The shock of culture shock
Written by Aaliyah André
Edited by Lote Līva Leimane
*This is a piece based on personal experience*
I thought myself immune to culture shock....
After all was I not well traveled? I was lucky enough to have a taste for the unknown injected intravenously by my father. Moving the family from the littoral of South America to off the Coast of Africa within five years. As my brother fussed at the mere idea of letting mom out of his sight, dad pressed a printed ticket to Paris in my hand. Telling 10 year old me to “Behave and everything will go well.” So I puffed my chest and travelled from this little island in the Indian ocean to the french capital, from Mamoudzou to Paris. I felt the cold air and the warmth of heavy pyjamas at night, the taste of my aunt’s food and the tickle of my cousin’s teasing on my side. Then I was back in the lukewarm air, in the southern hemisphere’s version of the cold season, austral winter. I barely even registered it.
No, culture shock felt like a myth to me.
When I frantically filled out questionnaires and did test after test to prove that I could in fact follow classes in english. Dad poured in again, a gift from a presence that had grown distant otherwise, pinned to one side of the globe when mom took us by the hand and flew us back to our home island, in the middle of the Caribbean. For us, there were no more unknowns, no more adventure.
Yet I craved it still, so there came the two weeks in Cambridge, English teachers and classmates from all over Europe. Summer, school, summer school. I took pictures, made memories, saw London. And was back home in the blink of an eye. Summer on carefully trimmed Cambridge grass wasn’t much different to summer on soft Guadeloupean grass after all.
Adventure drew me further still. I clawed my way through the last months of high school and emerged with a choice: Go to Paris, ride the metro every day, watch your classmates smoke during the break and tuck hair behind their ear as they talk about their house in the alps, or having visited your island on a vacation. Study among them and attend class after class supposed to prepare you for yet another exam, for a selection of schools you barely know exist. Or go to Galway, get confronted to a new accent, a new dialect, a new group of people, a new approach to academia. All of it in subjects you care deeply about, both challenging and creative.
It’s pretty obvious isn’t it? I packed two rose pink suitcases and moved to Ireland.
The first few months were a breeze. The rush of discovery, film class in a dark theatre used by the drama society after hours, international students with easy smiles and huge hearts, watching my roommate hang a Celtic knot on our wall. The simple, heady fact that I was eighteen and for the first time truly free. I took notes religiously, made the sudden and sticky friendships that only happen during those first few weeks of effervescence and bought a bus ticket to Dublin whenever I could to discover the city. I was immediately comfortable, the mist of Hiberno english (also formerly sometimes called Anglo-Irish, is the set of English dialects native to the island of Ireland), Irish accent and Leaving Cert related slang dissipated through simply going to class alongside my roommates. Galway was inviting me in, and the best part was I didn’t really have to do it back.
You see as I poured my energy into understanding the world around me, the a shroud carefully laid across myself sat undisturbed. At first, I was overjoyed, I comforted myself in the unknown that I was now a part of to the people around. Explaining where exactly the French West Indies were or how exactly I got into the university was, dare I say, fun. It felt good, I felt interesting. But overtime, the explanations became shorter mirroring the disinterested look, perceived or otherwise, in my audience’s eyes. When finally they disappeared, I tucked the veil tighter around myself, and tried to concentrate on what I was here for..
I think this is where the shock started to set in.
It could always be worse. Those were the words on a loop in the back of my head as I faced my first winter alone, the ultimate motto against pessimistic doom. I kept my hands in my pockets and took the time to admire the fractals of ice bursting from blades of grass. I fashioned a snowman that could fit into the palm of my hand. I kept going to class, I stayed in during evenings. Maybe it was the lack of vitamin D, the fatigue, the course-load suddenly feeling gigantic or the shroud on my shoulders.
But I was sinking, and fast.
Downstream.
The only goal became getting to class, no matter what. I was persuaded that if I missed a day to rest, I would simply never set foot in the university again. The cold sinks to my core and the draping over my shoulders becomes heavy. My mum starts receiving letters from the school, asking for the year’s tuition to be paid but they’ve had to cross the Atlantic, and the date has already passed. My dad berates me for not getting the funding I promised I would get, my main argument for coming. EU citizens could apply, be treated on the same basis as Irish citizens. I’d applied, waited for an answer, and was met with silence. So I open my emails again in despiration.
The trail had gone cold.
For a moment I replayed a conversation between my comfort person and their roommate. “I think I’m going to travel through Europe, with my brother.” “That’s so cool. It’s funny how I can technically travel more freely than you now.” I didn’t think of it then, how much that foundation year inherent to her course and not mine, separated. Her Senegalese visa switched with a passport, the PPS number gently placed onto her lap. The peace. I clung to my own passport, that auburn document, clutched it even as I knew it would be expiring soon, even as I knew multiple government bodies had been ping ponging me back and forth for months for that number. It wasn't fair. Without it no scholarship or salary. I underestimated the energy it took, to email and email and email again. And explain, explain almost infinitely who I was what I was doing, and if I could please be allowed that little number, that recognition that I was in fact a part of this system we call a country. I had started months before I packed my suitcase, I had done everything right.
My head was barely above water.
Classes finished, somehow, work was due. The assignments clinging to the back of my brain like leeches. Realising I hadn’t left my room in days, I stepped out. The air was still cool somehow, and as I walked through streets of Galway, their familiarity grew on me like a scab. My legs were weak, I hadn’t eaten that morning, or the morning before. And as I found a bench and bought a bubble tea with a sweet taste, I thought about it all, a straw between my teeth. The shroud, the cold, the country, the people. A friend walked me home that evening, and by the time we parted at the door, I thought: I know how to swim.
Or at least to paddle.