Adaptation

I'm dealing with the idea of being a person who has adapted. As an adapted person, when I return to America, people ask me chiefly about the language barrier. The language barrier is significant, and I believe that there are significant problems with economic models that assume that people (especially foreigners) living in a given market have access to "perfect information" so critical to the concept of rational actors in a market environment. Language obliges foreigners to either invest significantly greater amounts of time into hunting down the best deal; alternatively, they pay more than any given product is worth. They also may have considerable non-economic barriers (such as when founding a business, etc.) that the state itself puts up, either intentionally or due to a failure of communication. All of this is worth significant amounts of research, and is thus completely outside of the purview of this ridiculously unscientific essay.

You see, there are other complicating factors dealing with adaptation. The concepts of weights and measures becomes surprisingly difficult to manage, though some of these are easier to manage than others. For instance, buying ham at the supermarket or estimating distances. You find that you "translate" distances, in particular. This is not so bad – a meter is about a yard, and 400 meters is still a quarter-mile, and 10 meters is pretty close to a first down. And once you get used to the idea that 150 grams is about the size of the small cup they give you of deli salads, you learn to know to ask for that much; and a half-kilo is about a pound, in case you need that much ham. (Europeans don't sell sliced turkey, or roast beef either. So you eat a lot of ham.)

The worst is temperature. Temperature is complicated. You find that you memorize the scale instead of "translating" it. The yards-meters conversion is pretty close; the Fahrenheit-Celsius conversion is useless.* You look for yardsticks: 28° C is 82° F – that's a pretty easy conversion (switch the 8 and 2!), and that's pretty warm. Anything higher is just hot. Baking requires the conversion table, but my crummy oven has always been pretty sketchy anyway, and so you never really know what temperature it is on any scale, so that doesn't really matter. Unless you want to bake something.

As for cold, well, that's when it's nice to come from Colorado. It never gets as cold here as it does there. One yardstick that helps is that -40° C is -40° F, and almost everybody knows that 0° C is 32° F. The latter figure here is helpful, because that conversion in the footnote is much easier to use when it's cold – you then figure out that 0° F is about -15° C, and it never gets too much colder than that (two F degrees are about 1 C degree). The -40° C = -40° F conversion is helpful for talking about January in Colorado. It facilitates discussion, though generally not about the wisdom (or lack thereof) of the Fahrenheit scale.

For longer distances, I find that the best thing to do is to measure it in hours. It's generally the most relevant both in Europe as well as in America, though it carries different cultural implications, especially when you come from the West, and a two-and-a-half-hour trip to the mall is pretty normal. In two and a half hours, I can get from Brno to Poland, Slovakia, Austria, or Prague. All of them are completely different worlds in their own way. But again, those are four more subjects for four more essays. Moreover, of course, you should always make sure that you are on the right train. I had a friend that had a two-and-a-half-hour trip turn into a 10-hour trip due to his mistaken reading of the train schedule, confusing the "destination" station with the "arriving from" station. But I don't think he'd like me to elaborate too much about that.

*In case you're wondering, it's T_C = 5(T_F – 32)÷9