Things I Miss From Good 'Ole America

While I have lived abroad before, I have come to realize that I never really knew homesickness until I moved to Namibia. I miss so many things about America, many of them are completely random things that I never in my wildest dreams thought I would miss. My homesickness oftentimes reaches a magnitude that scares me but at the same time, I get a pretty good laugh about the absurdity of the things that I miss. In completely random order (because what I miss one minute is replaced by something else quite quickly), here are things I miss about the States:
The Material:
o Phone conversations
o Ethnic food (esp. Mexican, Chinese, Thai, and Indian)
o Unlimited, fast internet access
o The ocean
o Buildings that are taller than one storey
o Ice cream (we have it here but it is made from vegetable fat so it’s not as good)
o Hot chocolate and fireplaces on cold winter days
o My scrapbooks
o Air conditioning
o Movie theatres
o Television (I have one but it only gets 3 stations; 1 is a televangelist channel, the other two show news, soap operas, and terrible American TV shows such as Tyra Banks’ talk show)
o Cool weather
o Boston!
o Doorbells (if someone is picking you up, they just stay in their car and honk until you appear, this can be rather annoying for the neighbors!)
o Cobblestone streets (or paved streets extending beyond the main road for that matter!)
o Boats
o Book stores (I really really miss them!)
o Restaurants
o Filtered water
o Leisure activities (like swimming, bowling, plays and movies)
o Trader Joe’s and Costco
o Beds with real mattresses
o Washing machines!
o Deep green vegetation
o My bathrobe
o Familiar foods (like rotisserie chicken, hot dogs, baked beans, root beer, salmon, asparagus, artichoke, cheesecake)
o Halloween
o Candy corn pumpkins
o Weeping willow trees
o Jeopardy (I swear I almost never watched that show!)
o Lighthouses
o The Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland
o Las Vegas
o The season of fall, especially October
o Changing leaves
o Sliding in socks on hardwood floors

The Immaterial:
o The general ease and safety of transport
o Proper English and grammar (people speak “Namlish” here which is something of a brutalization of my mother tongue)
o Productivity
o The finality of the law (here what is illegal on paper often is not enforced such as the mistreatment of children)
o Feeling safe in my own home
o Familiarity
o Dedication and competence
o Logic
o Efficiency
o Random acts of kindness
o Predictability (i.e. knowing what day I’m travelling out of town more than five minutes before my departure)
o Hospitality
o Punctuality (i.e. knowing that if a meeting is supposed to start at 8, it won’t start at 11)