After almost ten years abroad, having written numerous articles on culture shock and written a book on the subject I thought I was pretty well clued up on culture shock. I was wrong.
We moved to France over the summer and having been here many times before we thought it would be relatively easy to settle in and make a new home here. The thought of culture shock hitting in a European country, after living in Asia for ten years, seemed a rather unlikely prospect. Unfortunately, as an expat, we learn something new every move.
France is great, the food and the wine are wonderful and even the people are much more friendly than their stereotype would suggest. However, we are missing Turkey and our friends there very much – the transition to France has even sparked homesickness for Hong Kong too, where we lived before moving to Turkey.
No matter how familiar France seems and how much we knew about the place before we came here – it is different living here to passing through on holiday. There are so many things to get used to, the little things that you normally take for granted (or you do after a couple of years in your host country) that are suddenly not so easy to take for granted. How do you make an appointment with the doctor? Where do put the dog into kennels for the Christmas holiday? Why does the government bureaucracy ask the same question five times and insist you visit their office to answer the question every time? How do you make a claim on your local health insurance? Why does everything take so long? Why am I so tired all the time?
The hardest part of facing the culture shock here has been facing up to the fact the we are suffering from it. Admitting that as old expat hands we do not know it all is not good for the ego at all.
Four months in to the French experience, and despite the fact we have always wanted to live here and really like the country, we have been asking ourselves why we left Turkey, why we left all our friends, why did we come here? This is fairly normal, as most expats will know, but it does not make it any easier to cope with, let alone understand. How is it that we can find an experience we like so much, so difficult?
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