Trust me. Read on.

If the only color you have seen in your whole life is green and then all of a sudden one day you see red for the first time you will most likely compare red with green and not with some other color you have never seen before- like purple. But maybe after starting your inevitable comparison of green and red you realize that while you know what green and red are when you see them, you could never describe them to someone who has never seen them before -even though you have seen them both throughout your whole life. It’s not just that green is hard to explain to someone who has never seen it before but also that, after seeing red, green doesn’t look the same anymore. You end up having pre-and-post red images of what green looks like. Then you think: I don’t even know how to describe green, how could I ever describe red if I’ve only seen it for two and a half years?

Cultures are like colors.

If you didn’t already guess, I didn’t just upload something I wrote after waking up from anesthesia induced hallucination or something to that effect. In fact (green = US) and (red = Chile). I just got back from my hometown (Bar Harbor Maine). I was there for four weeks during my winter break from school (it is winter in the southern hemisphere) but the fact that I was in the US for a little bit does not prevent me from writing about Chile. In fact, I think that reverse culture shock usually leads me to a slightly different take on Chile no matter how many times I experience both ‘culture’ and ‘reverse-culture’ shock.