A junior year of studying abroad at the University of Barcelona, Spain was my first experience living outside of the United States. Nine months without returning home to Virginia was my introduction into cross cultural living and speaking another language.
Years later, now as an educator of students from other countries, I have much empathy for them as I have “walked a mile in their shoes”. Cultural adjustment and adaptation are life shifting plates. They cause major upheaval in the mindset and lifestyle of a sojourner in a land not yet called home.
The first entry level into a new cultural experience – also twinning as culture shock – is an enthrallment of all things new – honeymoon. The country I had studied about in high school and whose language I spoke after taking Spanish 1-4 were the launching pads for desire to study abroad. James Michener’s Iberia was fresh in my mind as I boarded transatlantic wings from Washington, D.C. to Madrid, Spain. Nineteen years old and off to a “new world”. High rise buildings of architectural renown, noisy busy streets, cafes and tapas bars on every corner, and yes, that world famous gastronomic dish, paella – all unknowns to me, now a part of my new landscape. There were new friends, art classes of the fabulous three: El Greco, Velasquez, and Goya and churros and chocolate on the streets that were a part of my daily walk to the university. What was there not to love?!
I do not recall how the first tensions against this love affair came to be my companions. But I do remember that the “siesta” feeling of the afternoons was one of the first interruptions to my ardor for my new “home” country. The time from 1:00 – 4:00 in the afternoons off from the university was also the time that everyone had off, not just universitarios. How were these Spaniards ever going to be productive if they had such a large break in the day? With heading back to work and school after the long siesta, only to eat dinner at 9:00 PM and stay up much longer than my bedtime had been in the US, I was ready to be back on a “normal” schedule. The fight stage of culture shock was on full display.
Up next was the enticing level of flight. Not flight physically out of the country, but in my mind – yes. I was diligently planning how to spend most of my time with English speakers and to only do “Americana” life with my friends in my study abroad group. No time with Spanish speakers – I wanted to eliminate the dissonance in my head from living in another culture and listening to a language that literally fatigued my brain after hours of being immersed in it. As the months turned their calendar pages, realization hit that I had an entire academic year abroad in this “foreign” land. Lucidity revealed that if I did not attempt to develop these relationships, then I would lead a life of cultural denial and discontent in Barcelona. And so, I began to develop friendship with Spaniards.
As my new friendships blossomed, I entered the flex stage of culture shock with an awareness of my cultural growth and cultural empathy for my Spanish friends. Whiling away time at a café was pleasant and enjoyable. Afternoon siesta time was now the luxury of relaxing and “breathing in” the present moment I was living in, not just living for what I had to do in the upcoming hours of that day. Digging deeper into the Spanish culture was stimulating and challenging, and I was beginning to make sense of the dissonance of living in one culture while still hard wired for another. So, was I finally making it to a true cross-cultural learning experience? I did not have all the nomenclature for this sojourn experience but later I would look back, evaluating my Spanish year abroad and the experience of the phenomenon of culture shock and jumping through all its hoops. I have since realized that I gained real life interpretation of the textbook definition of culture shock.
“A set of intensive and evocative situations in which the individual experiences himself and other people in a new way distinct from previous situations and is consequently forced into new levels of consciousness and understanding.” Adler
Returning home from that year in Barcelona and learning to debrief myself culturally, I have made even more sense of how living abroad can widen a person’s perspective on just about everything, if we are willing. After graduating college and completing graduate studies in cultural relations and training, I acquired more tools in my cultural tool belt – tools that I now use to evaluate my responses to new cultural experiences and to evaluate what I have learned living away from the familiar territory of home.
In my next column, I will share more on how I continued to grow interculturally with reentry into US life. And why debriefing is so important in the returning home experience which can be as difficult as the entry into a new cultural unknown.
A person can be witness to a tremendous parade of episodes and yet, if he fails to keep making something out of them . . ., he gains little in the way of experience form having been around when they happened. It is not what happens around him that makes a man experiences; it is the successive construing and reconstruing of what happens, as it happens, that enriches the experience of his life. -George A. Kelly