You can only truly appreciate the weirdness of 'reverse culture shock' (hereafter referred to as RCS) when you go through it. For me, this is possibly my 4th time of having the 'temporary disease' having already moved back here from France (twice), Italy and now South Africa.
For some reason one of my major triggers is Tesco. Just walking into my (formerly) local tesco in Warwick on Saturday afternoon gave me a shock. RCS is weird because it's not uniform, you just react strangely to things or feel weird. For me, wearing my snuggly furry jacket, not real, which reminded me of the Zulu traditional skins (which are real fur), wandering into Tesco to buy some food for dinner became suddenly unpleasant when I realised that in the 18 months when my life was being transformed, NOTHING HAD CHANGED AT ALL in Tesco. I tested it and everything was indeed in exactly the same place... It shouldn't depress me but it did.
See, I told you RCS was weird. What do I care about shelving and food rotation?
But it's not really that, that is the trigger for then a whole process of thinking about the fact that Tesco hasn't changed and what else hasn't changed in life around me? And then my brain started aching and I had to sit down for a while.
A long while, in fact most of Sunday.
But I feel better now.
The main thing is to remember that the feelings are usually irrational, temporary and will pass. It takes half as long to get over being in a country so I'm on track for being 'normal' in about October time.
In the meantime, expect weirdness...
