For those of you abroad right now, going abroad next semester, or ever find yourself in any new destination in life.
It's been a little over four months since I've been abroad. I'm in the midst of classes, and it's my last month to explore Israel since I spent most of the breaks exploring the rest of the Middle East.
I just got back from a weekend down in Eilat, and you might remember my time in Eilat from my crossing the borders into Egypt and then into Jordan. Though this time, it was more of this:
and less of that:
.I had planned to readjust my sleeping patterns one of these weekends, but after this past weekend, my internal clock is now set on east coast time. Waking up for my 8:30 AMs this week will be a little less than enjoyable.
Before I left for Eilat, I had a very odd revelation that was so obvious, yet took me so long to realize.
In my internship class, we were lectured on the job environment in Israel, and the subject of culture shock was brought up.
The teacher had a long list of the signs of culture shock, and four of them stuck out to me as being especially pertinent to my experience in Israel (although I recognized almost all the signs):
1) unwarranted criticism of the culture, behaviors, and people
2) heightened irritability with the way things are done
3) an extreme desire to speak with someone who "makes sense"
4) a refusal or unwillingness to learn the language
The others included things like: feeling shy or insecure, questioning your desire to move to this place, anti-social behavior, and fear of meeting locals.
Anyway, the revelation I had was that what I was feeling the very first month in Israel was culture shock. (!)
Okay, yes, you're probably shaking your head and thinking "duh?", but to me, this was huge.
I really didn't expect to get culture shock in Israel. First of all, on the surface, Israel seems very much westernized and has the most western of sensibilities of all the Middle Eastern countries because of its close ties to the US. I guess I almost expected it to be very American just everyone spoke Hebrew in addition to English. Secondly, since I have traveled around out of the country several times before with home-stays and shorter study abroads, I didn't think I would be unable to easily embrace a new culture and society anyway.
Looking back at my earliest (angry) posts and remembering how much I used to grumble about going to summer Ulpan and how often I would lament having Hebrew replace my Arabic in comparison to now, how Hebrew class is often my favorite class of the day, I realize that all that I was feeling then: dissapointment, irritation, frustration, anger, disillusionment, homesickness, all of that was a part of culture shock.
When I reread that one post that caused such a hubbub among my family and friends, I can laugh about it because it represents the apogee of my culture shock. I finally can understand where the hell that extreme misery came from. From that point on, I was able to move on to stage four: the autonomy stage.
Now, I can't imagine having studied abroad anywhere else. Israel was never on my list of places to go, and it definitely never crossed my mind as a destination to study abroad in, but I'm so glad that because of a random suggestion in passing, I'm now here in Jerusalem.
There are still times when I'll smile to myself because some Hebrew words sound like English said with an Italian accent (e.g. spetsifi = specific, deit = date). And often things don't make too much sense (like when my Hebrew teacher was describing a new vocabulary word and explained, "It's a square so basically it's a circle." Didn't you know?
Or the confusion on my friend's cousin's face who came from the States to visit this weekend at the novelty that sometimes she couldn't order what was on the menu because the restaurant simply didn't have it. Why would the restaurant have what was on the menu?).
But now, instead of getting upset, I've come to enjoy and appreciate these quirky aspects of Israel. It's almost charming. Ha kol biseder. (= It's all good.) And I know that when I go home, and reverse culture shock sets in, I know I'll miss hearing Hebrew, and things will be weird because you know, they'll just make too much sense.
I'm grateful that although the lecture on culture shock came after four months of my being here after I had already gone through all the stages of assimilation, it's better late than never. After all, it would have been too logical to lecture us on culture shock soon after arrival. It's funny to me that I write this post so late into my being here, but I guess now I can better understand my initial experience in retrospect.
