Stress Abroad

Two thoughts occurred to me this week:

One is that the pace of life in Cusco is starting to infiltrate my pace of life. I realized that here, I don't even try to pack in stuff for a straight 12 hours before crashing. Some things are just fine waiting till tomorrow. I don't even feel guilty or weird about it. Its just how things are here. As a result I sleep better, don't need as much caffeine and am overall more relaxed.

I also realized that living in a foreign country produces this underlying low level of stress. You don't know the customs, the social norms, how to do things, where to find things. The latest example of this is tonight when I needed to buy a pair of scrubs tomorrow. In the states, even if I didn't know where to buy scrubs, I'd look it up online, drive there, pick some up, and be home in a maximum of 45 minutes. Here it took a bit of searching, a closed store, and two hours of waiting while a pair was hand-made for me. This totaled over 3.5 hours. This, combined with the uncertainty of if I'd find it or not was quite stressful.

Of course, my new hand-made, personally chosen color scrubs for my personal dimensions are pretty damn sweet. And the pockets are way better than any in US scrubs.