Culture Shock: Part I

As a joyous holiday season comes to a close (here I owe a quick and cheesy thank you to all of my friends and family, you made this a perfect Christmas), I’m looking forward to a New Year’s Eve that yields a few memories than last year’s  hazy debauchery. I’m also packing today, and trying not to panic about leaving (on a side note, I’m also nervously biting off what little is left of my fingernails). Per usual, I draw comfort from graphs, data, and schematics.

Before I left for Slutty...I mean Study Abroad, a Student Orientation Leader showed us a graph that was supposed to explain Culture Shock. She assured us that most people’s emotions would follow a similar trajectory.

Two months in to Study Abroad, a friend, Caitlin and I were making travel arrangements back to Lima after sandboarding on the Southern Coast for a weekend. We were also discussing how, “we must be above culture shock because we’re totally adjusted to Peru” (see Step 1). In a novel, they would call this foreshadowing, because within the hour we were mugged in a church (see Step 2).

After being thrown into Culture Shock, I think we both made it through the following steps and are pretty sure it was the best six months of our lives so far (right, Caitlin?).

The culture shock diagram turned out to be pretty real. And now it’s a comfort , because I know almost certainly, I will feel all nine of the steps more intensely than I even understand right now. So this post will serve as a Part 1 in a nine part series I will write on my journey through culture shock. Actually, let’s be real, it will probably only have four or five parts, because there’s no way I’ll be motivated to keep a blog that long.