h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Very good article. Squeaking as someone who has spent the last twenty years travelling (Africa, Middle east, Pakistan, Greece, France) i reckon i have been through all of these stages many times.

Strangely, it is here in France that i have had most problems, maybe because the other places were not so resistant to speaking a language other than English. I've been here now for nearly five years & will probably stay for the forseeable future; so hopefully into the "accepatnce" stage now!

Very true about the way those "back home" go glazed after a while when you talk about being away. They just want to know "do they all live in mud huts then & ride round on camels?", but when you start to explain, they want to tell you who is divorcing who & what's been happening on East Enders. At that point you are right:

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Terri (currently In South West France, do come & say hi if you are in the area!)

Hi Terri,
Glad you enjoyed it. I've lived in Japan, HK and Australia. Of those three cultures Japan has had the most profound affect on me. Interestingly I ignored my own advice on Oz when returning after 5 years. I assumed that it had stayed the same!! It hadn't!! Even though I was captivated by the thought of returning I shouldn't have let my guard down. Turns out that anti-immigrant feeling is on the rise especially in Sydney. I'm still going through the hostile stage!!!
SBE

It is even more depressing when the people left at home haven't changed. After you've spent four years sometimes in extreme danger and your own life has changed, you quickly lose patience with the stick-in-the-muds who haven't even been to the cinema in the nearest town

yes home culture seems more foeign and people react with hostility because i look like them but do not think and behave like them eating habits have changed and so has my attitude

I wouldn't recommend marrying a foreigner when it comes to culture shock: he's up when I'm down in my country and I'm up when he's down in his. I predict we'll have to moe to a neutral third country in order to syncronise our cycles

marry your kind but if you are not compatible then what?

I've been in France now for 30 years, and for me,you know, the most frustrating thing when I come "home "to UK is that I understand all the words, but what do they mean? Check out in a shop can ask me all sorts of "technical" questions, and I don't have an inkling of what they're on about! My daughter now lives in UK, and she translates back into French! The culture shock is back in the "old country" I'm sorry to say

eight years in Japan and I still find some attitudes and cultural conundrums surprising. One very good way to get past the 'hostile' stage - which is basically just homesickness - is to make some good friends among the locals and not just stick the the expat community as many in Tokyo do. The reverse culture shock hits me just as hard when I go back to Canada or visit the States - how the hell do people in the west eat such gigantic meals? Why do they talk so loud? How can they be so incurious about the rest of the world? Could it be that I was once like that?

I second everything said above about returning to a home country, including the advice in the article.

I'm a UK ex-pat in Finland, where I'm going through a very warped cyclical process, largely due to the bilingual nature of Finland's coast.
I'm in a stage of acceptance with the Finnish-Swedish culture, but hostility with the Finnish, largely due to my inability to master the language, but being in the hostility phase doesn't exactly help...

Interesting points there, but ... culture shock is NOT homesickness. Homesickness is when you leave home for a short time and miss things about your old life. Culture shock is infinitely more complicated. The hostile stage occurs when you lose your cultural certainties and realise that there is no way you can go back to being the same person as you were before. It is the mind's last attempt to restore the status quo before it accepts that you have changed irrevocably. By regarding it as homesickness you are much more likely to underestimate the hostile stage and suffer more from it.
SBE

I got the hostile stage in bits. Not all at once I mean. Every six months or so something very small would irritate me no end for about a month or so, and then I'd be back to acceptance. One of the most entertaining phases of this was when I suddenly noticed (after five years) this suond that Russians often add to the ends of interogatives. It's a sort of rising mmm sound, and would be really agreessive in English. I had to keep stopping myself from reacting agressively back to the most innocuous of questions. Then, after a few months, I stopped noticing it again.

I find myself going into big rants about the way Finns pronounce things, which is grossly unfair considering the way most English-speakers cope with foreign words.
I also get my back up now and again about their reticence, which can also come across as impolite unless you take it into account in advance.