Slow it down

I take a lot of interest in how we in America view and approach time, so I'll spend most of this post answering the second question. A female student in my photography class is originally from Columbia (and is now here at Columbia, heh) and I recently spoke to her regarding her home country's relationship with time. She explained how different it is back home, how in the city, everyone is "always running, always too busy, I don't like it." Just from hearing other people discuss city life, it appears that a lot of hispanic nations have a much slower cultural lifestyle. Based on my own travels and studys abroad to Europe I've seen the same thing. I studied in France for a while and noticed something similar. Other than in Paris, the smaller cities I visited had a much slower and relaxed sense of time. It wasn't like they were "wasting time" by moving at a slower pace, but they were seeming absorbing time, they were not concerned with getting things done "now" "instantly" "in a hurry." This was completely new to me.
I grew up spending my time downtown St. Paul, Minneapolis and so forth where things move fast. Even where I lived, in the suburbs, people drove fast, walked fast and spent most their time in express lanes at the supermarket or in drive thru lanes. This, to me and apparently to my Columbian photo-pal is how America lives. We live fast. We dont take any time to just, live, and this whole process doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Take for example the express-lanes and the drive-thru; we use those everyday because we think it'll save us time, we go to fast food restruants so we don't have to "waste" time cooking. We have credit cards that are simply touch and go processes where the cashier isn't even needed any longer to hand over a reciept. We have mircowavable meals that take mere minutes to cook. It leaves us extra time.
But what do we then do with that time? Watch television? Vote for a crappy new popstar? There is no time literally spent, we waste our time by, trying not to waste time. These other countries I visited and spoke about take time slow, walk places, don't build super highways and go to food stores where food is wrapped up with care and relationships are built with their neighbors. I never see the same person twice at Jewel, that I know of. Every person, in every country around the world, is given the same amount of time everyday to do with what ever they please. I think in America, we think, the less amount of time we spend doing other things, like eating...the more time we'll have to make money. We value money over time, which brings in the question of "time as money," the more time we have, the more money we'll have, in theory. That's why we run around the city and complain when the train is delayed, because we won't have enough time to get every minute on our timecard. It get to the point where when we do have...nothing to do. We get bored. We get bored so easily because in America we don't know how to relax, how to have good relationships where in person conversation is valued higher than a text message. Its unfortunate but its how our culture is.