When you emerge yourself into a different culture, even when you think you begin to understand things, sometimes things happen that make you realize you really don’t.

Take cold water for example. Today, to my complete disbelief, I discovered that the guard at my work place and our neighboring guards believed that drinking cold water gave you a belly. So as a result, they’ve swarn off drinking cold water to help get rid of the small guts they’ve developed over the years.

To me this is just a poignant example of how much our cultures (and not necessarily lack of education) affect our belief systems. While I still think the notion of water being the source of my, ahem, belly is completely crazy, it shows just far off the page we could potentially be even on the “givens” when trying to understand each other. It makes me wonder how many of my beliefs I am “crazy” for thinking.