The Swede: Rubbers and Erasers

I'm reading this book, and without knowing where the author is from its pretty safe to say she's British. It is mostly because of the words she use like dressing gown, I actually had to look that word up because I was like why the f*ck is he wearing a gown, because in my world it's robe or bathrobe. Dressing gown it is something old lady wears to bed, but then when I start thinking no that is night gown, hence looking it up.

In Sweden, when taught English in school, we are taught British English, don't ask me why it is just the way it is and has always been. But sometime around the time I was in sixth grader or something they also started to incorporate American English in our school books because there were words that meant one thing in British English and something different in American English, also British people spell words like colour with an ou and Americans without the u and so on and so forth. 

So here we are learning British English in school but every darn program on TV is 90% American shows, movies, talk shows, you name it. So you think I speak funny, well try speak so everyone understands with 10 years of British school English with 5 years American English and see what you get. *winks*

Well, reading this book got me thinking about an incident when I was 15, I had graduated high school and was going to the US for a year as an exchange student. This was the high life for me! I had been planning for this for years. I had been nagging my parents to let me do this, which I eventually got to do. 

To say to travel to the US alone at the age of 15 that it was scary is an understatement and the fact that I got lost at New York LaGuardia airport wasn't exactly what I had in either when I started my journey. But I lived and I remember a very nice and very good looking man I might add and I still remember this, 20 odd years later, helped me find my way, so I lived to see another day.

Finally settled and less jet lagged I started my Junior year in an American High School, and loved it, it was way different than what I ever thought it would be but I loved it still. Now to the tricky point. Here I was 15 years old, a Swede, with stigma of the Swedish Bikini Team to live up to and let's put it this way I was a nerd I didn't live up to it then and I sure as hell don't now. But there you have it. I wanted to fit in, I was 15 standing out was the devil, I was I think a month into my stay and had by some miracle managed to not fall on my face once. Yay, Go me! There I was having art drawing a tree I think and sit in a circle of people and kindly ask some guy sitting way across from me to please pass me the rubber. 

Fairly harmless, I thought so to until everyone started to giggle and I had no freaking idea why. I only understood, nicely showing from the color of my face, that I said something very wrong. The teacher tried to get them to settle and stop acting silly. I felt awkward both because I had no idea why asking for a rubber caused such frantic giggles. Then the same guy who I asked for this damn square thing, whatever you call it, said something of the sort: "I'm sorry but I don't have any rubbers on me but I'll lend you my erasure." 

Then someone kindly whispered that a rubber was a condom and if I had been blushing before then I probably flamed up at that point, and I remember thinking that I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me whole. 

Again I survived that horror, but I never got live that one down, which is OK, now in retrospect it is rather funny.