What Culture Shock has Taught Me

Picture this: I'm twelve years old. I've been in Ireland my whole life - wonderful, quiet, grey Ireland, surrounded by grass and pubs and root vegetable-based cuisine and used to having damp toes in my shoes. Great. And then all of a sudden I'm in the South of France; my parents have bought a house here, and everyone is speaking weird, and I can't find a can of Fanta lemon anywhere, and I think what!?... But then, on the drive to the house, I see the vast fields of sunflowers, and I think: wow.

Now this: I'm twenty-two, just landed in Moscow for my study year abroad, and it's snowing and I'm all alone and miserable. I descend into the metro system for my first day of school, and suddenly the escalator deposits me into...a temple, a temple of brilliant red mosaics and friezes of Lenin and golden hammers and sickles. "Wow!", I whisper.

And then this..! I'm twenty-six, it's my first year in Los Angeles and the city is bigger than I could have imagined. I'm so far from home and feeling intimidated and uncertain...and then my neighbourhood explodes for Fourth of July! The sky lights up with colours, and I think, well...I think wow again, don't I?

I'll be the first to say that culture shock isn't easy. Change is tough, communication is hard, and traditions can be weird - but I think, if you're lucky enough to be travelling by choice, that the shock can be less the car crash kind, and more the kind you get from a deep dive into icy cold water - the kind you feel wonderful after. Many of the most extraordinary moments in my life as a traveller have come in a new place, right when things were hardest, and that's taught me to embrace life as it is: to accept the bumps in the road and trust that the fireworks, mosaics and cans of Fanta lemon will come along in their own time.