Adolescents

(Written Oct 2 while watching, you guessed it, adolescents in Santa Teresa di Gallura)

Andrew and I have now observed adolescents together in 8 countries (I actually had a homework assignment in grad school that required observing adolescents in their natural environment, Andrew came a long to help. This was in LA, which I guess is kind of its own country. I was counting: USA, France, Czech Republic, Japan, Norway, Netherlands, Spain, Italy)

Eight seems like a big enough sample to make a couple generalizations:

• Most adolescent boys need a haircut
• Adolescent girls work much harder on their appearance then adolescent boys
• Adolescent boys in groups mostly stand around punching each other

One more …I didn’t pay as much attention to this last one in every country, but so far in Italy and everywhere we looked in Japan adolescent boys are MUCH MUCH taller then people their grandparent’s age. We just watched this young man talking to someone is grandma’s age (maybe even a big older) and tower over her. I thought wow, he really is taller then her, guess there is some benefit to not being a kid during a war. Then Andrew whispered, “Kate look, she is standing on the curb.” So he towered over her even when she had 7 inches of help.