Friday, July 11, 2008

Back in America (or 'Re-entry Stress 101')

Well, as you can probably tell from the title of this post, I'm back in America. After three weeks in Asia, I'm back at where I started. At least physically.
So, there's this thing called re-entry stress (or reverse culture shock). I'm pretty sure I have it. My time thus far in America has almost been like a dream. We landed at the Seattle airport around 7:30 last night. It took us almost two hours to get our luggage, go through customs, get our luggage again, and drive home. Because my stomach is still on India/Taiwan time, I heated up a frozen pizza at 10:30. As I was waiting for my pizza to be done, I noticed only one thing. The silence in my apartment was deafening. I sat in my room looking around and noticing how quiet it was. Asia is not quiet. Even at night there is noise. In India, it was the AC running and the car horns blaring. In Taiwan, it was general traffic noises. My apartment in Seattle is just quiet.
This morning I woke up at 5am. I could try to blame it on my phone beeping every 10 minutes to tell me that I had a text message, but it would only be a bad excuse. I was wide awake. I tried going back to sleep for over an hour, but it didn't work. So I got up and got ready for the day. Because my fridge was completely empty, I ate a Clif bar and went to the grocery at 8am. If you want to avoid people and get fresh produce, grocery shopping at 8am is the way to go.
Shopping for food threw me into a state of shock. There were so many choices and the prices were so high. At one point I was just staring at something on the produce aisle. The nice Safeway guy asked me if I needed help with anything. I wanted to say "Yes, did you know that I could probably feed a small Asian army with the money that I'm about to pay for my groceries." But all I said was "No, thank you" and pushed my shopping cart along to get some overpriced orange juice.
After unloading my food at home, I went to get some gas. My transmission was acting funny before I left so I thought I would take the car to the transmission guy so he could read the code. After I got gas, I turned on my car and looked for the check engine light. It had gone off thus making my trip to the car guy totally pointless. By the time I returned home disappointed that my car was acting like it was functioning right, it was 9:45. I decided to take a short nap because I was starting to get a little tired. I set my alarm for 11am. I woke up at 6:30pm. So much for getting stuff done today and fighting the jet lag.
Right now, I'm just trying to process what I experienced in India while reacquainting myself with my own city. This is going to be one weird week.

3 comments:

Michael said...

I'm glad you made it back safe :)

Rach said...

I'm glad you're back!! Too bad for the home culture shock...especially the groceries!

Anonymous said...

If you miss the noise you should move upstairs! Cars and loud people 24/7 :)