Tropical Tales: Further Fiascos and Fantasies

This book is about cultural roadblocks-what happens when we step into someone else s world and are confronted with a totally unexpected set of standards and expectations for which nothing in our own life-experience has prepared us. It explores what can, and sometimes does, happen when people of diverse cultures come together in one time and place, rattling the framework of our usual existence and recasting everything in a completely unexpected light, catapulting us into situations that vary wildly from humorous to dangerous. It is also a book about linguistics, the seminal tool that determines our level of involvement with the "foreign" ethnicity around us. It is mostly, however, a book of short stories about the pragmatics and the challenges of rearranging and reapplying our own cultural expectations, beliefs, and practices to better fit into a new and unfamiliar realm of existence, and, as such, it raises more questions than it answers.