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Damaged
Tufted Titmouse
Tufted Titmouse

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Joined: 9 Nov 2008
Age: 51
Gender: Male
Posts: 35

08 Dec 2008, 12:20 pm

Have any of you experienced living in a culture much different from your own indigenous one? If yes, what was your experience? My first few years in my current far away from home location seemed to offer me hope that I might finally fit in somewhere. It seemed that as I was new here I would be able to delibrately learn the culture of my host country and in the process have my blunders excused as an outsider. I suppose on an intellectual level this might make sense, I was apparently incapable of adapting to many of the norms of social interaction in my home country so perhaps as an adult I could set out to learn the ways of a new land with a clean slate. However, in the more recent years of expatriotism I have begun to miss the familiarity of my home country, better understanding its ways and my mistakes there. I also realize that I missing many of the subtleties of my host culture making it apparent that I will always be an outsider here. The natives are also beginning to irk me... Any one have a similar experience?



lelia
Veteran
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Joined: 11 Apr 2007
Age: 71
Gender: Female
Posts: 2,897
Location: Vancouver not BC, Washington not DC

08 Dec 2008, 12:41 pm

Not me, but millions of people have experienced nearly the same. Your culture shock is complicated by Asperger's. For NTs, the usual cure is to go home for a brief time. For my Korean sister-in-law who got more and more disenchanted with the USA, a half year back in Korea gave her the time to get over the exhaustion of trying to fit in the USA and to see that both countries had good and bad.
I don't know enough about your situation to make more of a comment. I know that one reason I like visiting Rwanda so much is because I can totally be myself and they have no idea whether or not I'm being weird or if I'm being American. We can just enjoy each other without expectations.
We were in the military, and whenever you move overseas in the military, you are required to take a class in culture shock. There must be online materials about it.
When I lived in Japan, I would go to the local market and bring home interesting looking maybe vegetables and other foods, cook them, and eat the result which often ended up nasty. I never knew if it was supposed to be nasty or if I had cooked it wrong.