You would think culture shock doesn’t exist when you arrive in you own country -your familiar and dearest home. Experience tells me it exists to the highest degree. If you won’t call it culture-shock, then life-is-so-incredibly-different-shock, might do.. But to me culture-shock covers it…
When I first arrive at home I feel strangely unfamiliar with everything, but in a very exciting way. Yet everything is just like before, as if time hasn’t passed. But time has passed, cause your mind and heart is filled to the edge with stories, feelings, and thoughts that you can’t wait to put words to.
But days and weeks passes. No-one knows your life, thus, no one knows what to ask. Noone to blame for that, but the stories and feelings starts making clusters in you mind, and you find yourself living half-way where you left and half-way at home. You’re driving on a constant zero, not knowing in and out and up and down; also called autopilot. Life may be good, but yet so confusing. Suddenly time has changed from beginning of the summer till end of the summer..how come? Both excited, but slightly unwillingly, you start the countdown for yet another departure. And THAT is when, all in a sudden, something happens that changes something with how everything feels. Is it Gods plan? Why now? Now, just one week before you leave, you meet good people who make me feel great and alive, the sun shines through, work becomes fun, busy becomes fun, you make fires on beach, drink wine in the moonlight, you need less sleep… life becomes busy and fun. You feel 100% at home in your own home. You are living the now. Your mind finally landed. And then a msg pops up on your phone “you can now check in on flight KL149 to Valencia”. A thin and lonely tear drips down you shin as the car takes you out the garage and leaves behind your street. “What a wonderful vacation, you think…it should’ve lasted so much longer”
This is how coming home feels like to me. It’s always the same. It takes time. Luckily in all that time, comes quite a few songs – songs I hope to show to you as I do the last finish throughout the coming weeks.
I now sit in a hostel in Valencia, Spain. About to start a semester of studies, work, gigging, experiencing, hablar espanol, voy al playa… learn and grow. I'm sure that culture-shock will hit me here as well, but this time it as at least a NEW culture..so it should be okay,r right? Keeps your ears and eyes up for new music, cause it will come. I can feel it already. This is a good place to write and be creative!
