Survival Fact #3: You Are Still Yourself (Only More)

Wow! A whole week since my last post? That's not good, but the circumstances aren't so bad. A new promotion at work is going to give me the time and resources I need to really concentrate on this labor of love. I want to thank everyone who has been so kind. Apparently people really like this blog, so I owe it to them to never fall so far behind again!

That said....

In the last installment, we looked at the symptoms associated with culture shock and where they come from. Tomorrow's post entitled "Chill Methods" will address how to slay this gorgon without risking your inner Perseus. But today, I would like to point out some helpful facts in response to some comments I have been receiving regarding the perceived loss of identity associated with culture shock. It happens. We sometimes feel as though our whole being has melted away and we're replaced with someone else.

I know I felt it, and unfortunately for me, I didn't have the darndest idea as to what was happening to me. Culture shock was just a humorous reference to someone who couldn't adapt to their new surroundings, or so I thought.... In my mind I was doing just fine blaring Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" every morning as my computer woke me up. So what if I didn't like that song before? At that moment, it was the best piece of music I had ever heard.

Yeah, I had it that bad...

Still do in some ways! Right now as I type this, I have a madman's playlist queued up on my Winamp. Patsy Cline followed by Jane's Addiction and rounding it off with some classic Dr. Dre. Before I moved here, I was pretty much an Alternative and Jam Band (Phish, Dave Matthews, etc.) kind of guy. In the year I've been here my (legally acquired) MP3 collection has gone from a few hundred to literally many thousands of songs. Why? Maybe I was (am) over identifying with my own American culture as a weird defense mechanism. But the side effect to that symptom is that I now have a much broader appreciation of music that will probably stay with me for life.

So it's not all so bad. Like the growing pains all of us have to experience when we are young, the secret is turning it around to your benefit. Though in my case it wasn't an excuse to get out of gym class, it was a deeper love of an art I had previously only used as background noise.

So in summary, don't be afraid that you are disappearing. You aren't. Whether you like it or not, you are becoming more cultured and the person you are is becoming the multi-faceted person you were meant to be. Tomorrow, we will talk about good ways of maintaining your tranquility. But for now, those of you who need something to meditate on,

I give you this truism....

Just think about it, you'll get it....

See?

You're Welcome!

Culture Shock 101: The Symptoms

So in the last post on this subject, we addressed the fact that culture shock is a very real problem that effects everyone who travels for long periods of time. You'll find yourself entertaining thoughts that you might not have back home. My good friend Nicole in Kuwait brought up an interesting example in her comment on the last post.

"The shock often results in me wanting to strangle certain types of people."
Nicole B Author of NicoleB Photography (excellent blog)

As tough as she may be, this is an educated and well traveled young woman. She's lived in Asia, Eastern Europe, and now the Middle East. If that feeling can be big for someone like Nicole who has seen more of the world than 99% of us, you can bet that you or I will be susceptible too.

For example, one time I was wanting to meet a friend at the Denny's in La Uruca, about 15 miles from my house. I told the taxista, "yo quiero voy a la Denny's in La Uruca". Simple enough I thought, until the hour long car ride ended at a glitzy country club / resort. I had said "Denny's", but the guy heard "tennis" and took me one one of the most exclusive clubs in the province.

Now had this happened last week, the driver and I would have had a good laugh and I would have called my friends with a funny story about why I missed my Moon Over My Hammy date with them. But no, this happened in the second month I was here and I was still oblivious as to why I was so irrational and paranoid. In that moment, my brain was conjuring up every possible scenario that had led to to some tennis club and not Denny's. First it was suspicion of the driver trying to charge a gringo as much as possible, knowing full well I had said Denny's. Maybe my friends sent me this taxi as a joke, which was quite possible considering my love of pranking them.

So I told the guy to just get me back home and that he was going to have to rethink his price. And because of my excellent grasp of the Spanish language at that time, I'm sure he heard it as "blah, blah, blah, mi apartamento...blah, blah, blah, dinero...blah, blah, blah, godammit!!" He was smart enough of a guy to figure it out, and an hour later I was back at my building. I paid the guy generously (I had calmed down enough to know it wasn't his fault), and made a beeline for my friends' apartment. The scene that followed played out something like this....



I'm a guy who rarely, if ever, loses his cool. This wasn't me at all and I recognized that as soon as my mind stopped to take a breath from all the hostility. And not all forms of culture shock manifest as hostility as Dr. Carmen Guanipa points out in her study.

