Mistakes, errors, and flubs

I did not try to steal this!

Living in a foreign county can make you feel rather simple at times. You miss clues that are obvious to natives of the culture but that are invisible for you. You begin to remember how you felt when you were 3 years old and your parents took you out into the adult world. As a child, you would look up and around in awe at everything -- some of it fascinating, some of it scary. But your parents were there to help make sense of everything and to hold your hand…and you could navigate the world safely.

Now you are again in a foreign country where you have already spent more than 8 months during a 10-year period. And you still get sometimes get confused but have no hand to hold.

It can be a daily struggle. You make mistakes. I call them "mistakes" because they just happen like that. Sure, you make mistakes back in your homeland (get in the wrong line, lose the word for something, etc.), but they just don't seem so discouraging.

I thought I would keep a running list of all my mistakes for the past two weeks:

• forgot my key -- locking us out of our apartment for the first time ever
• used my credit card for a 27-cent purchase when I had a fistful of euros because of …reasons that would need another post to describe
• purchased a big bag of coffee beans when I have never ever had a bean grinder either here or in the United States and do not even drink coffee
• walked past my tram stop in the desperate cold way down to the next one -- from which the tram departed and next stopped at the one I should have been at (but I was not there)
• bought an 8-euro ticket that I promptly dropped into an unreachable area between the sales counter and the candy rack (the salesclerk cheerily told me that when things drop down there they are hard to get -- and she promptly sold me another 8-euro ticket)
• put the wrong sticker on the self-serve pastry bag, and appeared to be a pastry thief ("sir, that is two pastries, not one pastry")
• succeeded in having a bus driver stop the bus to let me off in a place that definitely was not the bus stop because it was actually a snow drift that I had to climb over ("this American seems to want off here, so I suppose he knows what he is doing")
• put the fabric softener in the washing detergent slot, and the washing detergent in the fabric softener slot, and "washed" the clothes (my report: it all came out fine, so I suspect some sort of scam with this cleaning routine)
• convinced myself I would really like salted, fried Baltic herring this time but I did not when I took a bite in a public place
• could not figure out for several days how to answer phone calls on my university-supplied Samsung phone (ok, you swipe that button onscreen because pressing it does nothing); I blame easy iPhone habits that have spoiled me, btw.
• purchased three sepia ink pens when I intended to buy three black ink pens -- even though the packaging was in English, it said SEPIA on the top, and the color of the nice drawing on the package was sepia.
• pushed when I should have pulled, pulled when I should have pushed -- countless times on numerous doors (see: Helling Helsingissä: Once again: Finnish doors (hellinghelsingissa.blogspot.com). This is an ongoing, eternal issue.

But I am happy to report that the list of things I am doing right is too long to publish here. It's just that these things don't seem to affect me as easily as those other things I do...and no one congratulates me when I do the right thing.