Yes, it is real. And you may not realize that it’s happening to you. The feeling is something like driving the wrong way on a one-way highway and wondering why all those cars are driving the wrong way. If you’re visiting Paris for a few days, you don’t have to think about this, but for those of you who plan are spending a year here for school, for work, or to write your great novel, when you get that feeling - that everybody else is doing things the wrong way, then you know you’ve got a bad case of culture shock. It sneaks up on your that way.
But the most important thing to remember when all of sudden you’ve got the blues - for no particular reason, or the ‘cafard’ as we say in French, is that, suddenly the clouds will lift again. I’m not a psychologist, but it seems that one of the best remedies for this ‘culture shock’ is not to be too hard on yourself. Okay, so maybe you might not have succeeded in speaking French without a pronounced twang. You miss being able to tell jokes - or sprawling a la couch potato.
Maybe you’ve forced yourself to avoid speaking English to learn a new language, but remember that you can’t turn your back on who you are and your own roots. Sometimes the best remedy for culture shock is to find the nearest thing to ‘home’. Camp out in one Paris’s English, Irish or Australian pubs or an American style restaurants like Thanksgiving, go to the American Library or stop in at WICE and talk.
As Jim Wills, a veteran traveler, once said, he always recognizes who’s been away from home the longest: they’re the ones who order the hamburgers or the spaghetti. (I didn’t get at first - after my first RTW trip).
So, now that you know about Culture Shock, (look for it to happen about six months into your sejour), recognize it, and carry on.
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