How am I coping?

How am I coping with the reverse culture shock?

Firstly to all my beloved Canadian family and friends, please do not take this as criticism, but rather, these are just things that I am struggling with and am trying to do better at.

It's hard trying to squeeze into a world that you have not been living in for over two years. Everyone has their busy lives and circles of friends, and because we have not been around, we just don't fit into the pattern. And people like to live with patterns, it's comforting, I understand. In fact, I like it too, which is another reason why it is so hard to try to squeeze in, when I had pattern for a couple years in Russia.

I know that we were the ones to leave. Nobody here wanted us to leave, it was our choice. This also means that the burden is on us to try to see people and squeeze into their lives. But it is really hard, hard work to do the squeezing, especially when even minor resistance is felt, i.e regular commitments that I had no idea about and felt silly to not know about. So we will continue to try to squeeze in to peoples well worn patterns, but this is the essence of what reverse culture shock is about.

Is one place better than another to live in? That's a perennial question, that I would say no and yes to. Ultimately, people are most comfortable in the place that they grew up as a child, but the more time spent out of that context, the more difficult it is to adjust. I have heard of Russians who eagerly wanted to make it to the west, but then really struggled to adapt to a different way of life.

I have found myself missing little things from my way of life in Russia that I became comfortable with. If I wanted to buy a shaver, I could buy one for 40 cents, instead of having to buy a minimum of 12 for $6 here. I don't want 12, and I don't want to have to squeeze them all into my suitcase when I travel again. Everything here seems to be in bulk and everything is so big. I found myself being completely overwhelmed by the size of the Safeway supermarket, and taking a long time to find the things I was looking for. We may not have had a car in Russia, (at times we could really have used one) and did remark that it would be a little inconvenient having to walk 5 or 10 mins to the carpark to collect it everytime, but there is a different kind of convenience that comes from having a supermarket (smaller than Safeway!) 2 mins walk from your door. I know it took us the longest time to get used to buying our groceries everyday in Russia (sometimes twice a day), but now it just seems so hard having to buy for a week at a time. There is an even greater necessity to do this kind of thing when we live 50 kms from the city.

Another thing, that is unique to living in the countryside, but not an issue when you live in the city, is the actual problem of the trip to the city. I got used to living in rural Saskatchewan in the past. I knew and understood that when ever you make a trip into the city, there is probably a list of at least 3 or 4 things to do, sometimes more. This is logical and smart. But it just feels so overwhelming to me now, that it is not possible to just go somewhere without a long list of things to do.

That's probably enough for today. It's not a list of criticisms. It's a list of my struggles and me being honest. Every culture is a system of things that for better or worse usually hold together somehow without collapsing. Moving from one to another can result into taking lots of wrong turns in the maze!