Learning to socialise, AGAIN
Did you know that it can take a minimum of 21 days for a newly learnt behaviour to become a habit? Hey, don’t raise your eyebrows at me, I didn’t pluck this figure out of thin air. It’s actually based on a study conducted by the University College London in 2009. Of course, it also depends on individuals.
So, where J and I were stuck in a foreign land in the world’s strictest lockdown for five and half months without socialising with anyone “in person”, not only had we forgotten what it entailed, but we also got used to avoiding talking to strangers, or exchanging pleasantries with people that served us at supermarkets, taxi drivers, or the concierge staff where we stayed.
Sounds intriguing? Can you relate to the above?
Read on…
Jason said to our taxi driver, “You are the first person we’ve spoken to face to face in over 5 months.” You should’ve seen the cabbie’s face. Jason’s comment bewildered him. He wasn’t sure how to respond to that disclosure! I am sure he wondered whether we’d been living in the wild. I mean we did look pretty grubby. Anyhow, the driver chose not to say anything and carried on driving. Who’d blame him?
Feeling the fresh (hot) air on our faces as we drove to our resort, it was irrefutably the most alien, but satisfying feeling we’d had in a very long time.
We managed to get the last taxi from the airport in Saint Lucia to our resort in Rodney Bay. Our journey from Colombia to Saint Lucia was adventurous to say the least. After a few flight cancellations and changing our destinations several times, we arrived in Saint Lucia three days after we’d left Medellin via Bogota and Miami. We were exhausted and elated in equal measures.
Like most of the world we’d been in lockdown for several months, too. But unlike majority of the world’s population, we were stuck in a completely new city, thousands of miles away from home. To cut the long story short, Jason and I started our yearlong travels in early December 2019, but it came to a sudden halt in the end of March 2020 when we arrived in Medellin — at the courtesy of COVID-19.
Landing in Saint Lucia and after passing the temperature test, we felt we’d overcome all the hurdles. But we were so wrong. The immigration demanded a proof of an onward journey which we didn’t have, as we hadn’t booked it. We weren’t trying to be rebels; it was just that the information about requiring an onward journey prior to arrival wasn’t available anywhere on the country’s official websites. We were so used to having easy access to visa related information throughout our travels in Central and South America, we’d forgotten that the Caribbean was a different part of the world altogether.
The airport crew in Saint Lucia were really helpful though. They sympathised with us and told us that we weren’t the only ones who’d arrived without an onward journey! This made us feel better. You see, we got worried that we’d lost our travelling skills during lockdown. Anyhow, after spending two long hours at the airport looking for cheap flight tickets to a different island, we managed to book onward journey. And got all cleared from the lovely Saint Lucian airport manager. Off we went to our prison for two weeks, to serve our quarantine sentence.
Read the full Blog at confusionofcultures.com.