Social Shock

I have never been that comfortable around other people. I have a tendency to come across either stuck up or shy, and then once I get comfortable, I will not shut up. I even wrote a poem about it when I was in my senior year of high school, titled “Shy Girl Who Never Shuts Up.”

I have one of those memories where I catalog what I say and then before I can go to sleep I must relive every stupid thing I have said for the day and cringe. It has took years for me to finally realize that most times I am putting more weight on my words than anyone else is and thus I am just not that important that my words will be held against me in a court of law. I still have not 100% convinced myself of this, but I am a work in progress.

Add to all of this the fact that I am born and bred, from a small town in North Carolina. One way you can tell I am legit is the “born and bred” comment. I am from the south because even though we are “North” Carolina, we are not from the north. We talk slow, we take our time at new menus, and we say hello to just about everyone. Also, movies love to get someone to murder our dialect. But I digress.

Imagine my culture shock the first time I went to New York, New York. I still cringe about this trip. I took a bus with my mother, sister, daughter, and a local church. We slept on the bus on the way there, spent a whole day in New York, and then slept on the bus back that night. I was younger then. No way could I do that now.

First thing we did wrong was we went at Christmastime. I have since learned that it is one of the worse times to go to New York. Beautiful, with the decorations, but crowded with everyone who has come to see the decorations.

Second, you have to book it across the street. I do not know who timed the crosswalks there, but there is NOT enough time to try to figure out if you are headed in the right direction and keep up with the crowd and get across the street safely all at the same time. In the south, we give enough time for you to change your mind and go back the way you came if needed.

Which brings me to traffic. In the south, we fuss when we have a tractor coming at us from a different direction or the same direction and on our country roads you have to share the lane a bit. Imagine my horror when I saw that the bus we were in was close enough to our neighboring vehicles that I could have reached out and slapped the driver next door without straining, at all. No body of any person I know could have fit between our vehicles. I quit looking at the road because it made me a Nervous Nellie.

I have completely lost count at all the things we did wrong. I will just say, the next thing we messed up on was standing in line to order at a deli counter while looking over our choices. If you have never traveled to the south, and you are used to a quick order, please be advised that even if we know the menu by heart, we will still debate, at the window/speaker/whatever, what we want. Whether it is because we just are tired of the same old same old, or we have been shocked to find the nutrition information added and now must rethink our choice, we can be a little slower ordering. I am self-conscious about what others think, so I usually do have my choices narrowed down. I do not want to hold up a line by being completely incompetent. At the same time, I am ordering something and paying with my money so I do feel like I should have a second to think before blurting out my order. Let me just say my whole family messed this up for our breakfast order. We were in line. We were still looking at the menu. Before we knew it, it was our turn to order, and we had not conversed with each other to see if we all were in agreement with our choices (it is a thing). We tried to order, but were not prepared and messed up so royally that we finally apologized and got out of line to get our order straight. Then once we had watched others order, so we knew a little more about what we were doing, we tried again. It still was not quite fast enough for the guy taking our order, but we got great food and we get to now say that we ordered and ate in one of the restaurants with all the pictures from 9/11.

There was more snafus along the way. Most of them our own doing from not knowing more about the area. It is a trip that I would not repeat, under those same circumstances, but I still have pictures that I look back on and overall, it was a good trip. The food was amazing. Culture out of this world. The best parts of the trip were the saddest, though. Going to the subway and seeing the section where all the names of those lost during 9/11 are wrote, is touching. We went before the current memorial was finished. That area of the subway has a way of humbling you right in the midst of all the chaos.

I have since been schooled from people from further north, that we did not get a true feeling for the place. That while we did royally screwed up on ordering food, mostly we messed up by the time of year we went. Christmastime is the time when local folk usually stick close to home because they know the area is going to be overrun with tourists. This means that many of the folks who were making things crazy, were from other areas around the world even. Think Disney World during Christmas, which my family has also made the mistake of trying. Also, by not having a place to have rested the night before and then the night of, we set ourselves up for one very tiring trip. I think I will eventually take on New York again, but under very different circumstances. Shoot, if my teen has her way, she wants to move there to live full time, so I may have to venture north again if for no other reason than to see my baby girl. (She is convinced she can live the life of the sitcom "Friends" in the real world.)