Travel abroad: how to deal with culture shock!

Even though traveling abroad is quite exciting and interesting, it could also be challenging to some extent especially at the beginning. Everything would seem to change the moment you just landed. Now you’re out of the airport, you’re busy looking around, taking in the newness around you. Smiling, thinking and calculating at the same time, how fulfilled your trip would be.

With my little experience, I thought it would be helpful to share with you one thing you will certainly experience when travelling for the first time to an unknown region and how you could deal with it. Have you heard  of the term culture shock? Immediately you arrived to a new country, you begin to see things differently or may be slightly different to where you are coming from. However, your daily routine, culture, and the attitudes of people around you are no longer familiar. The process of recognizing, understanding, and adapting to these different changes is called culture shock.

What are the signs of culture shock?

• Feeling excessively homesick, resentful, tired, or isolated
• Sleeping a lot
• Feeling reluctant to associate with new people

• Writing or calling home very frequently
•  Crying a lot
• Feeling resentful toward your new environment
• Feeling anxious

There might be moments when you have no idea what is going on around you. You stumble from one misunderstanding straight to another and you might even feel completely lost. Most people try to manage the situation, while some can’t even place their finger on it. Hence, they tend to run back to their home country.😄 

I remember the first time I left my home country to a strange place where I knew no one. Initially, I felt almost all the signs listed above. The people and culture around me threw me off balance. And I felt terribly homesick after managing to survive for a year. Before then, all that came through my mind was to jump right on the next plane and fly home. Trust me, it was really diverstating. So after surviving a whole year, I said to myself, hey, 'whatever it takes, I’m going to accomplish my mission for coming', instead of running back home. And here I'm.💪 Please give me some accolades.😊

So, in case you’re planning on a trip to a strange land, either to study, live or work, and you find some culture shock you can’t with-stand, here are four helpful tips for you; I call it D-CAF

How to deal with culture shock

1. Be Determined; ensure that you stay positive at all time, because negativity would only make you lose determination.
2. Be Communicable; honestly, this is one place I’m still working on. Since I consider myself to being a close person. But yeah, communicate, communicate, communicate. Talk to people, communicating with people would ease you of emotional stress. Also, try to learn the language spoken there, if its other than your language.
3. Be Adaptable; it's a crucial one that you be open to things around you, feel free to adapt to your new environment.
4. Be Friendly; make new friends. Life is not centered around you alone, so to be successful in your new environment, you need people as well as their ideas. As they say, information is the road-map to success.
   

I hope this is helpful at some point. Thanks for reading through and see you soon.💖