I would have bought this blue Volkswagen bus and driven it back to California.


I very nearly did. My roommates in Guatemala and I talked a lot about buying a VW van (they were for sale everywhere in Central in America and for as little as USD 600) and then driving it up through Mexico and into California. They needed to get to Los Angeles and I needed to go back to San Francisco and making the journey overland seemed like it’d be a fun adventure. I’d met quite a few people on the road who’d done it (one of my roommate’s in Antigua had driven there from New York on her motorcycle) and from all accounts, the journey seemed fairly safe and super affordable.
And I would have gone through with it too, if it weren’t for the fact that I wasn’t sure the van would have survived the trip. Neither my roommates nor myself knew enough about cars to know which one to buy or what questions to ask. We’d have probably made it only half-way to Mexico city before the radiator fell out or something and then we’d be car-less and stranded in the desert somewhere. And although that could have been interesting, I didn’t have the funds to buy a bus or plane ticket if something like that went wrong (a planet ticket from Mexico is double the price of a plane ticket from Guatemala).
My dreams of owning a Volkeswagon were therefore temporarily put on hold. But one day when I have the money and have found a mechanic with a lot of time on his hands, I’d love to give it a try.
So. Who’s up for the idea?

I’ve been back on US soil for six days now and so far I haven’t felt even one ounce of reverse culture shock. And I gotta say, I’m a little disappointed. After my experience returning to New York from Tokyo and after reading this article on Vagabondish, I was actually looking forward to it.
Reverse culture shock is a little like walking around your neighborhood at dusk. All the houses, lawn-mowers and mailboxes are exactly how you remembered them, except the edges are all a little blurry and everything that was once familiar takes on this magical, twilight-y vibe. Nothing feels quite real. It’s trippy. And freakin’ awesome.
But the only sign of reverse culture shock I’ve experienced and about the only reminder I have that I was even in Central America at all, is that I have to continually remember to flush the toilet paper (and not dispose of it in the trash). When I first arrived into the airport in Miami, I
actually forgot and absentmindedly stuffed it into the small waste receptacle that’s reserved for discarding feminine hygiene products. Oops.
But besides that and the one time I slipped and muttered ‘Lo siento’ instead of ‘I’m sorry’, after I whacked a man with my hammock while I was trying to peel it off the baggage claim, I’ve found it pretty easy to readjust back again. It’s like I never left.
Maybe it’s because I wasn’t gone for very long (only four and a half months) or maybe it’s because I’ve left and returned home again so many times in the past that I’ve grown immune to it.
After all, something can only be a ‘shock’ if it’s unexpected. When your life is consistently lived between cultures and you’re forever in a state of limbo, that stage of readjustment stops being a stage and just becomes a barely noticed fact of life.