Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Culture Shock v. Reverse Culture Shock

Culture shock: not knowing how to say or buy cereal in a foreign country.
Reverse culture shock: walking down the monstrous cereal aisle in my home country.

Culture shock: riding in traffic with "flexible" rules without cussing out another car.
Reverse culture shock: being cussed out for slowing to let someone in during rush hour.

Culture shock: trying to commisserate with the broken, lonely, and hurting of the host country.
Reverse culture shock: realizing all the broken, lonely, and hurting in my native country.

Culture shock: comparing everything in Indonesia to "how good it is in America."
Reverse culture shock: comparing everything in America to "how simple it is in Indonesia."

Culture shock: paying for things in denominations of multiples of thousands.
Reverse culture shock: paying multiples of thousands for everything.

Culture shock: avoiding street riots over $1.25 gas in a third-world country.
Reverse culture shock: nearly causing a parking-lot-riot over $3.93 gas in this country.

Culture shock: passing time by playing computer games while waiting for Internet pages to load.
Reverse culture shock: playing computer games as a pasttime.

3 Comments:

At 4:20 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

culture shock: 6 guys taking a shower in a 1 man cubicle

reverse culture shock: missng my brothers the most when i drop my pants..

 
At 9:57 PM , Blogger Katie said...

Wow...those are so true and I'm sure there are tons more...looking forward to and simultaneously dreading that onset of American culture shock...We found out 3 weeks ago that my mom has breast cancer, they already did a masectomy and cleared the lymph nodes in under her arm and got clear margins that were cancer free! PTL! Also when they did body scans it had not spread to anywhere else, however we will be returning to the US for a year most likely to to Chemotherapy to kill off any free floating cells! Well....anyways, just saying that i loved this article and hope ya'll have a great semester in the US and will definately miss seeing ya'll 2 come 2nd semester! God Bless!

ps....loved the article about tim...it was really encouraging and a great reminder!
-Katie Murphy

 
At 4:50 AM , Blogger Bob, Sarah, and Miriam Logsdon said...

Welcome home! Hope you are truly enjoying your time with family. We would LOVE to see you! We'll have to figure out when...
Sarah

 

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home