Impressions of the US, summer 2021
Well, we made it to the US! I wondered if we would never get here, given how complicated all the negative PCR-test paperwork was. But we’re here. And even though we do normally go two years between seeing family, we are extra grateful to be here because it came very close to not happening.
As usual, I have all kind of thoughts swimming around in my head about returning to the motherland.
Within two hours of landing, we’d walked in to a pharmacy and gotten second Pfizer shots for Jeremy and me, and first Pfizer shots for the girls. The fact that this is possible in this country is bonkers to me. Finland is vaccinating 16-year-olds this week and has only just approved the vaccine for 12+ kids in risk groups only. Jeremy and I wouldn’t have been able to get our second shots until August in Finland (they’re spacing the shots by 12 weeks). Here in the US, we just…walked in. They even gave us each a 25 USD gift certificate for our trouble (the joke is on them: we would have done it for free).
Gender roles are still going strong here, especially in the Intermountain West. I noticed this phenomenon two years ago and now I can’t unsee it. At the pharmacy where we got our shots, the pharmacist prepared two clipboards of paperwork for us. One of them had Jeremy’s form on it. The other one had mine…and the kids. Finland would never!
We’re the only ones wearing masks (in the few places we dare to be briefly indoors). With the Delta variant on the rise, and with the way I saw and heard this area of the country behave over the last 18 months, I am just not willing to spend a lot of time indoors with random people! When our shots have had some time to settle in, we’ll see.
We went to get US SIM cards today and both Jeremy and I walked into the store (“masks required”; the other customer wasn’t wearing one) and spent a few moments looking around for the queue number machine before remembering we’re not in Finland anymore.
The small talk in this country! It is so fascinating to me! I had a conversation with an employee through a drive-through window this morning and by the end of it I felt like I had her life sketch! I talked to a guy in a parking lot at a trailhead for 10 whole minutes! People make eye contact and greet us when we pass each other! The pharmacist who gave us our covid shots was practically a family friend by the end of the process!
A brief note on air travel during covid - it was so stressful and even more terrible than international travel normally is. What irked me the most was all the hygiene theater in the airports (“let’s all sanitize our hands and stay far apart from each other”)…right before shoving everyone onto a completely full airplane. I would not have gone through all that for anything less than seeing family that I miss very much!
