I have spent so much time improving my Chinese and jumping into the culture that I stopped noticing anything about it. I had no foreign friends, outside of work. My day-to-day activities became local; there were no thoughts about why things were different. I stopped analyzing the world I was living in and just lived.
I could no longer see the forest for the trees. I may as well have been living in my old home of upstate New York.
Having some old friends and family visit was helpful. Their culture shock brought me back into perspective, thankfully. It is important to look at the whole picture and examine your life. You do not have to be in a foreign place, it simply forces you to think about things because they are so different.
If you fail to take yourself out of your current perspective and look at the entire forest, you don’t actively live. Instead, you just respond to the stimulus of your environment. You live more like a machine than a person.
