Friday, November 6, 2009

Bowing


One thing that I have not gotten used to yet is the bowing. Frankly it makes me feel uncomfortable.

I would say on average I only bow my head once a day and I usually do it with a slight smirk. I know it's the culture but I want to yell at the senior citizen security man at the university not to bow to me every morning when I ask him for the key to the teacher's room. In fact, today I even told my bow-crazy-only-female student to stop bowing to me...and of course she said "okay" as she bowed.

To me the weirdest thing about the bowing though is when people do it on the phone. Recently I had to go to the office for my apartment complex and sat a guy's desk for fifteen minutes. The guy made a couple of phone calls while I was waiting and literally bowed about 30 times in five minutes on the phone. Yes, he was bowing while talking on the phone!