No two cultures are alike, and you will inevitably be perplexed by any new culture you visit. I’ve been on Sint Maarten for a year (that statement in and of itself deserves a post), and I still don’t really get a lot of the things that go on here.
- Driving with your brights on. Headlights are cool, and they’re also perfectly sufficient for seeing where you’re going. I don’t understand why everybody uses their brights here– are they trying to blind the people in front of them? It gets hard to drive after dark without developing a migraine.
- Not Swimming. I haven’t met a lot of people from here who like to swim in the ocean. Actually, a lot of them never learned to swim. I find it ironic that the most beautiful reef is within a few yards of the shore, and yet people don’t go in to look at it. I grew up in the desert, and everybody knew how to swim. We dig expensive swimming pools so we can swim in the summer, because we don’t have anywhere else to do it!
- Lack of Garage Sales. In the States, we love us some garage sales. And in my old neighborhood, we’d wait all year for that one weekend that our neighborhood association would allow us to hold one. Here, nobody cares what you put out in your front yard, but people apparently don’t sell their stuff there. I think maybe the technology caught up to the island before the garage sale trend, because people list all their old stuff on Facebook classifieds groups.
- Accidents. I saw an accident once where a motorcyclist was thrown over the hood of my car when it hit another car. Both of them just recovered and went on their way. I guess that’s pretty typical. Nobody wants to deal with accidents here.
- Scary Motorcycling. Motorcyclists pretty much always drive on the center line. I’m really curious what happens when two bikers going opposite directions meet. How do they know if someone’s coming the other way?
If anyone has an explanation to these things, tell me in the comments!
