Re-entry Shock

Okay...so I haven't been 100% honest with you all. Despite the amazing car....new apartment....new job....new haircut....and new, well...life, actually....I haven't been happy. Nor have I been unhappy. I've simply been lonely, and deeply critical of everything around me. I began noticing how much I compare American culture to western European culture...and how much I feel that nobody understands me here. I realized that I would be going through a period of time in which I would experience "re-entry shock" (the adjustment of returning to your native country after living abroad), but I didn't know how long it would last, or how it would effect the people around me.

Yesterday, I recieved a book in the mail from my friend in Australia, called "Cross-Cultural Reentry". Immediately, I sat down...made a cup of Rooibos tea (my ultimate reminder of Holland)...and began reading it. It seemed to come at the perfect time. I spent the following 3 hours reading this book...crying at seeing the written form of my exact feelings, and laughing out of relief that SOMEONE finally "understood" me. Given...it's a book....but it's the first "connection" I've had with "other people" since being home. I didn't feel so lonely in my thoughts and feelings anymore. Here are a few examples of what other people have written about their experience, that parallels my own...

"In *Holland*, there was a touch of something different. There is one pub to every fifty hamburger joints in the United States, but that one pub is better than the fifty put together. Something about living there gives a special flavor to things. You make an occasion of even just walking down to the *centrum*. Yet, though we have so much available in America, it just doesn't seem worth the effort to get away from the tv to see it."

"You simply can't describe the feel of the hot wind on your skin in Sicily or the noise and commotion of traffic in Rome. It just can't be reproduced in conversation. When I try to tell people what it was like, it probably sounds like I just want them to envy me. But it's not that. I just want them to know what I felt, who I am."

There was a day last week...that all I wanted to do was sit on the terrace with Harro again, and talk about our day over a glass of wine. What I wouldn't have given to do that! But here....I can't do that. Aside from wine automatically being associated with drunkenness or other negative results....I have no terrace!! And frankly...Americans are in too much of a hurry to sit down and take time for a friendly recollection of the day's events! I laughed as I read the following in the book...

"I anticipated my adjustment to America to be a snap. After all, I was coming home, right? But America hit me like a tidal wave. As soon as I got off the jetliner at JFK airport, I felt as though I were seeing technicolor for the first time. Someone had also turned up the volume and speeded up the film. America was in a hurry. Whoosh!! Everybody talked, walked, ate as if they were in the prize for the f-a-s-t-e-s-t."

Ha! Amen! My feelings exactly! Why can't we meet somewhere for a glass of iced tea, instead of running through the drive-thru and using our new hi-tech hands-free cell-phone device minutes to catch-up on the day? *sigh*

So...all this to say...my daily comfort comes in the form of a book now, instead of human form. I'm still "me"....just much lonelier and uncertain of my own culture than before. Does any of this make sense?