Lost in Translation: Learning to be Risky

I had lunch with the staff at ACN today, and they asked me about how I liked my apartment, how I slept, and how good I felt after taking a shower. I told them that I was feeling very well after being unconscious for nearly eleven hours solid, and I felt like I was going to fit in quite nicely at the college. They looked at each other and grinned, and one of them told me that my adjustment period was only beginning. Now that I think about it, it really is only beginning.

I took an hour-long walk on Tuesday morning through the city as far as I dared go, and I ended up at Moss Kirke, a large church in the city center. As soon as I got there, I felt lost—not in the mental or emotional turmoil of a lost soul, but physically, spatially lost. I stood there a few minutes, and because I was standing in  front of a beautiful brick church from the early nineteenth century, I sat down on a nearby bench. I had this feeling of being lost for a few minutes as I sat there, but the weird thing was that I didn’t feel worried about being lost. I was just lost, and that was okay, because I knew I’d find my way back in time.

I stood up and started walking again, thinking I’d backtrack my steps until I found something familiar. I took pictures along the way, because again, I was lost but wasn’t worried about it. It was just something that was happening to me at the time. Because I was lost, I started looking at the signs posted on buildings and on street corners—but, strangely enough, I couldn’t read most of them, because they were in Norwegian. I was the goon downtown looking like this because he couldn’t read. In all, I made it back home without any problems.

Later in the day, one of the ACN staff took me and a group of students into the shopping area of Moss to go to the grocery store. I was only exploring this morning, looking at buildings and what not, so I didn’t even try to find the grocery store (and the food in my apartment could have lasted me a couple more days anyway). Our group leader walked us into the grocery store and told us that if we needed help translating labels, we should come talk to her. She recalled a story of another student a few years back.

The student went into a grocery store in Moss to buy makeup remover wipes, as she’d forgotten to pack hers for the trip. She found a carton of wipes packaged in Norwegian writing, and she took them back to her dorm. As she used the wipes on her face, the student felt a sudden stinging in her eyes. It turns out that she hadn’t bought makeup remover wipes, but vaginal wipes. Her eyes were fine afterward, but it just goes to show that she learned from her mistake.

If anyone ever watched The Magic Schoolbus as a child, we should all take heed of Ms. Frizzle’s catch-phrase: “Take chances, make mistakes, get messy!”