Thoughts
Life is strange for me at the moment, I am back in the United Kingdom, but right now for me it is strange. Of course I except that this is all very normal since I have been in China for such a long time and my life there is normal. China is my home and though I am British and come from here, this is now the foreign place for me.
It takes about 6 months for someone to adjust to a different culture and about the same for someone to go through reverse culture shock. Reverse culture shock is when someone has to go back into a culture that they had left. This is where I am now, going through reverse culture shock, a bit of pain really as I will go back to China in May, just enough time to readjust before I have to readjust yet again. For me the big thing I struggle with is the amount of choices people have! Just looking at the selection of coffee in a typical supermarket can be pretty overwhelming. Or of course when friends and families forget that you have been away for a few years and assume that you are on the same page as them, you rarely are and that can be disorientating.
Of course I am now in the position of having to remember what is acceptable here and follow British cultural rules. That can be hard, Brits like to queue up for the most part and because of the privacy bubble that people here have there are always these large gaps between people. Me I have to fight the temptation to jump to the front of any queue, which is okay to do in China most of the time! That and I have to remember that people have a privacy bubble, which is much larger than the one I am now used to. My privacy bubble is almost nil, which means that if I am not thinking I may well end up chasing people around rooms as I keep invading their space and they keep backing off. If you are not sure what I am talking about try talking to someone and keep getting closer to them, they will start to back off as soon as they feel uncomfortable, this space varies from culture to culture. To my mind I am not because I have gotten used to something different! I have to ensure as well that I don’t get used to the space that Brits like, because when I get back to China I will be the one backing off from people and that of course sends the wrong message to people as well!
I am also trying to catch up on trends, music, TV films, changes in Language, mainly because as I go back to China I need to know what my own culture is like so that as I teach on culture or answer questions about culture what I am talking about is up to date.
Still it is good to be back in the UK because I do get to see family and friends and that is a good thing. I get to see films in English in the Cinema, I can in China, though where I am they do tend to be in Chinese and well for some films that is a pain in the neck. I get to eat food that I can’t eat in China (I avoid Chinese in the UK as it is just too different to what I am used to). I get to see snowdrops, bluebells daffodils and other things that I do not get to see. All of these are positives and I am glad to be able to experience them.