived, I decided to take a shower, which is generally accepted as a good thing to do before heading off to work.  So out of my clothes I went and into the shower I stepped.  Before getting into the specifics of that adventure, though, I feel it’s worth mentioning the rest of the bathroom.  It was a small space, as seems logical in a dorm room, but not really as small as you might expect.  Now, I’ve watched enough home remodeling shows on basic cable DIY channels to know that a room with such Spartan accoutrements could be laid out in a much more space-saving way, thus freeing up more space in the actual dorm “room.”  There was, simply, a sink, a three-foot-square shower—I’ll call it a stall, for lack of a better descriptor at this point—and a toilet.

A word about toilets:  One’s feelings about toilets can really set the tone for a lot of one’s subsequent life.  There are some people who seem absolutely fastidious in their outward appearance, general cleanliness, and the way in which they organize their lives.  You work with these people, maybe even share an office or cubicle.  You regularly have lunch, even drinks after work, together, and in every aspect they seem to exhibit the proper amount of regard for sanitation and cleanliness.

Then something happens.  They’re fumigating your apartment building, or a water main breaks, or something else that otherwise forces you to decamp from home for a few days.  And this co-worker offers you a place to stay.  And of course  you accept, because this person is someone you’ve come to rely upon for cleanliness, punctuality, and overall lack of being an ax-murderer.

Everything is great.  Clean place, nice guest-room, or at the very least a well-made-up sofa bed, reasonable expectations for cooking or cleaning or whatever it is you need to agree upon for whatever period of time your stay will last.  Everything is great, until you get to the bathroom.

What do you do?  What do you say?  Should you say anything?  How do you deal with someone else’s toilet?  I suppose you could raise the point that any time you are a guest at someone else’s home this is an issue, though plenty of people have been know to get through a three-hour dinner party without using a strange toilet.  When you are a house guest, you are at the mercy of your host.  People who are generally lax about cleanliness in their own homes can freeze up completely when asked to use someone else’s toilet.

I’ve also found that this houseguest-toilet-syndrome is specific to personal toilets.  People who have issues at someone’s house or apartment seem to have no problem using a public toilet (I suppose I should qualify this.  No one likes using a truly public toilet.  Even those few who have no compunctions with squatting over a hole in the ground can’t use a truly public toilet without a little shiver of distaste, if not disgust.  In this case, by public I mean the kind of toilet you use at a workplace or other familiar yet not-home environment.  Even the toilet in a department store holds less fear than the toilet of a dear friend in whose home you are not a frequent guest).  Why?  Perhaps it’s a transferal of responsibility:  This company has 150 employees and manages to turn a profit every year.  Obviously they‘ve got the simple process of cleaning a toilet figured out.

Me, I’m typically pretty phlegmatic when it comes to the rigors of cleaning.  It needs doing, I get it done, end of story.  But this toilet, my toilet, I should say, had me completely at a loss.  It turns out that familiarity is just as important with toilets as it is with say, street signs.  No clear directions and I’m completely at sea.  When one of the first things you have to do on your first day in a place worlds away from the one with which you are familiar is clean the toilet (a toilet that looks and works quite different than the one in your own previous bathroom), well, it can be a little daunting.  Do these cleaning products clean the same way as the ones I’m used to?  What are these words I don’t recognize?  Do any of them say antibacterial?  And let’s not even get started on the actual physics of toilets from one country to another.

Is this symptomatic of how I will spend the rest of my time in Astana?  I suppose we'll find out.  Does how I felt about my toilet necessarily effect how I felt about my shower?  More on that later.

Wondering when I'm going to get to that shower?  Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion to In No Sense Abroad: Luxury and Necessity.