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Travels from Bhutan: Repatriation and Reflections

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Guest post by Catherine Perkins. If you spend enough time in a foreign country, things stop feeling “foreign” and start feeling normal; sometimes you don't realize just how normal until you return home. In my case, I expressed my reverse culture shock by stormily watching Americans perform tasks, and then saying, “That's nice, but the Bhutanese do it like this.” You realize a few things about your home country when you repatriate; sometimes it's noticed with relief (thank goodness for …

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Travels in Bhutan: Living in a Buddhist Country

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Guest post by Catherine Perkins You know from my earlier post that I spent almost five months living, studying, traveling, and working in the Buddhist Kingdom of Bhutan, a small country in the Himalayas tucked between China and India. It’s one of the few countries that still identifies as a “Buddhist Kingdom.” Even though the senior citizens complain about the declining spirituality among the Bhutanese youth (as every older generation in every culture for all time has complained about the …

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Living in the Land of Love

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Guest Post by Mike Henry As I write this, the movie Eat, Pray, Love is hitting the cinemas in the United States. I am sure most people are already familiar with the story. The book's author, Elizabeth Gilbert, is frustrated with her life in the United States and decides to take a year off traveling, spending time in Italy to eat, India to pray and Bali to find love. I have been living in Bali for the past year and it is not surprising to come across many people (mostly women) who have come …

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It’s Not the Easter Bunny, It’s the Easter Bell!

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My youngest daughter is halfway through a 2-1/2 month sojourn in France. This Easter, she was fortunate to spend the weekend with a French family in the village of Soissons. The village is northeast of Paris, about halfway to the Belgian border. The Cathedral Saint-Gervais & Saint-Protais dates from the 12th century, and a municipal museum is housed in the former Saint Léger Abbey, also started during the 12th century. They approached the village down avenues lined with Prunius trees in …

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Being a US Expat at Christmas Time

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Here are a few thoughts about expat Christmas time that I thought were interesting. Expat kids believe in Santa longer. According to Mary Mimouma of Expat Abroad: "My daughter believed in Santa (and the tooth fairy) until she was ten. I found that in most expat families that have “Santa,” all the expat kids continue to believe in him until much older ages than the kids back home. I have hardly heard of anyone whose children stopped believing in Santa before the ages of eight, or even nine." …

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Five Stages of Culture Shock

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I just finished reading a truly excellent article over at Expat Exchange. In Culture Shock: It's the Little Things that Count in the Biggest Ways, author Desi Downey identifies five stages of culture shock: Honeymoon/Tourist Irritation-to-Anger Rejection/Regression Integration/Assimilation Reverse or Reentry You can read the entire article here Downey went to China with her husband, sent there by his company. As she describes it, "One of the first things I noticed about China was …

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