OK...still sleeping it off, but at least getting to a point where I can sit up for more than 5 minutes without drifting off...
Still pretty quietly ensonced in my Mom's amazingly beautiful lake home. But even the little I've seen has presented very real wonders and challenges...
- It's all so clean and orderly here! Oklahoma seems to have somehow become...Switzerland or some such. No trash all over the place, inside or out. And public bathrooms demand that you read a sign to find them; it's inconveniently impossible to smell them from outside.
- People are so laid back and nonchalant. An elevator door opens, and everyone inside doesn't leap to all try and squeeze out of the door at the same time. Boarding is called for a plane, and yet people form a nice orderly quiet line instead of all demanding to go in first.
- There's so much empty space! Just no end of land here not being used for agriculture, commercial property, or even housing. It's just...out there, doing nothing at all.
- It's just damn quiet, too. I know I'm in a lake home, but I still haven't heard any construction noise, loud but distant conversations, car horns, or much of anything else except an occasional chime from an antique clock, the wind in the trees, and various species of (strangely uneaten) lake wildlife.
- Was trudging through Chicago's O'Hare Airport, about time to fly on to Tulsa. I was dying of thirst...the long haul on jetliners and perhaps some of the...navigation aids...I may or may not have consumed earlier, were combining to leave me painfully dehydrated. I couldn't buy another cola...I was already in the secure area, and bottles no allowed there. It was just me and this long corridor, unmarked except by this one piece of inexplicable plumbing-related equipment. It finally occurred to me that the odd device was in fact a drinking fountain, and that walking over and pushing a button would let me drink my fill of Chicago's Finest. Which I did, and it was excellent.
- It's amazing to see diversity again! I got off the flights here to see waiting rooms full of Blacks, Latinos, whole troops of sari-clad Indians, Orthodox Jews, non-Chinese-speaking Asians, mouthy white girls wearing chador...so many different kinds of people! Well, I had to just squat down, insert a finger in a nostril, and have me a good long stare.
- There's also a huge diversity of English. Not everyone around me is trying, with varying degrees of success, to talk like me: The Living Avatar of World Standard English
TM The Chicago brays, the urban black talk, the Spanish-accented language of different Latinos, all gradually merging into inbred redneck cracker as I got closer to Tulsa, have been music to my ears...
- I was really surprised by the composition of the fairly full flight I had coming over from Shanghai. When I came here 20 years ago, and on more recent trips, the international flights were nearly all Whitey, with a few Asians sprinkled around to make it look exotic. This flight was mostly Chinese, with enough Whitey sprinkled around to make it look exotic.
I had several instances of being surrounded by Asian people, but being the only person who could speak Chinese. I did have one conversation IN Chinese, in Chicago, with a nice old man and his wife who were here from Inner Mongolia to visit their huaqiao daughter, who herself was glad the old folks got to talk, yet definitely distrustful of un-naturalness of this dangerous svengali wild honking Chinese-speaking hoodoo-man whitefella lurking the airport.
But I think the old parents were as relieved as I was to have things make sense again for a few moments...
More to come...Mom says that chest freezer is full of ice cream. So, more research...and more sleep!