Natural environment and culture are mutual to each other. What you knew corresponds to what your daily life is about. I learned a big lesson in my early 20’s about sun burn.

Many people have hosting families when they study in another country. I never had an official one but I somewhat benefited from similar services during my early years while studying in Canada. I should say that I had a few quasi-hosting families even we did not call it that way; Liz was one of these.

As a long summer weekend approached, we headed to Liz’s beach house at Pugwash. This was a 2 hour drive from our residential town. The road side scenery was magnificent. We had 4 adults and 2 teenagers in one big vehicle. It took a few jokes and some chatting before we quickly arrived. It was my beginning year in Canada and also the first time to live in a private beach house. It was exciting to see sun rise above ocean daily, to experience the various natural paintings on ocean surface by clouds and light beams. The beach side was full of jelly fishes, sea shells, walking birds, cute little crabs; the sand is clean and pretty. There were only a dozen people or so most time walking on the quiet beach.

Liz was my co-worker holding a senior research position. She grew up in Atlantic Canada but studied in Manchester in the 60’s for PhD with a Commonwealth scholarship. So was his husband Dale, who was working engineering PhD under the same competitive scholarship. They bought this cottage house a few years ago when it was at good price but rarely used it, probably a few times a year. Not far from the site was another similar cottage belonging to her brother. Her brother was a dentist, too busy to use the cottage for the last several years. But he had to hire people to take care of the lawn etc. Gradually it became a headache for him.

Three days on the beach was a lot of fun. This area had very clean water but was a bit cold. I enjoyed rowing a surf board along the coastal line for a few miles. I was offered high grade sun lotion many times but I never used it. I did not have the right concept of sun lotion, believing I was tough enough after much longer exposure to sun during my childhood in China. I kept thinking that people there were simply too spoiled to deal with the very basic sun issue. I quietly talked to myself that sun burn was probably a white guy issue.

It was OK for the initial 2 days, on the 3^rd day I started to feel the sun burn on my skin. It was really the following day that I was feeling the miserable fresh pain, everywhere from arms to legs, blisters everywhere. My skin was torched. I had to rest for 2 days at home.

That beach holiday taught me the use of sun lotion. The North America UV is quite different than the one I knew in Northern China. Perhaps the polluted air protected my skin when I was little. Dirty air also has a sunny side.

Readers, please take care of yourself and kids about the American UV. We can reduce skin cancer if we could not completely prevent it.