L.A. overload.

It took two months for me to understand the phenomena of reverse-culture shock.

Coming home to my family didn't feel like a readjustment. I guess that's because your family never really changes, or at least your relationship with them doesn't. You can be away at school for months, or living in a foreign country for half a year, but when you return it's still home. I easily fell back into my routine: mornings with the LA Times and freshly brewed Starbucks coffee, playing with my dogs, making my own food, having my own space (and lots of it!) to bum around, televisions and computers in every other room, I even fell back into driving (which I wasn't looking forward to).

By the second day back, I almost felt like I had never left for France. But that was until I returned to USC last night and it hit me that I had been disconnected from this previous life for almost 8 months. Whereas family and home are constants, the rest of the world is not quite that way. People change, buildings change, trends change, society changes. The world doesn't stop for you to play around in Europe for a semester. Life goes on, without you, and most of life doesn't even notice (or care) that you were never there. Friends move on (or at least graduate and literally move on), so now I am in a completely new environment. Everyone I know that's still here, I didn't know well enough before I left to easily have a close relationship with again. So it's going to take time and effort to rebuild old bonds and make new ones. I know readjustment is part of life, but it's difficult.

And now, more than ever, I'm missing Paris. I see the extreme differences between my life there and my life back here -- in southern California college land and superficial Los Angeles. And that's reverse-culture shock.

Je laisse mon coeur a Paris. La France me manque, mais je la souviens toujours.