Sunday, November 15, 2009

Cultural experience vs Love

Cultural experience is a wonderful journey. I can easily be compared to being in love.
You enter the relationship being so excited. Everything is perfect, even the mistakes you notice seem to be just part of the fun. They are just things that make the experience interesting and new. Also you will hear some people trying to warn you for the possible future risks, but you are so in love that you don’t really care. That’s what the experience so far has been. The honeymoon stage.
But, as it is in relationships, it is in the cultural experience, at one stage you get back to earth. You start noticing small things, that piss you off. You get tired of being nice. You get tired of trying to convince yourself that everything is perfect. You don’t want to change. You feel like you are doing so much but not getting back as much as you would like.
That’s when the reality hits. No matter how hard you try, you still make mistakes. You put on the nicest mode you have, but people still think that you are rude. You sacrifice your own conceptions by justifying them with cultural differences. But you never see other people trying to understand your view of things.
So you reach the stage you feel like you are trying too hard. In love there’s normally two paths to succeed from this point. You break up or you start building trust and compromises to enter to a long term relationship and from that point things can only get better. What’s the next step in cultural experience? Can it only get better now or is this the time to realize that you don’t fit in?
PS. Even if this post might sound depressive…I can ensure you I am not depressed …still enjoying the journey…just analyzing the feelings of the moment .