How Travel Changes You, Even When You Don't Realize It Yet

[0:00] Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Put the Guidebook Down, a Kultura Travel podcast brought to you by me, Kiara, the creator as your host. Today we're going to talk about the version of you that comes home after a trip, maybe the one you don't recognize yet. This is going to be an episode all about how travel changes you, even when you don't realize it, maybe during the moment or when you come home. This episode is very personal to me, because as someone who has lived abroad for three years, in different, very different countries — you got the Eastern European and then also Southeast Asian abroad experiences, going from not just Moldova to Indonesia, but Moldova, back home to the States, and then into Indonesia, then back to the States — it was a lot of whiplash and back and forth. And it was also the first time that I felt culture shock. So for me, this story touches a little bit more on the personal level, and that's right, we're going to get vulnerable, so I hope you're ready.

I'm going to start today's episode off with more about my initial impressions when I came to Moldova. This was my first time abroad, and most importantly, my first time abroad, that first time I was living abroad for a long period of time, and I had to navigate this whole new world. Now, the one piece of advice that I was given from my Fulbright program was to be flexible and adaptable, which are very broad pieces of advice and characteristics, and it really felt more in terms of how you interpret it, keeping in mind the whole safety element of it. This was the piece of information that really changed my perspective and experience in Moldova. I found myself more open to new experiences.

One of the first times I adopted this term and phrase to my own personal experience in Moldova was when it was International Teachers' Day, which is a huge holiday abroad, if you were not aware — maybe not so much in the States. At this point in time I did not know any Romanian, and my colleagues mostly only spoke Romanian, only two spoke Russian, and even then it was mostly mixed in with Romanian, what we like to call the Moldovan language. And them trying to explain to me that we were going to go on our International Teachers' Day celebration after the school day was a big language barrier, which involved a lot of back and forth with Google Translate — and Google Translate at this point in time was not very accurate. So what did I do? I'm sorry, Mom, but yes, I did get in a stranger's car — when I say a stranger's car, my colleague's car, so the woman who was responsible for me was there, she was going on this trip, but I just got piled into a car with a bunch of the coworkers going to this destination. I didn't even know where we were going. And we pull up, and there's just a cookout area, and more and more people are showing up — more teachers from the school, some alumni or former teachers who are also teaching at new schools in the city — and they just start cooking and hanging out, someone brings out the music, people start dancing, people are working together to put together the dishes. It was just a really fun time, and that's when I realized the power of just being open-minded and overcoming language barriers.

So then this made me more eager to adopt this flexibility and adaptability to more moments of my Moldova travel, and that's ultimately what led me to all of my unique relationship-building and experiences within my two years in Moldova, but then also while traveling abroad, because I took this flexibility and adaptability to every country I visited — whether I was in Serbia trying to navigate the public transportation and only found out my original itinerary was completely cancelled, having to then revert to a whole different one of spontaneity, that was a flexible situation I was able to adjust to, or those times where I didn't know anyone where I was going, I didn't speak the local language, but just by making the effort to communicate with those around me and try to seek understanding in the most mutual way we can with the skills we have available, that changed my experience.

Now on the flip side, we talk about going into Indonesia. This was my first time actually in Asia, let alone living there. I had done, with my program, some prep and some culture prep, so we had an idea of maybe how to navigate some of the cultural barriers or differences, such as "selam." Now, for those who are not aware of some of the Javanese culture in Indonesia, there's a whole aspect of Javanese culture and life, and selam is part of it — how you address people is part of it, how you go about your day is part of it, and it's really all about respect and giving respect to one another. And that was a little bit different for me, because in some parts of the States we're very straightforward with how we address people, maybe a little bit too informal with how we address people in situations, and more confrontational. We always picture, I feel, the classic New Yorker line, of people walking in the street and the car's coming, and they go, hey, I'm walking here — yeah, you don't see that in Indonesia. It's all handled in a very mellow way, passively, behind a closed door, into a private space, so you're giving respect to one another, protecting each other's image, and seeking understanding without the external influences of other parties getting involved. This was something that also changed me, and one that we'll get into later about reverse culture shock. But that was my first time I really experienced it, because coming back to the States, where all the conflict was handled openly, people were maybe rude or aggressive, going from that very quiet, respectful demeanor into this more aggressive approach in daily communications, was a little bit of a shock to me.

