Return to Australia and "Reverse Culture Shock"?

The flight back to Australia was fairly standard except the in-flight entertainment had a video-on-demand system. This thing is totally awesome! It allows you to select the movie of your choice, then play, pause, rewind or fast forward it at your leisure. So, if there's an urgent call to "go see a man about a dog", you can pause the movie, do your "number one", return and continue where you left off. As an added bonus, there's no longer any luls whilst you are waiting for all the movie's to rewind and restart. Needless to say, I got absolutely no sleep on the flight.

After landing in Australia, I had the arduous task of getting through customs together with the 15,000 other flights that had just landed, and retrieving my beloved guitar from the oversize baggage area.

My lovely parents came to pick me up and give me a lift home which I am always forever grateful for. There's nothing more satisfying than getting off a plane knowing that your transport is taken care of so THANKS MUM AND DAD!

Wednesday night involved meeting up with Sally and Tanya - the two girls that did the exchange program with me at CSUS in 2004. Another friend, Colin from Canada joined us for dinner. He had just arrived in Sydney, ready to start a career in Melbourne for 6 months.

The night was very enjoyable and contained much reminiscing on old times, however I experienced what I would call "reverse culture shock". After spending the last 4 weeks with Koreans Japaneses, Americans and Canadians I firstly found that I was using American expressions such as "sidewalk" and "downtown". I also had a little chuckle to myself at just how funny the Australian accent is, and just how difficult it must be for others to understand exactly what we are trying to say. I then had a little freak out with the Australian money - I actually thought it was quite funny to see people carrying our money again. Lastly, was the confusion when trying to cross the road. Koreans drive on the right side of the road and Japanese on the left side of the road. After being almost run over a couple of times in the past month, my body decided to have a "brain fart" every time I aproached a road.

I can only put this wierd experience to the fact that I've slept about 10 hours in the past week, and the fact that I have had basically no interaction with any Australians (apart from Ben in the first week) for the past month.

Since then, I have done a little research and have come to found that this is actually documented. It is sometimes known as re-entry shock. Although mine was only an extremely mild case it was still the first time that I have ever experienced it in this manner. I have to say, it was a strange sensation and rather amusing. If anyone wants to read anything on this, try starting with this short article.