Culture Clash

Dealing with people from other cultures can be very challenging, as everyone knows, but it's easy to forget how many different cultures exist side by side within our own country, or even within my own apartment. (Well, in that case only two, but it's still a challenge occasionally.) I've settled into my department reasonably well, I think, but there's no denying that my colleagues here are, by and large, of very different backgrounds than most of the people I knew in college or high school. Before grad school, I had only really known one seriously Christian person my age; here, they're everywhere. I was downtown today and I saw people holding signs and from a distance I thought they were Women in Black but in fact they were protesting against abortion. Things are different out here; they are not what I'm used to.

I don't know what the rules are for dealing with these people. Okay, I'll cut to the chase: I have no idea what it means when an Evangelical Christian boy puts his hand on a girl's knee. Does it mean he thinks she's easy? Is this the sort of thing one ought to slap someone for, possibly with a glove? Is it a test of some sort? Surely the Christians have rules for touching each others' bodies, but since I don't know what these rules are, I feel like a laowai again. Of course, I'm new to this whole coed thing, too, so I can't say for certain, but I suspect that in secular society, a hand on the knee is not a huge deal, but who knows? No one has ever spelled this stuff out for me; I just have to make it all up as I go along.


ETA: Krista informs me that you'd have to be really conservative - "like, Amish conservative" - for knee-touching to be a really big deal. Good to know that, once again, I am making mountains out of molehills.