Last night Ryan and I attended a talk given by the author of "Homeward Bound, A Spouse's Guide to Repatriation", Robin Pascoe. She said something last night that I thought wasn't me until I realized in a conversation this morning with Jamie that she was right. She said that we tend to idealize what home is like. I do this without knowing it. It's frustrating to go grocery shopping here because you can't find half the ingredients on your list. I have this idea in my head that grocery shopping back home is so much easier because you can find everything you need. At some point in the past year I let myself forget that you CAN'T always find everything you need at one store - a point that was illustrated to me at Christmas when I couldn't find two ingredients that I needed. Before we moved here I would have walked into that small town grocery store knowing that I wasn't going to be able to find everything I needed and either would have made two trips to two different grocery stores or would have skipped the small store in favor of the larger store that was MORE LIKELY to have what I needed. I would have been prepared mentally for not finding what I needed. Instead when I couldn't find what I needed I was very frustrated because in my mind I should have been able to find it in one stop. I have idealized in my mind that grocery shopping back home is easy and never frustrating.

Robin says that when you experience the culture shock of moving to a new country it's easier than the culture shock of moving back home because you expect it when you move to that country. You don't expect to feel it in moving back home. You forget that while you have changed so have your friends back home. You forget that everything isn't as easy as you have come to believe in your mind that it is. When you move abroad (or at least to an Asian country) there is an expat community that will reach out to you because they know what you are going through and you are all in it together. When you move back home people aren't as likely to reach out to you because instead of looking like a foreigner who needs help figuring things out you are now a "local" who should know how to do everything.

It takes approximately a year to adjust to a foreign country - it can take 18 months to two years to adjust to moving back home even if you have only been gone for a year. It will be interesting to see how we all adjust - if it's easier than we think or if it's much harder than we think.