Culture Shock

by Melissa

Everyone warns students about culture shock when they leave their home country and are traveling abroad. You will miss home. You will miss the food. You will miss your normal lifestyle. Other than missing my friends and family back home, culture shock was just a definition that not too many people agreed with. Don’t get me wrong, learning to get around, learning the new traditions and how real italians lived, trying to speak italian was all a struggle, but extremely enjoyable. After 4 months of running around a foreign country and jet setting regularly on the weekends to a new culture and lifestyle, you get pretty use to differences.

The problem now is getting use to your old lifestyle when you come back home. You think it would be easy, jumping right back into how you always lived and always spent your days. Then you realize the excitement of change and of new experiences and miss it like a fat kid on a diet misses chocolate cake. I have realized how unadventurous my back at home life has become, with the routine of work and class. Although traveling to a different country every weekend or visiting the most spectacular places is out of the question, I am determined to make my days as adventurous as possible. I have decided to try new things, see new places and explore what I have around me.

Now, I will leave you with some reverse culture shock, so you can see what I am missing from Europe: