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[emsu04]

i'm in the middle of reading henry james' 'portrait of a lady,' which ,from what i can gather at this point (am not very far along), is the story of a 23-year old american orphan who gets whisked away to europe by her wealthy aunt and learns to navigate the strange customs of the europeans. there was a line i read today that really stuck out:

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[breedlove]

oh, i know exactly where you're coming from! my reverse culture-shock upon moving back to the U.S. was ten times worse than what i experienced when i moved to france. it IS shocking to realize how america is. i remember being appalled by something as innocuous and pedestrian as the overhead announcements in, say, the drugstore.

i'm kind of afraid that the longer i'm away, the farther removed from my friends, my family and my culture i'll become, and i'll end up completely alone & unable to identify with anyone or anything except my own experiences...which is really scary, if you think about it.

i gave a lot (a lot!) of thought to this while i was in europe. it IS really scary! and, i would argue, worth it ... but it's a lonely, lonely feeling.

[emsu04]

yes, france was much weirder because of the language thing - i remember feeling so out of sorts when i came back & everyone was speaking english!

aw, we should talk more about living in paris, as i think we probably had quite similar experiences there - where did you study?

x

[breedlove]

the language thing definitely made it weirder, but i think culture shock is still culture shock!

i studied at the sorbonne! my school actually had a co-partnership with the universite de paris, so i took 4 courses at the sorbonne and 1 course with my program (bc in paris) per semester. it was sort of crazy, since the french students were taking, like, 3 courses at the sorbonne per semester! but it was so worth it. where did you study?

[emsu04]

i was at the sorbonne too (through AIFS)! my language classes were all at the sorbonne, and i think my 'history & architecture of paris' class was one of theirs too - and i took a fashion history class at ESMOD.

i miss it so much! x