Ten adaptations to make after returning home from Ecuador:

1. Not speaking to “outsiders”—such as waiters, store clerks, bus drivers, and people I bump into—in the default language of Spanish.

2. Getting used to not being honked at by every passing taxi driver just because I’m white.

3. Getting used to not feeling as if I stand out like a huge, oversized pale insect with eyes that have morphed away from the earth.

4. Being able to actually call people on the telephone, but more than that, remembering what it is liked to be called by others. Is that a ring?

5. Getting used to coffee shops on every corner and a dearth of maggoty unspiced white rice piled onto my plate. Ah, sweet adaptation.

6. Getting used to not having a freshly squeezed glass of orange juice waiting for me every time I entered the kitchen. In fact, just getting used to not having the ground washed in front of me as I walk from room to room in the house I am staying in, which actually covers a whole gauntlet of travails such as doing my own laundry, grocery shopping, paying separate bills, washing dishes, and cleaning up after myself. Frankly, not a hard adaptation to make, although the lack of orange juice makes me sad.

7. Having female buddies again.

8. Not kissing people on the cheek, or the “air-cheek” as I finally discovered on my second-to-last day when I broke down and asked my favorite student exactly how one was supposed to kiss people on the cheek. Which cheek? Where on the cheek? Any differentiation between how one kissed a student, and how one kissed, say, a best friend? To which I was instructed that one does not really kiss the cheek, but rather one gets their cheekbone region close to the other person’s cheekbone region (shoot towards the left, so it is the right cheekbone being kissed), maybe even touching cheekbone regions depending on closeness, and then kissing the air near the cheek. My student then told me how one could judge the general sleaziness of a boy depending on how well they respected the protocol of the air-kiss. A sleaze will lay a Juicy One on the cheek, D said, wiping her cheek as if in disgust of a few nasty introduction remembrances. This whole discussion made me blush deeply for an extended period of time as I felt resentful over the fact that I hadn’t been given an instruction booklet on just how one ought to perform this amazingly fast and confusing piece of etiquette. I, as I would never admit to anybody, had been not performing the “air-kiss,” but rather the “cheek-kiss” and had probably looked like just your average American slut to any number of students and friends I had exchanged greetings with. Another piece of the puzzle fell into alignment for me about American girl’s reputations abroad. Anyhow, just as soon as I had it explained, I suddenly had to get used to not practicing correct cheek alignment at all.

9. Getting used to not being able use the weekends to hop on a random, crowded, uncomfortable bus heading any ol’ direction and traveling to some randomly-chosen unknown spot outside of the city I live in. In some odd ways, since it was not something I was regularly doing when I had a car last year and could go anywhere, no-cheap-buses feels like a real limitation on my freedom. I think, of all things I experienced in myself while I was in Ecuador, this is the most lasting and makes me the proudest: I did so many things on my own.

10. What appears to be the hardest adaptation for me to make is remembering that I don’t have to throw my toilet paper into a separate waste receptacle. The tossing instincts are enormous and there are certain of my forearm muscles that are furious about the loss of regular exercise.