Where in the world am I (17)

I am in a country where the spreading of Western culture (and especially, I often fear, of all that is least worthwhile in Western culture) in not so much an insidious creeping as a spouting geyser.

Take Christmas. The locals certainly have. There are probably nearly as many Christmas trees on display in and outside shopping malls here as there are in any medium-sized city in Europe or America. In my neighbourhood supermarket (which I am the only foreigner ever to set foot in) all the checkout girls wear little red Santa hats throughout the month of December. That doesn't happen back in England! In fact, last year (it doesn't seem to be quite so crazy this year, thank heavens!) just about everyone in a service industry in the entire city - every waiter and receptionist and shop clerk and garage mechanic (yes, really, even garage mechanics - only the notoriously curmudgeonly taxi drivers refused to join in) was wearing them.

What's more, there's tinny, tacky Christmas music playing everywhere. Not just in the foreigner-oriented bars and restaurants. Everywhere. In my supermarket (again) they have a solitary Christmas compilation CD which they get out at this time every year, and play on a continuous loop for 12 hours a day for 30 days. Cruel and unusual punishment, I call it. This is a compilation of late-50s/early-60s vintage, and includes such wincemakers as "All I want for Christmas are my two front teeth" - which I hadn't heard for years before coming here (and have no wish to hear ever again!).

The locals are certainly embracing the rampant consumerism of the holiday with gusto. It is in danger of eclipsing their traditional winter holiday (a month or so later) as the year's major retailing peak.

Next thing you know, they'll be wanting a holiday as well. Christmas is not yet an official day off here. Although it is becoming so de facto. Most foreigners - even those in fairly lowly jobs where they have precious little power against their whip-cracking employers - generally just refuse to work on this day. And a great many of the locals - well, those who work for foreign companies, at any rate - are at liberty to take the day off, since almost all the foreign executives go 'home' or on holiday for a week or two at the end of the year, and the business world goes into a brief hibernation.

Of course, at this time of year, local friends, colleagues, and students are constantly assailing me with the question, "Are you going home for Christmas?" This prompts the shocking (NO, rather comforting, actually) realisation that.... I am home.

For all its strangeness and craziness and irksomeness.... I feel more at ease and more connected here than I have ever done anywhere else. I won't be leaving any time soon.