@mizka Happy Anniversary to us http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2008/12/03/we-got-married.html
Inspired by this feature at Pictory ...
The first place I ever really got culture shock was Australia.
The odd thing was that I, even at that age, I'd travelled a fair amount before - going all over Europe, Morocco, Cuba, swathes of South East Asia. Not only that but it wasn't the first time I'd I'd been there either - I'd worked and travelled there for several months a few years before.
However I'd just spent 2 months in Palo Alto working probably 80 hour weeks and then flown into London on Monday and then left bound for Oz with my then girlfriend on the Wednesday at 5am.
About 3 days later I was still nauseous with jet lag and still utterly exhausted. We went into Brisbane and kept bumping into people she knew and suddenly, standing in the town center I felt a weird almost vertigo-like sensation and it dawned on me that I was experiencing acute and pronounced culture shock.
Looking back I think it's because everything was nearly the same as the UK but just very slightly different - like a weird, real life application of The Uncanny Valley. In the William GIbson novel "Pattern Recognition" the protagonist continuously refers to this phenomenon as 'The Mirror World'
"The plugs on appliances are huge, triple-pronged, for a species of current that only powers electric chairs, in America. Cars are reversed, left to right, inside; telephone handsets have a different weight, a different balance; the covers of paperbacks look like Australian money."
For a while I kind of had a slight feeling of how people with Capgras Syndrome - the bizarre condition in which a sufferer holds a delusional belief that a friend, spouse, parent or other close family member, has been replaced by an identical-looking impostor - might feel. That uneasy feeling of certainty that, even though everything looks normal, something is terribly, terribly wrong.
It passed and, since then, I've had only the faintest echoes of that sensation. Occasionally I miss it - it wasn't entirely unpleasant and, without it, I fret that I'm somehow taking it all for granted.
So I keep travelling to prove myself wrong.