"The symptoms of cultural shock can appear at different times. Although, one can experience real pain from culture shock; it is also an opportunity for redefining one's life objectives. It is a great opportunity for leaning and acquiring new perspectives. Culture shock can make one develop a better understanding of oneself and stimulate personal creativity.

Symptoms:

• Sadness, loneliness, melancholy
• Preoccupation with health
• Aches, pains, and allergies
• Insomnia, desire to sleep too much or too little
• Changes in temperament, depression, feeling vulnerable, feeling powerless
• Anger, irritability, resentment, unwillingness to interact with others
• Identifying with the old culture or idealizing the old country
• Loss of identity
• Trying too hard to absorb everything in the new culture or country
• Unable to solve simple problems
• Lack of confidence
• Feelings of inadequacy or insecurity
• Developing stereotypes about the new culture
• Developing obsessions such as over-cleanliness
• Longing for family
• Feelings of being lost, overlooked, exploited or abused"

Remember: YOU are in control here, and now that you know why it is you think building a bunker in your room for the end of days seems like a swell idea right now, you can put off those plans and just try to chill.

My next post on this subject will be just that: Chill Methods

I hope this helps!

More Fun(?) With Google Earth

Okay, I have a bit of a strange situation on my hands here, and I decided to postpone my original post idea until tomorrow. Maybe someone can shed some light on this for me. Now I have been making some comedic posts involving our friends at the Google company. None of them really at their expense mind you, but posts where their tools have been utilized in the name of chaos and mischief. I don't THINK they could be involved but...I just don't know. I called up my house on Google earth the other night and when I zoomed in, I saw this weird streak of light going right over my roof.

If you have this program (and you should), you can zoom in on the thing at 9°56'59.40"N Latitude and 84° 7'52.83"W Longitude. If you don't have it, you can see the pictures I have attached here. It almost looks like some kind of electro-light tadpole thingie. I've decided to name it Kermit and ask some people smarter than me what it actually could be.

People supposedly see UFOs in the sky down here quite a bit, and at least once a week someone is on the news who claimed to see one. However they also figured out a way to make moonshine out of sugar cane, so I usually take those news stories with a grain of salt. But this thing is zipping over MY roof! Should I make a quick "implant check" on myself? If it does turn out that I was tagged like a wildebeest by some intergalactic Steve Irwin, I'll be pissed at first but after a while I'd figure out a way to have fun with it.

I'll let you know what the smarter people have to say as I get responses, but until then , tell me what YOU think...

Culture Shock 101: The Problem

Well after a month of existence, it's time for this blog to get to the meat and potatoes of it's mission. Sure we've had some n'yuks at my expense so far, but I'm a pretty easy target for that considering my ridiculous lack of common sense. Just as you learned from Wile E. Coyote that strapping rocket skates to your feet is a dumb idea in an area known for cliffs, you've hopefully seen where I should have done some things differently.

Culture Shock is a very real psychological phenomenon that effects everyone. For those of you with a metaphysical take on things, it may be explained this way. Every country and area in the world has it's own unique "psychic field" for lack of a better term. This field is basically the sum total of all the culturally unique thoughts, outlooks, and ideas of the population. And stepping out of that comfort zone and into one you are not used to literally shocks the psyche and can cause all kinds of weird things to happen to your state of mind.

For example: Those of you raised in the US as a child probably remember the old schoolyard taunt "nya, nya, nya, boo-boo, stick your head in doo-doo!" Where did you learn that? Who taught it to you? The bigger kids right? Well, where did THEY learn it? I don't remember any taunting seminar when I went in to Kindergarten. It's the same anywhere you go in the world. People just do certain things because they are inclined to by merit of being born in that particular culture.

Dr. Carmen Guanipa of the San Diego State University College of Education wrote an excellent piece on this phenomenon that you can read in it's entirety here. And I'd like to quote some of her work for the purposes of this post and others where I address this psychological annoyance and how to deal with it.

Culture Shock
The term, culture shock, was introduced for the first time in 1958 to describe the anxiety produced when a person moves to a completely new environment. This term expresses the lack of direction, the feeling of not knowing what to do or how to do things in a new environment, and not knowing what is appropriate or inappropriate. The feeling of culture shock generally sets in after the first few weeks of coming to a new place.

We can describe culture shock as the physical and emotional discomfort one suffers when coming to live in another country or a place different from the place of origin. Often, the way that we lived before is not accepted as or considered as normal in the new place. Everything is different, for example, not speaking the language, not knowing how to use banking machines, not knowing how to use the telephone and so forth.

