Cold Canadians Cast Cool Callous Casual Claspes...

So one of the first lessons I learned as a missionary is, you walk into a room, shake everybodys hand. You leave, same deal, up and down the line. If you don't Albanians get offended. Even if you're in the sacrament hall, sixty people, you gotta plan a route to the door that passes by everyone so you can shake their hands. Of course Albanians kiss each other on the cheek too, 2, 4, 6, times depending on how close they are. Personally it always bugged me. When I came back, I think I've made a little bit of a conscious effort not to do it. Cause once you start you can't stop. "Oh Andrew didn't shake my hand today, and even though I'll see him probably 4 more times this week, and each of the last three times I've seen him he shook my hand, he Must hate me." sigh. Obviously I'm being a little over the top but I've seriously had multiple conversations along those lines. "why don't you shake hands?" "Why are you so cold?" My usual response is we Canadians have ice in our veins so yah, we are cold. -Pause for laughter- Then I apologize and say I'm not used to it. Then something happened last night that kind of changed m,y mind about the whole thing. I was having dinner with three sisters who live together. The older sister was late coming to dinner, showed up at the restaurant, shook my hand, then proceeded to shake hands kiss her sisters. I couldn't believe it, and i said as much. They see each other every day. They live together. And here they are greeting like they haven't seen each other in years. it just made me think that if I went home right now, walked in the door, I think I could manage to get Joel, whom I haven't seen in months, to look up, maybe remove the headphones, and get a perfunctory nod, and a "'Sup." (Love you Joel) Not saying I would do much better. I'm just saying that we, as a people/nation/society, whatever, maybe we got in wrong on this one. Maybe the Continent got it right, and the whole British stiff upper lip thing turned the whole lot of us into a bunch of cold people. I don't know... this post is losing momentum. I think I'm done. It just seriously boggled my mind... Serious. No Seriously. I'm so super Serious... - sigh- It's too early in the morning. I spent more time on the title than I did this entry...