Reverse Culture Shock

[Hannah Smith]

I wrote my name on all of the papers, my signature scrawled on every line required. I was signed up for six weeks of deep brain stimulation with a continuous direct current of shock therapy. My mind had been like a dry sponge inside my skull, thirsting for culture. I had craved ethnicity, diversity and vitality in my humdrum life. After my treatment, I had expected to be healed, and so I willingly submitted myself to a month and a half of Costa Rican culture shock therapy. But I failed to read the fine print. I was unaware of the side effects. After 42 days of intensive, Central American, brain-saturating voltage, I dangerously and recklessly returned to the United States. Never will the effects of reverse culture shock be erased from memory. Let my experience serve as an admonition to naïve, knowledge-seeking, outward-bound travelers.
I arrived two hours early to check in for a red-eye flight out of the San Jose airport with a brain that was groggy with sleep, but otherwise perfectly saturated with all of the pleasantries of Costa Rican life. Following the herd of foot-shuffling, lethargic zombies, I paid the 26 US dollar exit tax and handed my passport over the counter when prompted. Unpretentiously, I checked my bags and proceeded through security. Had my senses been more acute, I would have never passed through the one-way security metal detectors. But I went, following the crowd.
I handed my boarding pass to the stewardess as if selling my soul back to the United States. Like an arrival at Auschwitz, my feet dragged on; ignorantly, I had succumbed to the sorting process. Walking down the ramp to the plane the metal walls made sure that the only way was forward. I had been tempted into a one-way portal to culture shock withdrawals and reverse culture shock therapy.
I stuck to my seat. 17C. I did not need a tattoo on my wrist: it had been forever engraved in my memory. A week ago I had been living in a house with cement floors and a tin roof that did not completely do their duty against the rain and cold air, and now I was seated in an airplane being instructed to buckle my seatbelt as air conditioners shoot fake wind at my face. When the stewardess came by with a heavy cart, I requested a ginger ale. I had become accustomed to water from the river that carried the smell of rainforest when I stuck my nose in the cup to take a sip. One swig of the ginger ale found itself spattered all over the back of the seat ahead of me. Even the mere particles remaining in my mouth retained an overwhelming taste of pure syrup. I was already in an unstable condition.
After arriving, a 2- hour layaway in the Houston airport sent me spiraling into a downward whirlwind of insanity. A hunger pang turned my thoughts to food. There was no rice or beans in the terminal. I searched for leftover tortilla soup or even some arroz con leche. There was none. A Cinnabon Restaurant loomed on the horizon. Its menu boasted two things that seemed vaguely familiar: orange juice and coffee. When the man asked me if I wanted my coffee with sugar or cream, my answer was milk straight from the cow. The countenance of response left on his face assured me that I did not belong here. Had I accidently responded in Spanish? No, I was sure that it was English. Milk straight from the cow. I had become an alien in my own country.
I left the restaurant and could feel the look of the man on my back. I sought refuge in the women’s bathroom. My trembling hands splashed water on my face. Warm water. Over a month of cold showers and face-splashes, the mere thought of warm water burnt my hands. I jumped back. My face and fingertips dripped. The attention of my eyes drifted towards a basket of paper towels, waiting to comfort my fingers. I fled, as fast as I could, wiping my face on my sleeve and my hands on my thighs. My escape efforts led me into a mass of people larger than the feria de los granjeros, without the fresh mangos, homemade cheese, and un-refrigerated eggs. The sound of plastic forks on Styrofoam plates emanated off of the walls. Every way I turned, a different screen blasted a television looping of CNN into my face. Gossip on Sarah Palin oozed out of the news reporter’s lips. Obese people stood in fast food lines. Men in suits screamed into nearly invisible earpieces and typed furiously into laptop computers. A teenage girl talked on her cell phone with one ear and listened to an IPod plugged in to the other ear. The sponge that was my brain needed to be rung out, relieved of the excess culture bombarding my brain. Hoards of people circumnavigated me. The culture started flowing out of my ears. College T-shirts, Starbucks coffee cups, little dogs in little bags, carts driven my airport staff, newspaper stands glaring at me through beautiful eyes on magazine covers, and stores filled with people shopping because they are bored of waiting.
Reverse culture shock. It does not come in the gentle, massaging currents that preliminary culture shock does. There is no pretty packaging. It is a blunt, direct blow, like a hit upside the head with a baseball bat. But it is as exact a getting struck by a bolt of lightning. It is an inversion of what you know, like a Fun House of Mirrors, seeing what had previously been familiar through a distorted lens. After the tremors of reverse culture shock, the whole world can no longer be viewed through an agreeable pinhole. The spectrum of culture and learning has been cracked open to reveal a new viewpoint to everything that you know and everything that you don’t know.