Culture Shock I
I think if there is any topic that deserves to be mentioned here, it’s the famous culture shock. I had my first encounter with this condition when I bought a travel guide for my trip to Pakistan. The book series of the same name explained all the little obstacles on the way to eternal happiness (or whatever you’re up to). I thought of it more as a creative title than any real problem you can encounter. A admittedly kind of naïve thought though.
What makes the culture shock so back stabbing is the time it takes. All four phases can last together about a year or more. So this affects hardly any of the tourists spending their days in a hermetically closed resort hotel where everything from the food to the staff is imported. That’s more a thing for long travelers or those who decided to stay in another place (doesn’t even have to be another country) willingly or not for some months or years.
In Pakistan however I had no real time to get past phase one – the Honeymoon Phase. Everything seems interesting, new, exciting and there is nothing you don’t want to try out. Even the fried chicken burger on the side of the road although everybody warned me of the street vendors. Well, I paid my debt by three days vomiting and the most fucked up intestinal problem I ever had. The thing to learn would be that spoiled European gut bacteria is not very compatible with the life forms found in not boiled water on certain places on this planet, but that’s another story.
So, after the Honeymoon Phase, where one seems to wear pink glasses and tumbles on LSD through any fucked up slum, comes the big hangover. The Withdrawal Phase. You suddenly get to see how things are done – and that’s definitely different to the things you are used. This can be anything, from how bus schedules are working, to the arrangement of cornflakes and toilet paper on the supermarket shelves. Driving habits (usually described by combinations of “insane” and “suicidal”), culinary preferences (too spicy, too veggy, too meaty, too bwah), climate (green season is an euphemism for 8 month of rain by the way) or arbitrary controls in a blatant unorganized environment. Like when a stubborn officer at the airport took away my passport because I didn’t have a return ticket. Or when your speeding ticket comes with a bribe-me-manual (you know sir, its 20 dollar, but if you… let’s say drop this 10 dollar bill, I haven’t seen anything… blink blink).
It’s a nasty feeling. You begin to make comments about the country and the persons, forgetting that’s you in the end who is the guest here. You feel anxious. Lock the doors and don’t let anybody in and of course would never leave. Who knows what dragons may be waiting out there? Corrupt cops, insane drivers, falsely sorted cornflakes and toilet paper vegetating in their supermarket racks. No way José. That’s a tough time for everybody who is with you or around you. Don’t forget what’s in your way when you’re out on a fuck-this-country-rampage again.
A very good friend of mine had this kind of shock after just 5 days. He was planning some nice beach time coming from the cold and quite excited to see some nice beaches. When it started raining and they stole his bag with the camera the first cracks in the surface appeared. Then he got the dengue fever but, that’s another story. He ended up hating everybody (especially me I think because I was the reason for the visit… so this would make me the master of his doom). The fact, that he spent his time in a poorly equipped Panamanian hospital in Bocas del Toro instead of taking this diving course didn’t really help at all.
But for all the others, that don’t leave like my friend four weeks later (I’m sure he burnt all maps showing Central America) there is a light at the end of the tunnel, as we are going to see in next phases.
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 04:42 and is filed under such is life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
