It's crazy how quickly it happens; you'll flip from the honeymoon phase, where you end up whimsically throwing your big floppy hat into the air several times a day, to the kind of bitterness usually only experienced by IHOP waitresses and the kid who played Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace. This is a real, studied phenomenon called culture shock, which includes "feelings of helplessness [and] irritability, and fears of being cheated, contaminated, injured, or disregarded" (and stems from the jarring realization that a lot of the things we think of as "the way things are" are actually just cultural constructs.
We're not just talking about the big things, like being far away from your family and being surrounded by accents that sound completely ridiculous to even the most well-trained American ear. It's the tiny differences, from the aesthetics of road signs to the words they use to order coffee, that really get you. Before a move, you mentally prepare yourself to handle the stress of saying goodbye to your family, but you don't prepare yourself to live in a world where the vegetation, architecture, animals, and smells are completely different. At any time of day or night, absolutely everything you see seems designed to remind you that things are different and you don't belong there.
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This is Australia's "jeans and a T-shirt."
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