Norway: Crazy beautiful, crazy expensive.
I came back from Norway last night, and was greeted by my Google Reader with Matt’s extremely resonant post on the problem of “reverse culture shock.” I’ve been back in the home-orbit (counting Norway, since I traveled there with college friends) for almost two weeks, and the question of how to explain the past year of my life has plagued me all week. As Matt observes, the superficial aspects of culture shock — everything is so expensive! the air is so clean! — quickly wear off. But the difficulty of describing what it has been like to live and teach in China is likely to last all summer. People probably don’t want to hear too much about the difficulties and loneliness of living abroad, but at the same time it’s not accurate to reduce the year to a string of funny stories.
For me, the most gratifying conversations have been about China generally, rather than my specific experience. I’m certainly not a scholar of Chinese history or culture. I haven’t even made a particularly concentrated effort to study China in any academic sense. And yet, whether we were discussing religion or politics or the economy, I always had plenty to say. I was pleasantly surprised — and gratified — to realize how much I have learned in the past year. My Mandarin is not be as fluent as I would like (by a long stretch), but I have made a lot of progress on the less tangible goal of “understanding China.”
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