We all know that when traveling outside of one's home country, one can expect a lot of things to be different. Sometimes the people will primarily speak a language that the traveller doesn't understand or speak themselves. The food will probably be different, the layout of cities and land will be different, maybe the air will smell different. Certainly, the way that people interact with one another within the confines of social rules will be different. Most people who travel prepare for this, particularly if they plan on staying in a foreign country for an extended period of time. They research, they plan, they write notes in their phone. When the time comes to get on the plane to come home, however, many people forget that they must adjust once more. I am one of those people.

In the past year, I have spent almost 10 months outside of the United States. Each place I visited in that time came with its own set of cultural differences. At first, I had to deal with adjusting from American life to Scottish life, then back again, then onto Jamaican, etc. Every time I changed location, I brought with me remnants of the cultures I'd learned along the way. By the time I arrived in Thailand, my third country in Asia, I was all mixed up. Was it here that I was meant to lift my soup bowl to my face, rather than bring my face down to the table? Or was that terribly rude? It was really hard to keep track of it. Somewhere in all of that mess, I also stopped keeping track of American culture.

I have been back in the country now for a week and some change, but still have not fully adjusted. Unexpectedly, I'm relearning how Americans do life. Some of this is in the little things, like how in the airport I had to be patient while people stood on the escalator and did not file to one side so I could walk down. I mean, I tried to be patient, but inside I was screaming, "I'm walkin' here!" Some of the things I'm now trying to adjust to are actually kind of amusing. For instance, I occasionally find myself bowing slightly when I apologize to people and I still spend at least 15 seconds looking for light switches outside of bathroom doors. As silly as these things are, they are still having a very serious effect on me.

It is hard to readjust. It is hard to go back to the way things always were before I left. It is hard to believe that our money is really all the same color and size, I mean what is up with that? There have been times when, upon returning, I have felt that I would never fully belong here again- that the person that I was before I left the U.S. for the first time doesn't exist anymore. At times, that can be a really scary and quite sad. Yet no matter how difficult it is to readjust, no matter how hard it is to feel like I belong here again, and to start saying "dollars," instead of "pounds," or "euros," I like that travel changes me. I would even go so far as to say that it is good that travel changes me. Perhaps in the future, I will remember to research American culture a little before coming back to it. (Or at least remember that real actual people here have Donald Trump signs in their yards- that one was tough.)