You may think that not having heat or air conditioning is weird, or a siesta, when the entire city stops for 2 hours, or dinner at 10 pm. You may also think that kissing people on the cheeks to greet them is weird, or living without heat or AC so you have to wear yellow pants, sweatshirts scarves and puffy jackets. Or you may think that standing in a completely blue bathroom after a shower and refusing to open the door to let the hot air escape is kind of strange… we definitely don’t do that…

My new life is the best kind of weird.

However.

Today I was talking to a boy from London who I sit by in my fake class (we start real class next week), asking about the classics: tea, the royal family (Megxit), & Brexit.

He said that Brexit will really drive up the prices, making everything more expensive and the government will also forget about the common people, focusing on securing a trade deal. Then he said that they will have more American products and said that was concerning because we have low food safety standards.

Well I wasn’t going to let my country go down like that, so I decided to say that we did. Even though I really don’t know if we do or not.

His response: you have spray cheese!!!

That, I could not defend. I immediately started laughing while he questioned why we deliberately eat something we know is fake.

I told him how kids like to squeeze it in their mouth, draw pictures with it and put it on crackers – which i told him was normal (cheese and crackers of course) to which he asked why we couldn’t put real cheese on crackers…

I laughed and laughed looking as an outsider on spray cheese, thinking if I didn’t know a thing about America except spray cheese I would run far away.

Then he told me his favorite food is haggis.

Haggis is sheep’s lung, stomach and heart. The directions say: make sure you remove the windpipe. Google at your own risk. (PS it’s banned in the US, so don’t go looking)

To which I simultaneously laughed and threw up inside and said I would eat a whole can of spray cheese before I ever touched haggis.

We agreed to disagree.

But, we’re all weird. Every place has things that make it unique. Some are hard to adopt, some rooted in the traditions of hundreds of years, others are simple – a change in mindset.

The past few days I’ve learned to open my mind to the world, asking questions honestly, thoughtfully and respectfully knowing that if I ever think Americans are superior, I just have to remember spray cheese.