But this — going into these two stories, and really the whiplash I experienced going between the three different countries and cultures — these experiences and the time abroad and the connections I made really started to change me, and at first I didn't notice it, but then you start to feel maybe that you're not fitting in exactly where you used to, and you start to reflect: is this me, is this what I've experienced, is it the people who were originally in my close friend group that have changed? The correct answer is hard to navigate — my interpretation is that it's a mix of everything. You've changed, some people have changed, some are stuck in the same place from when you left. People did influence you — maybe they opened your mind, and now you have these different opinions and ideas and perspectives. But the most important thing is that it's okay that you are different now from when you left, and that you did have some change. And when it comes to culture and travel, we like to see this as the personal growth that we want to see — that personal change, the positive perspective, and open-mindedness that you then take to all of your future connections, relationship-building, and travel experiences.

So let's get more into the psychology of cultural exposure — how being immersed in a new culture shifts your instincts, maybe how language learning rewires the way you see yourself, and this idea of culture shock, right — I'm sure you've heard it, you've heard maybe reverse culture shock, they are real, and we're going to get into it.

So let's go back to the first point, more in terms of how being immersed in a new culture shifts your instincts. I talked about the whole adaptability and flexibility — that is something that is 100% true, and people feel, maybe without vocalizing or realizing it, that depending on where you're living, where you're staying, you start to have these different instincts or natural reactions to certain situations. For example, living in Moldova, in my city, the buses were never on time — frankly there was not really good bus schedules, it started to get better by year two when I was there, but it was still very much intuitional and local knowledge, even the locals were like, the bus system here is bad. So one of the big things was, for me, trying to travel into Iași, Romania, just to get into Romania to maybe be able to travel to other places, or just to visit a new city, get out of the home city I was living in — all of this was possible by either bus or train. Now the train had only two to three departures a day, now it's down to one. The bus was the mashrutka, the vans, and the schedule was not online — you literally just had to take a photo of the sign on the front of the car that had the departure times. Now, talking about instincts, there's no way to track if the car had already come or left for the bus, so you just had to trust your basic knowledge of travel, and now you're going to try to get there early to see if the car arrives early or leaves early — if you're going to arrive late, you know that you take the risk that you're going to miss the bus or the train.

So for example, with me, when I first arrived, I talked to a local, I got the understanding that the bus to Iași, Romania, they don't know the schedule, you just have to take a picture of the car's placard with the times. So I did that, I arrived there early, and sure enough, it arrives early and it departs within like two minutes — sometimes right on time or early, depending on how full the car gets. So my first time was okay, I got on and then I arrived in Romania. What I didn't realize, it's the same issue where you have to know the departure times from Romania back into the home city, otherwise you're stuck. So the instinct was to try to talk to the local people who may have answers, and when they don't have answers, you then try to go to Google — Google doesn't have the answers, because they're not very online on that side of the world. So then you start to go to the bus station and wait, that's your natural instinct, and when the bus doesn't show up, trying not to have that panic or anxiety, think about what other options you have. So in my case, I had times where the car did show up or times where it didn't show up, and the times where it didn't show up, I felt I had two options — I could either try to navigate the train scene, or I could pay the really expensive fee to maybe try to find a taxi, a car, that would take me over the border, which I came to learn is not easy because of the border regulations and people not having the proper documentation or passports, so very complicated. So eventually I did learn how to navigate the train, because I had to, and with that you had to learn which station you come into, how to get from there to my hometown, etc. But you find more openness to all of these last-minute changes and shifts. So your instinct becomes more of — rather than just being proactive to your travel, you learn how to be intelligently reactive to the situation. So when something goes wrong or not according to plan, you instantly start to go automatically to a plan B, C, D, and E, and then start going down them and testing out if B is available, if not then pursuing option C, etc. So you start to see changes like that, or maybe the gut reactiveness that comes to certain situations that you normally wouldn't have encountered before when you're in the States or your hometown — your instincts do change depending on the observations and data you collect by living in that other country.

Now the next one is really important to me as a linguist: how language learning rewires the way you see yourself. But I also want to add the component in terms of how this language learning interprets how you see your world — the one you left, the one you're currently in, and then when you leave to return. Now, I think depending on what your native language is and the languages you learn, that impacts how you express yourself and how you see the world, and we see this a lot in linguistics, with words that are not translatable from one language to another. The one that immediately comes to mind from my Romanian learning is the word "dor," D-O-R. Now, dor is one of those words that cannot be translated into English, because it's a feeling, a different type of feeling of longing, needing, a part of you is missing, but that's the closest you can get to the translation — you can never express it the same way in English. So when Romanians, Moldovans, the people use "dor," they're able to poetically express how they see someone or some aspect that's important to them in a way that maybe we can't express in English to that same caliber. We can get close, but we're never exactly going to replicate it.

This was my first actual real-life encounter, as a linguist, in language learning, because people would talk of this "dor" to me, and I was never able to fully feel it. And this is a question I always ask people when I met them while traveling — I'd be like, oh, if you speak multiple languages, are you able to feel emotion in those other languages you learn, secondly or thirdly, to the extent that you feel in your native language? And I found that everyone had very different answers and interpretations, and that's the beauty of language learning. Some people were able to find that emotional connection, whereas others were saying that how they express the language was just cold, or just felt like a robot reciting it. I think there definitely needs to be a whole other episode on language learning and how deep it can go in terms of seeing the world yourself. But I find then that once you learn a language, you learn how to express how you feel, think, or see things in your native language differently. So I can be more poetic and try to explain what dor is to people, but they're never going to understand it unless they knew dor growing up. I think for me, language learning has made it a little bit confusing in terms of how I express myself and then also how I interpret the world. And I know for myself and some other multi-language learners I've spoken to, we have — not code-switching, but the way you switch languages in your head depending on the situation you're in, but then also how you interpret or digest the information given to you in one language.

So for me, in English, that's my native language, that's where I am most in the day-to-day, now these days back being back in the States. But when I'm then talking to someone, maybe in an angry sense, or I am talking more about the history or my experience in Romania, Moldova, I switch to Russian, and I don't know if you can tell, but my accent changes a little bit, and I get really into it, and I start to see how my mind kind of shifts to certain topics, or maybe how I view it, just because of all the context I took in while being there and learning the language. So you start to see different sides of yourself being expressed, and different manifestations and verbiage depending on the languages you've learned and the curated experiences and perceptions you have behind it. So I'm going to leave that point there for you to reflect on, and we'll save the language learning discussion maybe as a three-part series for a later topic.

The last one I really want to jump into is this idea of culture shock and reverse culture shock, as I mentioned earlier. Now, I feel culture shock, unfortunately, has this dramatic level tied to it, because we tend to think of "shock" as this really big, dramatic instance or serious thing. It can be subtle, and that's why maybe some people don't realize they're experiencing culture shock or reverse culture shock, because it's small manifestations or feelings that don't necessarily come to the surface right away. For me, I never experienced culture shock, despite being abroad for the first time, living abroad for the first time in Moldova, and being dropped there, or between all of my travels, until I was actually in Indonesia — again, Southeast Asia for the first time — and having gone from American culture and Moldovan culture into Southeast Asian culture without much knowledge around Southeast Asia and the day-to-day actions and how people carry themselves, I did have some shock with that. Now, again, it's not dramatic — I'm just talking about the way you address people, even for starters, it's a small thing, but for me it was something I had to get used to, because they always use different terms for women, for men, and your age or social hierarchy — I don't want to say hierarchy, but like where you stand in society — who addresses someone. And that's not, again, maybe from an outsider's perspective, you're like, wow, you're ranking those people — no, it's just how they express the respect and address one another in their language and culture. So again, it's not a bad thing, it's just something I had to get used to. And I mentioned earlier, the whole adjustment to being respectful and how you handle confrontation in Indonesian culture was different. So again, it falls down, unfortunately, into this broad label of "culture shock," which, again, it doesn't have to be dramatic — it could be these small things, but it's again called culture shock.

