Living together with someone from a different culture is enormously interesting. Maybe because it is the kind of person I am, but I enjoy bumping into little situations that are culturally unexpected. Some people might get frustrated, some people might ignore it, but I always find myself thinking, “Wow, that’s cool.” It helps that I live with Kuniko, who is infinitely patient. It’s as if a long time ago she decided that we’re going to have times when we completely don’t understand each other, but the good things more than make up for it. <\/p>\n
Generally he handle our day to day communication in English, but there are times when we stray into Japanese. We strive to avoid mixing the languages mid-sentence, but we don’t seem to mind changing languages sentence by sentence, which probably is weird to hear but seems natural to us. Sometimes one language has a better way of expressing an idea in that particular situation, so we use that. <\/p>\n
Last night after we came home from dinner at Kuniko’s parents (where I got a pretty good Japanese workout) we were doing little chores around the house and Kuniko mentioned that she was looking forward to our brunch on Sunday. The restaurant is having a special course based on shrimp dishes, and since I love shrimp I was all excited about it as well. I said something like “Woo, yeah, shrimp, shrimp, let’s eat shrimp!” while smiling and Kuniko gave me a look like “What the hell are you talking about?” <\/p>\n
I think the last thing she expected me to do after an evening of polite Japanese with her parents was act like a junior high school cheerleader and do a shrimp rally cheer in English. The last thing I expected was for her to think it was weird. <\/p>\n
Like I said, I love it when this kind of stuff happens. She just shakes her head and smiles, and I usually try to measure if it is worth it to try and explain it or to just let it slide as “Bryan sure is weird sometimes”. Last night I let it slide, but it did remind me how culturally different we are, and how lucky I am to have someone as open-minded as my wife.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Living together with someone from a different culture is enormously interesting. Maybe because it is the kind of person I am, but I enjoy bumping into little situations that are culturally unexpected. Some people might get frustrated, some people might ignore it, but I always find myself thinking, “Wow, that’s cool.” It helps that I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-nu","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1456\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}