Culture Shock?

When I recently emailed Mike, a college friend, that I was living in Africa, he wrote, "I remember in grad school we studied the process of culture shock and adaptation. They say that when you first arrive in a new culture you experience a period of euphoria where everything feels exotic and exciting, then you swing towards the other extreme where you reject everything as foreign and you feel out of place, and finally you adapt and are able to enjoy the good things and accept the bad. So, if you keep that in mind and know that it is going to happen then you can hopefully deal with it better."

I'd say we are now swinging toward "the other extreme" at the moment! On Monday, when we returned from our long weekend in South Africa, our house alarm was going off and we couldn't get it to stop. To make a long story short - we learned from our neighbor that it started going off Saturday afternoon and NEVER stopped. I won't even go into the details with our dealings with the security company - I'll just say that it makes NO SENSE! And now I am sure the entire street is not so fond of us.

What else...Each night this week we have been awakened by rats running around on the ceiling.

On Friday, we had to speak to the gardners' supervisor because they are doing a whole lot of nothing...except for taking naps on our veranda, washing their clothes in our swimming pool and hanging them dry on our trees over the weekend. If looks could kill, I would be dead as of Friday!

Driving gets more comfortable as time goes on but we still have to adjust to people, lots of people, and animals crossing the road anywhere they want. Good brakes are essential.

On top of all that, Ian's work has been crazy lately.

And while we've met great people here, I miss our friends and family. Chad and Nancy welcomed their second son, Jack, into the world last Friday. We are soooo excited - but just wish we could be there with them right now.

Fortunately, after living in Central Asia, I believe there is validity to what Mike said. I remember feeling a lot more out of place in Kazakhstan than I do here - with similar types of episodes. And we did adapt, and had a wonderful experience. I figured if the purpose of this blog is to share our African experience with you, I should share both the good and bad, right?!