Walking in a Small World

Each morning our alarm goes off at 0500. I get up and grab us a couple of cups of freshly brewed coffee and return to bed. We chat, we plan our day, we check the temperature. David gets us another cup around 0540 and by 0600, we’re up and dressed and out of house, walking the perimeter of the golf course by 0615. It’s pretty much the same routine every single morning that we’re home in Las Vegas. It’s how we start our days.

We meet some of the same people repeatedly… sometimes once or twice a week, sometimes daily. We wave, maybe say hi, but for the most part, that’s about it. We name folks we see regularly en route. There’s ‘Soccer Mom’ who has an athletic gait and looks like a middle school PhysEd teacher. There’s Sunrise Lady who sits on a chaise lounge in her back yard facing the golf course, all snuggled up in a comforter watching the sunrise. There’s ‘Perky Lady’ whose jaunty walk always exudes morning energy and an ‘up’ attitude. The head groundskeeper, Steve, stops to say hi on occasion and recently alerted us to the bald eagle who had taken up temporary residence at the top of a utility pole. Juan, another groundskeeper, just adopted an abandoned puppy and he takes him in his cart for his morning rounds.

And then there’s the Chinese ladies whom we’ve seen on most of our morning walks for nearly two years.

Time for our morning language lesson!

Up until a couple of months ago, we would say hello to the Chinese ladies as we passed and that’s it. Recently though, we thought we’d learn ‘good morning’ in Chinese (thank you, Google Translator) and bid them a good morning in their own language. We thought we did pretty well with the pronunciation until we found out that they are Korean and not Chinese at all. Oops! They were, however, quite pleased that we took the time to learn good morning in Chinese, especially after we apologized profusely for attributing them to the wrong nationality.

Since that morning, we have had several conversations with the Korean ladies. Lee and Lisa are their anglicized names. They taught us ‘good morning’ in Korean (phonetically pronounced… ahn nyung ah-ci-OH) as well as ‘thank you’ and ‘see you tomorrow’. They begin waving to us as soon as they spot us and then when what seems to be a prescribed distance away, greet us with a bow and a Korean good morning. We reciprocate the best we can and it pleases us all. We’ve learned not only their names, but where they live (not far from us), how long they’ve been married, how many kids they have and so much more... and we’ve provided them with the same information about us.

We consider this a cultural exchange. It could have happened anywhere in the world and has certainly occurred many times in the past as we’ve traveled. But instead of it being in a foreign country, it happened in our own neighborhood along a path we walk every single day. Special things regularly happen if you go out of your way to look for them. Kind of like the 90 day rule, huh?