Snowball Effect

When I first got here I thought to myself This isn't so bad at all. There are so many things that are exactly the same. But I have to say that I am experience what I thought I had more or less dodged (minus a few incidents with the shower). Though most everything appeared the same on the surface, there are little differences that were at first negligible and are now obvious. You can hear more cicadas than would be normal in Georgia. No one owns a dog bigger than a chihuahua. The bricks on the sidewalk are laid at an awkward angle. There's Korean on the manhole covers. The seat backs in the desks at school feel slightly off. Von Dutch is wildly popular. The sweet potatoes are the color of regular potatoes. It's rude not to wash your face before eating breakfast. Most places, even fast food, street vendors, and ice cream parlors, don't want you to pay until after you've eaten. There is no half second lag between when the light turns red and the next light turns green. Some TV shows end on the 15th minute of the hour. People still wear white gloves when they wear tuxedos. Laundry is done in several frequent, small loads.

These sundry little differences have created a what we in the business call a snowball effect, or butterfly effect for the Ashton Kutcher fans out there. All in all I have to admit that I have a case of culture shock.

I always knew that the culture was strange and different, but I never felt anything like a "shock" per se. I felt that ever all I had handled it very well. It now becomes clear that the slight differences in every last aspect of life make for a really big difference to my mind, and some days I just feel sick of it. I was on the subway one day and felt so sick of hearing Korean being spoken that I just got off at the next stop and waited for the next train. I find that, while I go to many restaurants and stores in the city, my favorites are styled in a western kind of way. It's still something of a relief just to walk in an area with no buildings, no writing, no Koreans.

I now know that I hadn't felt that I was culture shocked because I was looking in all the wrong places for it. I expected something like feeling weak at the knees and nauseous, a trapped, claustrophobic sensation that would just overwhelm me. In fact culture shock is a sneaking sensation that everything is just a little bit wrong, as though an alien abducted you and tried to build you a habitat like your own, but goofed all the subtle details. Culture shock is the nagging in your brain that nothing is quite right here, and that you should find something immediately that validates the reality of the world, proof that your not in a glass container.