After 2 years on the road we knew that some kind of culture shock would be inevitable. Reverse culture shock is when you return to your home country and find things are… well, different. It’s not good or bad, it’s just not what it was like before and often it’s accompanied with feelings that you belong there just a little bit less. In our case, we think ourselves rather fortunate because our reverse culture shocks were much more funny than depressing.

In order in which we experienced them:

Noise

We cleared customs in Newark, NJ and visited some friends in NYC. As soon as we got on the train to NYC we started to notice that we understood everything. It. Was. So. Nice! After 2 years of hoping in and out of english speaking countries, some of which still sounded foreign to us, we finally understood 99.999999% - saweet!!! Except in the 1 1/2 hours it took us to get to Brooklyn we noticed that not only did we understand everything, but we could also hear everything. It’s like our sense of hearing had somehow become super heightened. We arrived to Brooklyn thoroughly exhausted and thankful it was night so we could just go to sleep. Since that first day everything feels very normal, but those first few hours back were very, very noisy.

Laundry

Now that we are living at home, we don’t have the luxury of hotel sheets & towels. Or having the AirBnB change the linens every 7 days. We didn’t realize how little time it took us to do laundry until we had our first house laundry day. For sure running a house is a lot more work than we remembered. And what about cleaning?! Yes, we knew you’d ask. We are blessed with an amazing cleaning service so that hasn’t changed, but the amount of laundry has easily tripled since our travel days.

Data

We are still super stingy with our mobile data! We know! Whaaaa? with so many unlimited plans available, what do you care what apps use your data? On the road we generally got the smallest amount of data to survive a country and since we’ve been back we signed up with Google Fi. With Google Fi you only pay for the data you need so… I guess things haven’t changed from when we were traveling. On the bright side, our mobile bill, including text, calls & data rarely ever exceeds $70 for 2 lines. We think that’s pretty reasonable but if you know of a better savings, please comment below! We still like saving a penny wherever we can.

Huge

We knew that things back home were generally bigger but we completely underestimated how big things would feel. Even our tiny apartment (and it’s tiny at just over 700sq ft/ 65sq m) felt spacious; not a word I would’ve used to describe it before. It even felt tall! That last bit might just be our faulty memory. Particularly the food! The portions here are HUGE! Don’t get us wrong, we usually end up sharing so the cost is pretty cheap, but when you see a giant sized burrito after 2 years, you can’t help but just think, “Dang! that’s big!”

Minimalism

Expectedly, we are much more minimalistic than before we left. We had hoped we’d want to continue living a more simple lifestyle, and by simple we mean, not adding to what we already had, and we had a lot. Since we’ve been back we’ve continued to pair down our house and clothes and it’s been much more refreshing that we’d thought. Not sure what the future holds, but we hope we can continue this less things, more experiences, lifestyle.

As always, there’s a video of us chattin’ it up -

What about you? have you had any instances of culture shock? Comment below, we’d love to hear other anecdotes.