Culture Shock

I have been back in the United States for one week. Adjusting to living in my hometown again is more difficult than I expected. This is the first time in 6 years that I have been here without a definite date to leave again. Walking around our annual town festival on Saturday, an old friend and I remarked that it was like a bad family reunion. I continue to feel surprised by how many people I know. Some things have changed, and some have not.

Here are a few of the shocks I have experienced, things that are totally different from what I have become accustomed to:

• No one says "eh" 
• The rate of speech is much faster than I have been hearing for the past three months
• I don't sound like I have an accent anymore (well, to anyone not from the Chicagoland area, I have a definite accent)
• I went for a run Sunday morning and did not see a single other pedestrian, and the number of cars could be counted on one hand
• I got chased by a ferocious dog on my run
• Everything is big
• I don't hear noises from any neighbors when I am in my house
• No wireless internet at my house
• I recognized and could name most of the people at my church
• It's hot
• We have air conditioning
• There are screens on the windows and doors, and they must be used
• No mountains
• No ocean or sea
• No public transportation within a half hour of my house
• There are fireflies over the cornfields
• I wore a t-shirt and shorts to town without feeling under-dressed

I could go on and on because there are so many things that are different here. I have not yet braved a grocery store, but I'm sure that will be another adventure into the land of the unknown - or at least long-forgotten. I guess all of this change is good for enhancing my adaptability though. :)

Crossing walls

Edo and I went to Berlin for a weekend as a sibling bonding event. Berlin is a fascinating city, and we enjoyed a tourist-tour via bikes for the majority of Saturday. On Sunday we got our own bikes and went to an old castle (Schloss Charlottenburg) and the East Side Gallery, the longest remaining piece of the Berlin Wall, which is dedicated to artistic expression. The pictures on the wall, painted in graffiti style, were fascinating. On the other side of the wall, pictures of walls that still exist today provided a moving display.

The moment of the trip that impressed me the most can be captured in this photo:

All through Berlin they have a strip of cobblestones or concrete where the wall once stood that separated Western, capitalist Berlin from Eastern, socialist Berlin. The wall went up overnight in the 60s, and it opened overnight in 1989. A wall that separated families and standards of living and personal freedom for twenty years. People were killed trying to cross the boundary between the halves of the city. Now, the city hardly shows the division between east and west. We walked over the strip of the Berlin wall like it was no big deal, as easy as strolling on the beach, while people died trying to cross when I was still alive.

The wall is now a place for people to point out that walls still exist in our world. I did not even know about many of the walls that exist, including one on the US-Mexico border. It's incredible that we can accept things so that they seem normal, or even expected. Looking back in history, we see that these walls or practices or wars were not acceptable at all. I hope and pray that I will have the compassion and awareness to recognize the walls in my life and to take them down so that crossing them is as easy as crossing the street.