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My favorite part of living in a foreign country is that social norms don't apply to you.  The Chinese might not laugh (or make any kind of verbal noise) in public, but you're not Chinese, are you?!  You can laugh until you pee your pants on the street, and what are they going to do about it?  Nothing!  At first, you try and stick to the behavioral expectations of home. Eventually you take on some of the social norms of your new surroundings, but mostly you end up creating your own little culture within a culture, with it's own rules and peculiar habits.  You become an embarrassment.  In the culture I create for myself things like showering, personal boundaries, counting calories, and not making a fool of yourself on public transit go out the window.

The most obvious change comes in the form of dress.  It gets to the point where you stop caring and start dressing based solely on comfort and convenience.

Case in point:

I came home from China looking like this...

I came home from Maine looking like this...

(And yes, in case you were wondering, summer camp on the East Coast does qualify as it's own country.)

You don't even want to know what Russia did to me.  The hideousness of it all is too great to be blogged.  All you need to know is that it involved these boots...

If I ever permanently leave the country I will most likely progress to a scary level of just. plain. weird.  If it progresses too far I won't fit in anywhere.  Don't get me wrong though, my culture is pretty rad.  If I ruled the world we'd all get dressed in the dark, take a 4 hour nap every day, and live on a diet of Oreos and sour cream.  Yum! 

I can't decide if this post makes any sense.  It's just one of those days.  It makes sense in my head, and that counts for something.  I think.