Posted by S. , Wednesday, September 22, 2010 7:05 PM

It's funny how quickly we abandon our habits and routines when we find ourselves far away from our normal "life". I wear jeans and sneakers everywhere and everyday for the first time since the 90s. I wear ponytails, and don't drink coffee (or red bull!) every day. (I am still somewhat addicted to farmville, though...)
In the space of a month it turns out, it is easy to get used to having to time what day of the week you buy certain grocery items, to get used to not understanding 99% of what is spoken around you, and to not having a car.
When a friend posted a status update on facebook about the price of gas, it struck me as to how foreign gas prices seemed. After 8 years of constantly being aware of such things... irrelevant. You get used to, it seems, very quickly, to the unavailability of things, and the foreign-ness of a culture.

We aren't just physically remote, we are also just.... removed from a lot of the western world, I guess. News is a bit of a foreign concept up here... To start with, due to the 2 times a week mail system, there are no newspapers brought in, and none are published here. No one seems very concerned about what is happening in the rest of the world. Terrorist threats, car crashes, and hurricanes all seem... not just far away, but like they belong to another world than this one.

News here takes the form of water shortages, class cancellations, bear and wolf shootings and sightings, and who is having a chinese food takeout at their home the next day. Hockey, however, remains part of the culture here.