Culture (shock).

Sometime in the spring of my sophomore year there was a meeting for all the students who were going to be studying abroad the next year. During the meeting, the head of the study abroad program gave us a little talk on the four stages of culture shock: the initial euphoria of being in a foreign country where everything is new and different; the culture shock itself, where you kind of just want to get back to the old and familiar; the process of gradual adjustment; and finally, assimilation and bi-culturalism.

I kept these stages in mind during my junior year, but I never really felt as though I was experiencing them. I had good days and bad days, but mostly I was just really happy to be in Europe. When I got back to the U.S. in May of 2005 I had a really nasty case of reverse culture shock, but that's a different story.

Now, I think, I'm sort of getting a more realistic idea of life abroad, culture shock included. I realized even during my junior year that, because I was in a program with other Americans where classes were taught in English, I wasn't really getting as immersed into another culture as people who studied at foreign universities or lived with host families and who had to deal with living in a foreign language all the time. I learned a little Greek and Italian, but used it mostly for ordering coffee or saying "Excuse me" if I bumped into someone on the street. It was if I were living in a foreign country, but only within an American bubble that sort of kept me from having to worry too much about dealing with Greeks and Italians.

Well, this time there ain't no bubble. I have to work with Germans, live with Germans, and speak German on a regular basis. And I think that if culture shock had a song, it would be called - in the line of "I'm in the Mood for Love" - I'm Not in the Mood to Deal. As in, I don't really want to ask for a coffee from the cafe and have to deal with the barista looking suprised at my accent. I don't really want to deal with the eighth graders I have for a period tomorrow who all talk when I'm trying to give them instructions and then clam up when it's actually time to speak English. I don't want to talk to my roommates, who are very nice but who have lived together for years, and find that I've done something else that disrupts their normal way of doing things, like arranging the mugs the wrong way in the dishwasher.

I don't want to go home, exactly. I sort of just want to get a book, make myself a pot of tea, wrap myself in a blanket, and just veg out for a few hours.

Which, after I get some work done on grad school applications and make sure I have things in order for tomorrow's lessons, is exactly what I might do.