SNOW!!

That's right flavoury tea!



These are the two pics I was able to take in my car of the snow at our house... before the camera's batteries died.


The rest of these pics are from our little trip to Hakuba in Nagano, Japan. =) enjoy!

Culture Shock aka Culture fatigue

Everyone experiences culture shock, (or if you want to be more PC)culture fatigue. I'm sure someone out there will tell you they lived in another country for a while and didn't have culture shock AT ALL. This person just doesn't understand what culture shock really means, or was not in the country long enough to experience all the stages of culture shock. (I have a reason for preferring the name shock over fatigue which I will get to in a bit)

Quoting from the Culture Shock page of Wikipedia:
"Culture shock refers to the anxiety and feelings (of surprise, disorientation, uncertainty, confusion, etc.) felt when people have to operate within a different and unknown cultural or social environment, such as a foreign country."

I am honestly an expert on culture shock. I had several weeks training to deal with culture shock in 2004 and 2005 in preparation for my first trip to Japan. On my 2005 trip to Japan I experienced culture shock, along with the 5 people I was traveling with, though we all experienced it a bit differently.
In preparation for my return to Japan, this time being in a Japanese workplace setting, my contracting organization sent all the new ALTs to special training in Tokyo geared to help with culture shock.

With my expert knowledge, I have come to the conclusion that my husband and I are both suffering from a bad case of stage two culture shock. Stage two is "Irritation and Hostility―Gradually, your focus turns from the similarities to the differences. And these differences, which suddenly seem to be everywhere, are troubling. You blow up little, seemingly insignificant difficulties into major catastrophes. This is the stage generally identified as culture shock. People experiencing culture shock often
feel homesick and have a negative attitude toward the host culture." (JET General Information Handbook 2008)

Let's break that down a little more- the key being that this stage is all about the person's irritation with and hostility towards the new culture they are living in. With the amount of time Matt and I say "Silly Japan" or other not so nice terms, it is clear that we are finding faults in all the differences between our home culture and the culture we currently find ourselves living in. We are both HOMESICK. We have lists in our heads of things we want to do, places we want to go, and even food we want to eat when we get back to America. In case you were wondering, because we will probably be arriving in my hometown first, we will probably have McAlister's as our first real meal back in the US is all goes according to plan. =P
I miss my cat much more than I thought I would. Don't get me wrong, I knew I would miss her, but I thought with time I would miss her less...that has not happened.
I miss sleeping on a real bed. I have already begun looking at shops online to see what the going price for a decent queen sized mattress is in America.
I miss doing any daily task or errand in ENGLISH. My Japanese is not so good and I have very little faith in it ever getting much better. As a result of my lack of Japanese language skills I get frustrated by the simplest of things. Simply leaving the house is exhausting because of the cultural and language barriers.

I know I have brought some of these things up before, but I just wanted to get a summary of my culture shock symptoms. I like calling it SHOCK and not FATIGUE because I am a dramatic person and FATIGUE does not express the true emotional rollercoster this is like the word SHOCK does.

So yes, the low of culture shock has hit us both hard and we are very excited to tell everyone now that we will be moving back to America in end July/ early August!!!
None of the specifics are in place yet. Worst case scenario is still not that bad for us because of this strong desire to be home again, it beats out any financial concerns...which we still hope not to have. I will update with more information when it becomes available. =)

In case anyone is interested, here is a pic of how some people believe culture shock looks like. Though I would like the say the JET General information handbook does have a better graph with the more detailed ups and downs that an ALT feels while in Japan...I just can't post a copy of it.