I can only imagine that living abroad for years can leave you feeling very distant from the place you grew up in and the people you grew up around.
But I also recognize how absolutely wonderful and freeing it must feel to leave the confines of your home country to go and explore what the rest of the world has to offer.
So I wanted to ask the ex-pats of the BuzzFeed Community: if you've ever lived abroad for a long period of time, what was your experience like, and what kind of reverse culture shock did you experience upon returning home?
Maybe you're a Midwestern American that relocated to Italy three years ago for work, and you experienced how wonderful it was to be able to walk outside and immediately have tons of shops that sell locally-made products and homegrown foods steps away from your front door only to return to the Midwest and find that you need a car to do absolutely everything, and none of the products were nearly as high quality.
Or maybe you're a Canadian that moved to Bali six years ago, and you found that trading in the snow and cold for crystal blue waters and high temperatures was exactly what you needed for a better quality of life. But upon returning home, you found yourself feeling like everything had changed, and you felt very distant and isolated from the place you grew up in and the people you once knew.
Maybe you're a Londoner who's now spent two years studying abroad in Korea, and upon arriving, you quickly became enamored with how trustworthy people were of their fellow citizens. You even found people leaving their personal belongings alone in the coffee shops to use the restroom. But when you returned home, the reverse culture shock hit you hard when you realized it's definitely not that way in London and someone will, in fact, steal your things.
