I have a German friend who has lived in London for the last ten years. On a recent visit back home, she was crossing the road when someone shouted across to her ‘Citizen! You are not crossing the road at the designated place!’.
It was a sharp reminder for her of why she left Germany in the first place.
I was surprised to experience some culture shock while traveling with cwPartner in Ontario (we’d been living in the Chicago area for quite a while). This was after same-sex marriage had been legal in Canada for a few years.
It really was strange to not have to explain ourselves to people, to not have to remind vendors that my employers’ contract with their company includes same-sex couples, etc. I hadn’t realized how often that happens at home.
I did experience both culture shock and reverse culture shock, but it wasn’t so bad.
When I was going into middle school, my mom’s job brought us to Singapore for a two-year stint. I spent the first year in Singapore but was sent to Taiwan to stay with relatives for the remaining year, when my mom got too busy to look after me. When I got to Singapore, I found it was a blend of east and west. Everyone spoke English. No language problems there. A large percentage of people were of Chinese ethnicity, so many people looked like me and spoke Mandarin as well. The place reminded me of Orange County, in that it was safe and clean to the point of almost being sterile. So it really wasn’t all that different from what I was used to.
When I left Singapore, I thought it would be cake adapting to Taiwan, because I had already been there many times before. Some things made it particularly easy. For example, I went to an American school, so there were hundreds of other Taiwanese Americans or Chinese Americans who were there because of their parents’ work. Just like me. We all had our bouts of cultural vs nationalistic identity crisis, but we knew we were all going through the same thing. I felt right at home there. But beyond school, I definitely had many things to get used to.
When I came back to the US, it took me a long time to stop comparing everything to Singapore or Taiwan. For months, I’d talk nonstop about those places. I’m sure my friends were sick of hearing about it.
For me, there the culture shock of moving abroad was pretty mild. Sure, some things are different, but you expect them to be different. When we returned, the country (USA) was in turmoil from the recent election and Supreme Court decision, then a few months later some idiots flew some planes into the World Trade towers. People were making conversational references to a show I’d never heard of, much less seen (Survivor), that I just didn’t get. Prices for eating out lunch, although much less than Switzerland or Germany (and much higher than Thailand), seemed to have almost doubled. Add in that my company was also going through economic turmoil as an aftershock to the Dot Com bubble bursting. I was really a mess. Caused problems in our marriage and eventually I got frustrated and left my employer.
I’ve made several trips, of many months duration, to SE Asia, India, S America, etc. I found the reentry culture shock most disconcerting the first time. After that, I was expecting it a little more, so it wasn’t much more than amusing.
I think when you’re headed away to a new and exotic culture, you’re expecting everything to be exciting and different. And, of course, it is. By the time you’re returning, you’re sort of expecting to fall into the warm and familiar embrace of your own culture. You’re not really expecting for things to strike you as odd, but they do. Like how fat people are in the west, or how little they use their car horns, waste etc. They’re little things, but suddenly, they stand out in a way they just never did before.
That first trip, we’d been gone about 8 months and not seen any tv. We returned to a friend’s apt in the city, staying over night before traveling on to our city of residence. She’d gone off to work, we were moving slow from the jet lag. Once rested and stirring we turned on the tv and the morning talk shows were on. We were entranced. Each new channel, we’d switch to, would make our jaws drop. We could hardly pull ourselves away from it, for a time.
It’s also kind of amusing when miss a giant hype bomb of some sort. For us it was the mania surrounding the first Batman movie. We’d been away and missed all of the build up, the opening and raving reviews. We just returned and scratched our heads that this side of the globe was totally Batman crazy. It’s interesting in that it causes you to reflect on exactly how manipulated you’ve been in the past, by the same sort of marketing, and remained somewhat unaware.
I couldn’t get over how luxurious everything was when I got back to the States after being in South America. I still remember my first shower after I got back - it felt so decadent to be in there more than two minutes (which is how long it would take for the hot water to run out where I had been). And it was heaven to take a shower without having to first light the hot water heater. Then when I got out and stepped onto the fuzzy bathmat, it was the softest thing I’d ever felt in my life.
Also, both in South America and in India, you don’t really find people with so many lights on as you do here. When I got back from South America, I was obsessively turning lights off in every room of my mom’s house. It was like the entire place was ablaze with unnecessary, decadent electricity.
It wasn’t like it, it WAS ablaze with unnecessary, decadent electricity. Just because we’re used to that level of waste doesn’t meant it isn’t waste.
I do this, too. Americans are CRAZY wasteful with electricity. I can’t believe it. Water, too.
But I don’t think that’s because I’ve spent time as an expat, I think it’s because I grew up in California (which had an electricity crisis a few years ago, and water is a constant worry) and live in the Midwest (which never experienced rolling blackouts and where water is abundant).
