I tell our student (for the second time) about the shower. I had already given her the "house rules" document, translated into her native tongue, that included a request for one five-minute shower per day. My own kids have struggled mightily to stop the torrent of warm water in a timely manner, but 20 minutes is a new household record.
There's gotta be an app for this. I start googling, Amazon-ing and Ebay-ing, trying to find a product that will automatically cut the shower after a preset time. A gadget in Australia costs $400; another in the United States sells for about half that.
I order instead a timer shaped like a duck. It comes from Greece and costs about $12, including shipping. It arrived a month ago and no one has ever used it. For $7, I bought flow restrictors from the shop down the street– they're little discs you pop into the shower hose.
"Mom, what did you do to our shower?" asks Miss 14. "It's terrible!"
I'm guessing I cut water flow in half.
My point is, if you're living in someone's home and trying to assimilate with the local culture, go all in. Follow the rules, even if it means losing your private waterfall for a few months. Or, if you're bathing-averse (as some teenagers are), understand most of us don't want to inhabit your funk cloud.
Our family have hosted six international students during the past three years. Their stays ranged from 10 days to one year.
We've learned a lot about our surrogate teenagers' countries, even visiting our former student, Sofia, in Italy in July. Students become temporary family members, sitting with us around the dinner table, going on outings and helping with chores like dishes.
Internationals who've fit best have allowed themselves to be here. They interact with us rather than continuously drip-feeding conversations from home. Voice-over-internet lets us ditch phone cards, but it also means any traveller can have hours-long discussions with people back home rather than the new people with whom time is short.
Some of our interim teens have spent so many minutes mumbling into their phones when it seems no one's responding, I wonder if they're dictating medical notes, like a modern-day Doogie Howser, MD: "Yes, I told him to increase the dosage to 200 milligrams three times per day …" Of course, this is happening in another language. Also, they might be leaving very long voice-mail messages.
In the late '80s, during my exchange year in Europe, I was lucky to telephone my mum once a week using an antique corded contraption. A month's worth of calls could've bought a Eurail Pass.
I wrote and received letters. About a week after Christmas, I bawled my eyes out listening to the cassette tape my family made at the grandparents' annual gathering.
On the plus side, there was no pressure to check in with parents or friends each day. I learned a new language within a few months partly because I didn't spend time keeping up my social media feed.
Newcomers must also navigate food. Our students eat like ravenous wildebeests for the first couple of months. They pack on five to eight kilograms in that time, then start dieting. Once-full lunchboxes suddenly contain little more than a boiled egg and apple.
One of our former students wanted to be vegetarian before she came to us but decided that wouldn't be fair to a new family in a new country. While some hosts will take vegetarians, their numbers are smaller than the omnivore contingent.
The late chef and TV travel show host Anthony Bourdain wrote in Medium Raw, "I don't care what you do in your own home, but the idea of a vegetarian traveller in comfortable shoes waving away the hospitality - the distillation of a lifetime of training and experience - of say, a Vietnamese pho vendor (or Italian mother-in-law…) fills me with spluttering indignation."
Bourdain suggests enjoying the kindness of strangers while saying "yes, yes, yes".
One more thought about those interminable showers: not only do they waste water and power, anything longer than 10 minutes strips skin of moisture. And no one wants to bring home a scaly epidermis as souvenir from the Land of the Long Hot Shower.
