One of the weirdest parts of it all is the REVERSE side of culture shock, when you come back to what is in fact your home country, culture and former reality. Obviously the depths of how it is felt depends on the length of time spent outside of it, and I can't really imagine what it would be like returning several years after being away; but I can tell you about what it was like after being gone for 15 months.
-I used to pride myself on my "thick skinned" abilities to stay warm in the midst of a cold Colorado winter, but 60 seconds into standing outside in Los Angeles, California, and I was ready for some tropical weather again. (And not to sound like a whiner, but I really don't enjoy the heat over here most days!)
-What happened to cash? I'm not really condemning credit and debit cards, but after living in an all-cash economy, and then trying to buy normal things with greenbacks only to have the cashier stare at me like I was from the dark ages wasn't really something I expected. Seriously, one clerk seemed to expect to encounter spiders when they opened the register till!
-Everything is so CLEAN! It didn't take my mom 30 seconds walking down the "sidewalks" of Thailand to realize she was going to need to be concious of her foot placement. But the States actually take care that there aren't dead/sick/lazy dogs laying across the concrete, and seemed to have realized that spools of wires hanging down from streetlights and power cables might not be such a great thing to put in a pedestrian's way.
-There's space to breath. Walking around everywhere you'd either have to be drunk or just horrible at walking to actually bump into sombody with all the space and lack of people in your immediate proximity. Coming from living in a city that has 1,000 people/square mile can feel a little tight, especially when they're all trying to avoid said dogs and power lines on a 3 foot wide walkway.
-And the biggest shock of all was the EASE of talking with ANYBODY. There was no need to look up specific words in advance or awkward mumbling searching for the right tone just so you could get a table by the window. It took living with basic conversation skills to truly appreciate the awesome capability to just chat with the barista, or stranger in line.
Now after being in the US for 6 weeks, its good and bad to be back in the hot, sticky, cash-wielding, Thai-speaking crowds of SE Asia. But oddly enough there were no shocks to come back to; it was all the same as I had left it, and I took that to mean that I must be home.
