It’s hard to explain fully, but to put it concisely it’s “culture shock”
You have to constantly be calibrating when you are immersed in a foreign culture, and that takes a lot of mental work. You make cultural blunders and don’t even know it.
Everything you want to do is harder. Let’s say you have a cold here, you go to the pharmacy and buy DayQuil or whatever. Now imagine you are sick in China, you go to the pharmacy, and you can’t read anything; none of the boxes, the signs over the aisles, anything. So you have to find a shop keeper and mime your symptoms, she hands you a box, you hope it’s right… how much do you take? What do you take it with?
You go to wash your clothes, there’s no dryer, so you have to hang it out to dry, but it’s summer and super humid so the only way to dry your stuff is on a line inside so the A/C can dry it out, and now you have clotheslines across your ceiling.
You go to cook a meal and there’s one burner.
You go to take a shower and hot water is very limited, so you have to be done in 5 minutes.
You go to take a dump in a public place and there’s a squat toilet.
These are a few examples but everything takes work. None of these things are bad per se, if you’re Chinese from China it’s just what you’re used to, no biggie. But for you it’s completely different.
It’s worth it for the experience, but there’s an ease to life that accompanies being where you are from that is easy to underestimate until you don’t have it anymore, particularly in an environment as foreign as China.
This is exactly what I was going to say. I lived in a different country for a year while I worked as an English teacher, and I both loved and hated the "everything is an adventure" aspect of daily life. Need to talk to your bank? You'd better fucking focus, because you're about to use vocabulary that you don't use on a daily basis. Going to the grocery store? Oh shit, the way they have their register set up, I can't just read the total so now I have to focus because numbers are hard because there's no context to give you a nudge if you forget a word for a second. They're making an announcement on the train? You'd better listen up, because the sound quality isn't good and there's no face to look at to help with understanding. Also, there's a big difference between knowing enough of a language and get by in daily life and being fluent enough to have real conversations beyond the weather so you can actually make friends. I'm glad I went and I had a lot of experiences I value, but it was also the loneliest I've ever been and it was really tiring. I remember landing at O'Hare and riding the tram, an announcement came over the PA system, and I realized I was understanding everything without trying, and I was just like, "holy shit this is SO EASY." Same thing the first time I went grocery shopping back in the states, "this is so easy." I kind of missed the aspect of IT'S ADVENTURE TIME BABY, LET'S GO GROCERY SHOPPING, but damn it was nice just sliding back into a culture where I knew how to do things and how to respond appropriately without effort.
General sentiment still applies though, you gotta pull out your phone, type some shit in, show it to the lady, she has to type some shit in, it’s all annoying compared to just walking in and getting what you need
It’s hard to explain fully, but to put it concisely it’s “culture shock”
You have to constantly be calibrating when you are immersed in a foreign culture, and that takes a lot of mental work. You make cultural blunders and don’t even know it.
Everything you want to do is harder. Let’s say you have a cold here, you go to the pharmacy and buy DayQuil or whatever. Now imagine you are sick in China, you go to the pharmacy, and you can’t read anything; none of the boxes, the signs over the aisles, anything. So you have to find a shop keeper and mime your symptoms, she hands you a box, you hope it’s right… how much do you take? What do you take it with?
You go to wash your clothes, there’s no dryer, so you have to hang it out to dry, but it’s summer and super humid so the only way to dry your stuff is on a line inside so the A/C can dry it out, and now you have clotheslines across your ceiling.
You go to cook a meal and there’s one burner.
You go to take a shower and hot water is very limited, so you have to be done in 5 minutes.
You go to take a dump in a public place and there’s a squat toilet.
These are a few examples but everything takes work. None of these things are bad per se, if you’re Chinese from China it’s just what you’re used to, no biggie. But for you it’s completely different.
It’s worth it for the experience, but there’s an ease to life that accompanies being where you are from that is easy to underestimate until you don’t have it anymore, particularly in an environment as foreign as China.
This is exactly what I was going to say. I lived in a different country for a year while I worked as an English teacher, and I both loved and hated the "everything is an adventure" aspect of daily life. Need to talk to your bank? You'd better fucking focus, because you're about to use vocabulary that you don't use on a daily basis. Going to the grocery store? Oh shit, the way they have their register set up, I can't just read the total so now I have to focus because numbers are hard because there's no context to give you a nudge if you forget a word for a second. They're making an announcement on the train? You'd better listen up, because the sound quality isn't good and there's no face to look at to help with understanding. Also, there's a big difference between knowing enough of a language and get by in daily life and being fluent enough to have real conversations beyond the weather so you can actually make friends. I'm glad I went and I had a lot of experiences I value, but it was also the loneliest I've ever been and it was really tiring. I remember landing at O'Hare and riding the tram, an announcement came over the PA system, and I realized I was understanding everything without trying, and I was just like, "holy shit this is SO EASY." Same thing the first time I went grocery shopping back in the states, "this is so easy." I kind of missed the aspect of IT'S ADVENTURE TIME BABY, LET'S GO GROCERY SHOPPING, but damn it was nice just sliding back into a culture where I knew how to do things and how to respond appropriately without effort.
Everything is Google translate now. Illiterate foreigners have never had it easier.
Oh word I didn’t think of that
General sentiment still applies though, you gotta pull out your phone, type some shit in, show it to the lady, she has to type some shit in, it’s all annoying compared to just walking in and getting what you need