Now on the flip side, culture shock to reverse culture shock — this is again coming from Indonesia, where I had the most experience, and it leads into our closing of how you feel returning home. So I've talked to multiple people about this, because they've asked me, Kiara, how do you adjust to being back home after you've lived in these different places for a long period of time, you've adopted the local language, you've adopted local customs, cultures, mannerisms, etc. How do you find your place in the home that you once left? Because the reality is, coming home, you notice that you don't fit in with the people you used to fit in with on a day-to-day basis, maybe even your best friend — you feel disconnected from the environment that you're in, your home, and you just feel different, or this dissonance to not really relating on the same level as you did before you left. That's reverse culture shock, in a way, but it's also just you changing and being different from the person that you were before you left.

And the way I was able to come to terms with this was actually from a video on Instagram — I have it bookmarked, because I do have to refer to it sometimes as affirmation that there are other people who experience this and that you're not alone. And it's something I always share with anyone who messages me or asks what this is, like how to navigate it, because I feel the video captured it so perfectly. What the video said is that you, as a person, were able to be an expat or fully immersed into a local culture for however long you lived abroad or were abroad, and you did as much as you could and were able to immerse into the local culture, but you'll never fully be that local person in that country. So as much as I lived in Moldova for two years, I learned Romanian up to fluency from scratch, and also knew Russian, I immersed in the day-to-day, was hanging out with host families, I was doing essentially a bunch of Moldova things, to the point where Moldovans were like, are you American? But I'm never going to be Moldovan, a local who was born in Moldova. Now, when I come back, I was not the same me that I was when I left, so those who come back home are not feeling like themselves to the same caliber and instance that they were before they departed for their destination. And that's what we call, maybe a little bit, imposter syndrome, but then also just not feeling like you, because you're not the same you that you were before you left. So then what is this? Where do you belong? That's what I like to call, from the video, "the middle." You exist in this new middle, of people who were fully immersed and adopted these new ways, perspectives, language, mannerisms, but then you're not the same level as you were on the day-to-day back in your hometown. So you're in this middle with other people who are also in the middle, and it's up to you to find the new community where you fit in, who most likely is also in this middle.

And from that point, I don't have the answer now, but this is where I am — finding similar people who are in the middle, to exist together and have that communication, that community, someone who can relate to you, because you all had that experience of living abroad and deeply immersing and integrating, but then you're not the same person you were when you came back home. So my best suggestion and recommendation for these people is really to find those other people who are in the middle and relate to one another, be open to share that, and just know and acknowledge that it's okay to be different from the person you were, that you came home different. I hope in a way that you feel different, and you are different, and that, as we talk about with cultural travel, you grew in a more positive way — more open-mindedness, and more experience, worldly experiences and connections than the person you were before you left. And to me, that's what we're all about here, is that immersive cultural travel, to really immerse so deeply in a culture that you are able to learn beyond just the tourist surface level, to come back with new perspectives, ideas, opinions that challenge the social norm of what's in your hometown, in a respectful manner, of course.

So what I would encourage you to think about, or even journal, is what did your last trip teach you that had nothing to do with the destination? I would love to hear your responses, if you're open to sharing, or maybe even what your interpretation is of this "middle," in our comment section, either if you're listening to this on our Substack or our YouTube channel, or if you are on a different channel — hello, welcome — but please find your way to our website, Substack, or YouTube so you can share your ideas and opinions about this with me.

But this is why we built Kultura Travel — because the trips that change you are the ones we should be accounting for and focusing on, not just the ones that end up in your camera roll and end up back on Instagram with just a superficial caption. We want you to build those relationships and really build yourself into the next, improved, better version of you.

So thank you to everyone who listened. Please make sure you subscribe to our channels, and send in your travel stories, maybe for a chance to be featured on our channels. Follow us on Instagram, TikTok, X, we're all there. And please share ideas — if you have interest in sharing your stories, please reach out. We've had several guests come on from my own personal network, and we're actually having more of our travelers around the world currently share their own stories and experiences. So always happy to help amplify positive stories and experiences in travel, and to show people that there is more to travel than just taking photos and getting the next best Instagram post out there. So thank you so much, everyone, and see you on the next episode. Bye.