Mine was Borat. I had pretty decent internet access in Uruguay, and checked my e-mail daily. I use Yahoo, which often has little blurbs about movies and culture on the front page, so I knew that Borat was a movie with the Ali G guy, but that was it. When I got home and all anyone could talk about was Borat, I didn’t get it. Still don’t, but that’s another story.
I had to get used to people not having their windows open. In Uruguay, the only time we ever had the windows closed were the last weeks of August, when it was pretty damn cold. As soon as the temperature was over 60, the windows were open and the air was in! Also had to get used to not walking everywhere all the time.
Oh, I totally agree. I still wander through the house, especially when my mom visits, turning lights out.
Life in the US has changed SOOO much in the last 10 years! Was your cell phone glued to your body 10 years ago? Were you on the internet 20 hours a day? Texting people? Tweeting? Facebook? Also, 9/11 changed the consciousness of the country a lot. Ten years ago- “Desert Storm” and now…? Look how long we’ve been over there. It’s a different place from the place she left 10 years ago.
I spent a month in a very poor, rural area of Romania in 1994. I worked with orphans and in a hospital, and was amazed at the simple purity of the people. I’m not saying there weren’t assholes among them, but the perspectives were so much less spoiled–literally. I came home to the trivial-to-me OJ Simpson trial on every freakin’ TV channel save for one–and it showed horrendous overindulged brats on talk shows seemingly all day long. The insular, self-absorbed nature of both the news focus (I was infuriated that OJ was that much of a news story) and the people on the talk shows made me really hate the American media. It’s still not my favorite.
I was only there for a month–I can’t imagine what the reverse culture shock of someone who’d been gone for years would be like. I do think the whole OJ thing amplified my experience with it.
Uruguay sounds great. I want to spend more time in South America.
When we got back (to the U.S.) from a year in Japan the thing I most noticed was how wide the streets are and how spread out the towns are. We got nothin’ but space here, and lots of it. We looked at Pullman WA and it seemed like the Twilight Zone after dense, busy Japan. Then we went to Seattle and it seemed more familiar, very urban and close fitted and busy, so we settled there.
I just thought of another thing - people drive so freaking fast here. In India and many places in South America, dying in a car accident is relatively rare because traffic is often so congested that you just can’t drive fast enough to cause a fatal accident (with another car - pedestrians are a different story, of course). The most that usually happens is a fender bender. But here, people fly along the highways at upwards of 100 miles an hour, so your chances of dying or at least getting severely injured if you hit another car are much, much greater than other places. When my in-laws were visiting from India, they found highway driving and even driving on some of the main roads extremely unsettling.
I spent four months in Hungary during the fall of 2001. When I got back to the US, the whole place seemed different after 9/11, and not in a way I would be proud of. Everyone seemed more scared and unnecessarily patriotic. It was really unsettling. It was an actual Rip Van Winkle experience.
I’m sure my friends were tired of hearing me compare everything in the US to how it is in Eastern Europe. Also, English was no longer a secret code language that only me and my closest friends knew.
9/11 happened two weeks after I moved to Spain, and I didn’t get back to the U.S. until a year later. At that time, a sort of patriotism backlash was happening. People were starting to criticize the excess display of American flags. It was weird, coming to a place where a major event had happened, and then a large cultural shift because of that event, and then a backlash against that cultural shift, and I had missed the whole thing.
Culture shock isn’t really there if you’re setting off on an adventure. I had very little culture shock when I went to Taiwan for a year at the age of 21 and the first time outside of the Western US. I had no culture shock when I went to Tibet in 1985, even though that was about like travelling back in time hundreds of years.
IMHO you don’t get reverse culture shock after being abroad for a month or two. You probably notice a lot of things you didn’t before and maybe have a new frame of reference. However, your life and environment didn’t change significantly. You can pretty much plug and play back to your old life. I had some reverse culture shock when I returned to the US after a year in Taiwan. But I went right back into my old university life. There wasn’t a significant change in the broader environment or in my personal life.
I may revisit this thread in a few months. You see, the last time I lived in the US was 1990. Since 1982 I’ve lived 25 years in Asia. My wife and kids have never lived in the US. None of us have lived in Seattle. We are moving “home” in mid-June. I expect some reverse culture shock. 
Where are you driving that people regularly go 100 miles per hour?
100 miles was an exaggeration, but 80-90 miles is not uncommon on highways in St. Louis. I usually don’t go more than 5 or so miles above the speed limit, which puts me at 65-70, which is still pretty fast if you’re only used to going 30-40 tops.
I’d never seen traffic like the traffic in India. Even in Santiago it wasn’t that bad. In Bombay you’d get maybe a few yards at a time before you’d have to stop. It didn’t seem to matter what time of day it was or what day of the week. It was crazy. U.S. roads seemed empty in comparison.