RE-PATRIATED AMERICAN EX-PATS

Do you feel about the US as ex-smokers do about fags?

No. I don't look down on them. It's just that as an American, I think it strange to have culture shock from being in my own country. I guess it will take a while to get into the swing of things.

KATE THE SAINT TO THREAD!

Uh, no, other way around for me. I was born in the UK, raised in the US, then dropped back in the UK about four years ago. My passport and my accent don't match. I feel equally NOT AT HOME in both the UK and the US. I never felt American, so that didn't change matters. But I always kind of believed that the reason I never fit in in the US was because I was fundamentally British. Coming home to the UK was a weird culture shock to realise that no, I wasn't British either.

Being an Ex-Pat is a nationality all its own. You'll realise this when you realise that no matter where you are, the people you get along with best are other Ex-Pats. In the US, most of my closest friends were British. In the UK, most of my closest friends are North American. It's not the nationality that I'm attracted to, it's the sense of alienness.

I'm sorry, it will never completely wear off. You'll always carry a slight touch of culture shock. But it'll feel less weird. It's kind of cool in an odd way to be able to view your own culture as an outsider would. It gives you a very healthy perspective on things!

I'm a State Dept. brat, so I grew up overseas mostly. Through high school, I lived in the US for 5 years and in various other countries (India, Yugoslavia, France) for the rest. While I was in the US for college, the rest of my family was in Hong Kong, and I would go there for Christmas/summer. While I was overseas, we would usually come back to the US (Florida) for about a month each summer, so I was never totally seperated from American culture, but it was still weird. We would go on mini spending sprees, buying all the junk food and toys we couldn't get in other countries. It was a big deal. I don't know. One way that it helped me was that the schools I went to in other countries were essentially government-owned private schools which were pretty rigorous academically, but when I came back to the US for the last two years of high school, I was in a (shitty) public school, so I got straight A's, a lot of which were in AP classes, my junior and senior year, allowing me to get into a pretty good college. Those last two years were the worst "culture shock" I had, but I think that was mostly due to being in a school that was about 75% black students and 20% Hispanic students after I had been in schools with mostly white American and European students (even in India).