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A few years ago I made one of the biggest life-altering decisions that anyone could undertake: packing my bags and moving to another country. My first several days as an “alien” in Singapore were exciting and exhilarating; the sights, smells and sounds were so different from what I had grown up with back home in the Philippines. I moved into my room, spruced it up with my colorful flower-print bed sheet, stuffed toys and a handmade dreamcatcher given as farewell gifts from friends, photos of loved ones up on my wall, and my guitar tucked away in a corner. I was all geared up for a new school, new friends, a new life, some 3000 miles away from home.

Needless to say, the “honeymoon” period came and went, before I was even aware that I had been in one. It started with the little things: “Why does the sun rise at 7 a.m. instead of 5:45—I almost slept through my alarm!”, “They cook spaghetti weirdly in this boarding school—bland and watery”, “NINE dollars (quick conversion in my head: two hundred seventy pesos) for a movie ticket?? I could watch four movies with that in Davao”… and unfortunately, things didn’t seem to be looking up anytime soon. I was doing unsatisfactorily in school. I had made new friends but they couldn’t seem to compare with my old friends back home. I missed my house, good home-cooked meals and most of all I missed my family. I resented almost everything about this new place, and wondered: Did I make a very big mistake in coming here?

This was one of my earliest and biggest encounters with culture shock, and virtually every person travelling to or moving to another country is bound to experience culture shock as well.

Why Do We Get Culture Shock?

Our personal identity is partly shaped by the community that we live in and belong to. When we move to another country, the familiar is now replaced by foreign landscapes, cultures and lifestyles. Our personal identity is thus threatened, and we respond with varying degrees of anxiety and confusion. This is what we refer to as culture shock.

In our own home community, we know how people interact with each other and the environment according to certain “rules” that we have learned over the years—we know how things are supposed to work. In a new foreign community, however, we discover that things don’t work the way they always have. For example, in your hometown, it may be customary for strangers to give greetings as they pass each other on the sidewalk, but on the streets of a new city you find, to your astonishment, that people don’t even acknowledge one another! You know that there are different “rules”, but you don’t know what they are and whether you’re violating any of them. Culture shock is hence also brought about by all sorts of insecurities that arise from this feeling of being in the dark.

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Katlyn Batuigas has lived in Singapore and the US and has traveled in other countries as tourist. In this article on Culture Shock she offers her insights based on her personal experiences and the way she handled it.

The second part of this article will be on tips on how to lessen the impact of culture shock.