Re-Entry Shock

Re-entry for rockets and space shuttles has to take into account the heat created by entering the atmosphere so that the vehicle or object arrives intact and without too much damage (or rather as a completely singed, charcoal object).

Why didn't I take into consideration such serious measures about coming home and re-entering the U.S. cultural zone? Yes, I know about reverse culture shock. I have done it more than once. I just thought that I was over it, as if it was something that I might only encounter my first move back. Ha! As I have traveled across the globe and relocated thousands of miles from where I grew up, my journey has been fraught with small glitches, moments at which I stop to re-consider if I really know what is going on. As an English teacher, I imagine it might be worse. Abroad, I was constantly called upon to share the "American perspective," as if a vast nation of 300 million can be captured in a sound bite. In retrospect, I think that I eventually bought into the question and, at times, offered what I thought to be the pervasive American way of doing things. This perhaps is the best set-up for a serious atmospheric jolt.

I think that I often appear as a foreigner in my own country, even though I speak the language without a discernible accent. Making choices for salad dressing at a restaurant, a coffee at Starbucks, or hair products in the supermarket take me ages. I have been asked several times if I need help by overly eager store clerks (What do they want?!? questions the American who has been living in a place where customer service is defined a bit differently). The choices are overwhelming and they exist on every detail of the product and every level of service you can imagine. Bewildered? Yeah.

The world is so friendly here. Strangers talk to me in line about the news or a local event. Waiters chat with me while I wait. At a salsa event that I attended last weekend, I made several new friends that gave me tips, exchanged contact info, and invited me for future dancing events. After two years in a rather reserved Nordic country, I feel strange with the familiarity, as if it can't possibly be true.

There are so many systems. Charts. Organizational lists. Calendars. The program I work in has everything planned through the middle of next year -- and I have been informed about it in advance. My colleagues and friends seem to have full calendars of appointments and obligations. It feels a little bit stifling. Where is that room for an impromptu cup of tea or glass of wine? The world seems to move so fast.

Other milder observations run the gamut. Food tastes sweeter(sugar seems to be an ingredient in almost everything here). I have a car, an apartment, stuff inside of it (yikes!). Packaging is in just one language which seems so succinct in comparison to the multilingual microscopic text on everything in Estonia. The metro and city is filled with so much linguistic, ethnic, and cultural diversity. The cultural program here is fantastic -- I can go dancing three times every night of the week. The city is also full of people and traffic; a tough adjustment after living in a small town somewhere in the Baltic forest. For once, I seemed to have planted myself in a nexus for so many -- I already have visited with so many long-lost friends and look forward to meeting more. Cheese in America is not exciting as I remember; it is so yellow. My partner in crime, a savvy Computer Scientist is far far away back in another corner of the universe, and I am also readjusting to a solo routine for a while.

Huh?!? Still confused or think that you missed something?
Here's the one-sentence scoop: I finished my stint as an English Language Fellow in Estonia and returned back to Wyoming for the summer months before heading to Washington, DC, where I accepted a position as an instructor teaching English as a Foreign Language at Georgetown University.

More adventures and tales to come... assuming that I survive the re-entry, of course!