Toucha Toucha Toucha Touch Me
Trip Start
Sep 07, 2008
1
117
148
Trip End
Dec 09, 2008
Athens,
Attica,
Greece
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
We're back in Athens for a regular day of classroom instruction and blogging catch-up after our trip of wonders through the Peloponnese. As I was going through my pictures, I realized I had a lot of pics of the students' unceasing touching. They're always touching each other in public, but NONE of it is between pairs who have been rumored to be romantically linked.
I have some theories about why this has been happening. Two months ago, these students didn't know each other. Now they spend 24 hours a day together in a setting of very intense experiences. They hug, hold, and massage to express and manage their accelerated friendships. Evolutionary psychologists might say that they're reverting to the clinginess of the infancy stage to cope with the stressful situation of studying in a foreign country
A Spencer, Cricket, and Red sandwich
. But I also wonder if it might be about skin hunger, the need of every person to experience nonsexual human touch. Separated from the support structures of their loved ones back home, they provide the haptic affection for each other that they would have otherwise gotten from family and friends. I would be curious to hear the students' own explanations.It's getting downright painful for me to watch this all the time, because I'm a relatively huggy person, but it's not ethical for me to touch the students much. They can initiate a hug for me, but that doesn't happen often. And of course the Bear who holds my hand in parking lots and plays with my hair in movie theatres isn't here, so it just makes me miss him all the more to see the students hanging on each other. When I get back to the States, I need a Bear hug.
