Language #3 Talking in Fluent American

After practicing my Thai all morning on my 110km ride, I flawlessly ordered my vegetarian lunch. It was delicious! And by about the third bite into it noticed the hunks of dead chicken. Dammit! So much for flawless. The after lunch ride was a bit painful as my colon was reintroduced to the muscle tissue of another animal. How do you meat eaters do it? I'll spare you the soap box and politics of meat and just cop to the fact that it really was tasty. Maybe the meat showed up on my plate because I'm out of practice. And I'm out of practice because I've been speaking American! And I've been speaking American because I randomly bumped into the American couple here in Krabi that I originally met in Malaysia (OK another shameless plug for their website www.northstarjourneys.com). It was a great reunion and we hung out continuouslyfor the past two days. There is something that happens while travelling that makes friendships more immediate and more intense than at home. Maybe the knowledge that you only have a short time together condenses the experience and makes you cut out the filler that normally occupies most friendships. There is something more to this connection, however, as we all acknowledge that it feels like we've been friends for years.
I said speaking American and I meant it. I first realized it when Paul gave me the measurements of something big in football fields. I instantly understood the size of it without having to convert meters to feet to yards to football fields. The metric system is lame. I mean, sure it's logical. Sure it's neat and clean. Sure everything can be divided by 10 or multiplied by 10 which is really efficient. But if someone says "that is probably 450 meters long", I'm too busy converting that length into football fields to hear what comes next. Everything should be measured in football fields, it just makes life easier. Then late one night sitting on the curb in front of their guest house we had the inevitable conversation that every real American has. I realized that even though I haven't missed it, the topic hadn't come up until now. Of course I'm talking about Gilligan's Island. I haven't owned a TV now for over 15 years and yet there we were discussing the personalities of Mary Ann and Ginger. The relationship between The Skipper and Gilligan or...well you get the idea. That part of growing up, the afterschool television experience, is such a huge part of our collective psyche that many years later we have a common bond that, as silly as it sounds, runs deep. We barely touched on Star Trek (the Captain Kirk and Spock years of course) and for the first time having this discussion I didn't mention the Brady Bunch...which is probably just as well. In Kuala Lumpur I had tried to describe to my German friend the concept of a situation comedy about WW2 Prisoners of War but her horrified look of distaste kind of quieted me down. Paul and I just cracked up recalling Hogan's Heros' Schultz and Colonel Klink. Kelly was sweetly smiling but not as animated and I found out that she was more of a PBS kid. Sesame Street and The Electric Company were more her role models for TV and it sounds so much healthier to me now as I write it down. That led later to a discussion of the best kids album (and most aggregiously politically correct) Free to Be You and Me. After our discussion I now have a deeper under standing of why Kelly is one of the most mellow and gentle people I've met in a long time. We're all going to meet up again in Bangkok and I'm stoked. Not just because they're so fun to be around, but also there is a huge part of that topic that we left out, and need to complete. Sure we might have broken out a short verse of "It's alright to cry" from Free to be... but none of us sang a theme song from one of our beloved shows and that is an American birthright.