The symptoms of cultural shock can appear at different times. Although, one can experience real pain from culture shock; it is also an opportunity for redefining one's life objectives. It is a great opportunity for leaning and acquiring new perspectives. Culture shock can make one develop a better understanding of oneself and stimulate personal creativity.

Well if my new agey description of it confused you, I'm sure Dr. Guanipa's was alot more clear. The next post on this subject will cover the symptoms and their effects on an expat, exchange student, or habitual tourist abroad. Until then, safe journeys and DON'T PANIC!!

Survival Tip #3: CHECK THE HOSE!!

Today is the first day of the rest of your lives, and for me, it's my first Benedryl shot of the year.

You see, last Friday I didn't get to the bank on time before it closed to get my paycheck cashed. And being that it was on the cusp of the New Year holiday, the banks were closed the entire weekend and up to today. I've literally had about $10.00 to live on for almost the last week. No New Years parties or festivities for Dr. Girlfriend and I. Que triste...

But we took it in stride, and believe me when I say that it turned out to be one of the most life affirming and all around positive New Years I have ever had. One of the things that I learned while living in a "poor" country is that money really and truly isn't everything. Poor village children laugh just as fully and have just as much fun as rich ones. And because their playtime is based more on imagination instead of a steady stream of whatever they ask for, who is to say who is better off?

In Costa Rica, $10.00 will feed you for a week. So we opted for food instead of libations and fiestas. One pain in the butt was the fact that we couldn't get a propane tank for the hot water. I don't know about you, but hot showers are something besides thumbs that separate us from the animal world. And cold showers are....well...they just suck.

But the sun down here is shining and it's about 85 degrees this time of year. And since we were already in an "oh well" kind of mood and determined to have as much fun as we could on the limited resources we had, we came up with a cool idea. Our backyard is enormous and the nearest neighbor is quite a distance away. So we decided to strip down to nothing and bathe ourselves with the hose. It was hot outside, the sky was bright and cloudless. Just sounded like a fun and romantic thing to do on a budget. At least this way, if the water was too cold, we could hang out in the sun for a while.

So giggling like hyenas, we got all the stuff from the house like towels, shampoo etc. and headed out back for our "sun shower". Now one of the most distracting things in this world for a man is a Tica with her clothes off. And Dr. Girlfriend is no ordinary Tica, she was actually one of the runners up for Miss Costa Rica two years ago and only lost because of "her attitude". So needless to say, my mind was on other things, and I didn't follow a golden rule about living in the tropics.

ALWAYS CHECK YOUR HOSE BEFORE TURNING THE SUM'BITCH ON YOURSELF!

Why? Because life down here can find a place to thrive in any area, even the common garden hose. So when I pointed the hose at my rear and told her to turn it on and "lemmie have it", it was entirely my fault that the newly displaced family of scorpions (about eight) decided that they instead were going to "lemmie have it".

Now in my life, there have been many times when my emotional state has gone from arousal to horror in the span of an instant. But this was different, and not induced by alcohol and mischievous friends. Imagine a bee sting with a pain factor multiplied by a factor of about 15 and you get the gist of a scorpion sting. My culo was on fire and swelling to Della Reese proportions. And when Dr. Girlfriend's apparent solution to the problem took the form of her shrieking and running back inside, I knew I was on my own. So I danced and slapped like a vaudeville performer on a cocaine and espresso diet. Eventually I got all the little bastards off of me, but I took about five hits of venom in the process and was already feeling woozy. It was actually shock because the poison on these little guys isn't really that bad, but I didn't know it at the time, so I mentally prepared for the worst.

That's when I turned to see a nekkid Dr. Girlfriend running at me with a broom hefted like William Wallace with a claymore. The distraction hit again as I thought about how the addition of nekkid Ticas would have greatly improved the movie Braveheart, and I think the vocalization of that thought manifested itself literally as "boingy, boingy, boingy". The thought of telling her I was fine and critter free just didn't occur to me. She then connected like a lumberjack thinking a pancake breakfast was hidden in a magic tree stump. I responded in English for her to "cut it out", and since her English is lacking, she translated my words as "hit me harder you're almost to the pancakes".

Luckily for me, she actually is a third year med student and a dang good one to boot. One shot of Benadryl later, I was feeling alot better. Sitting on a pillow as I type this to you, though.

This survival guide is intended to help you along your way to self discovery in new lands far from home. Please learn from my stupidity. Check your hose before you turn it on.