{"id":737,"date":"2013-07-25T17:25:35","date_gmt":"2013-07-25T11:40:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dorjegurung.com\/blog\/?p=737"},"modified":"2026-03-13T22:17:37","modified_gmt":"2026-03-13T22:17:37","slug":"travel-you-know-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dorjegurung.com\/blog\/2013\/07\/travel-you-know-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Travel: You Know You&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong>You know you have lived abroad for too long when&#8230;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>you have spent more time abroad than in your own home country.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>you have acquired a foreign accent.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>you have lost the fluency you once had in your two mother tongues (Nepali and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tamangic_languages\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Seke<\/a>, referred to as a dialect in the Wikipedia entry) and have pretty much lost the ability to communicate in (Hindi) the third language you learned growing up.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>the language you express yourself best in is (English) the fourth language you learned growing up.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>you even think and dream in (English) the fourth language.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>you return home you experience not reverse culture shock, as is the norm, but reverse reverse culture shock, basically culture shock.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>your home country has become a vacation destination.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>you have celebrated some other holiday (Christmas) more than any of your own.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>you have acquired some not-very-useful skills, such as the ability to\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>interconvert between five or more different currencies.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>recognize and distinguish twenty odd languages (though you might not speak them all!).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>recognize a dozen or so different accents.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>swear in several different languages.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>determine the nationality of many people by just their appearance and\/or their gestures and mannerisms.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>identify the nationality of people from certain countries and regions based on their <a href=\"https:\/\/dorjegurung.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/guessing-nationality-by-handwriting.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">handwriting<\/a> (such as those from Italy, Hong Kong, Japan etc.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>You know you have been travelling\/moving around too much when&#8230;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>you have made 30 changes in residential address in 25 years; in other words, you have spent less than a year at a residential address on average.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>you have lived in 14 cities in 11 countries spread across 5 continents in that same period.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>the longest you have retained a residential address is for just two-and-a-half years, just once at that, and the second longest is two years, also just once.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>you have set foot in over 40 countries (in spite of the hurdles to travel imposed on you because of nationality).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>you live for the journey&#8211;the journey becomes more important than the destination, really<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>you have lost your sense of how expensive or cheap things are (when you have paid anywhere from 50 cents to 15 (US)\u00a0dollars for a 300 ml bottle of beer, for example!).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>you compare costs with not only your home country but four or five other countries (anyway).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>only one of the material belongings you set out with 25 years ago remains: a tie.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>you have lost your intuitive sense for the direction you look first before crossing a road; in other words, you have to remind yourself which side of the road people drive on.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>football means any one of three different sports: American Football, Australian Football, and what the rest of the world calls football!<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>you use a travel adaptor at home, because your electronic gadgets come from four different systems! (Still missing Swiss though!)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>every major city begins to look the same&#8211;they all have McDonald&#8217;s, Pizza Hut, Burger King, Subway, huge sky scrapers, big expensive cars, busy and noisy streets etc. etc., unfortunately.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>you have a world view about most issues.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>most importantly, social status has lost its meaning<\/strong> (since it has changed so often, so many times).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You know you have lived abroad for too long when&#8230; You know you have been travelling\/moving around too much when&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":7382,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[43],"tags":[130,131],"class_list":["post-737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-travel","tag-international-travel","tag-nepal-travel"],"blocksy_meta":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.dorjegurung.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/passport-cover-front-cover-feat-image.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2Jbro-bT","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dorjegurung.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dorjegurung.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dorjegurung.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dorjegurung.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dorjegurung.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=737"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.dorjegurung.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/737\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30117,"href":"https:\/\/www.dorjegurung.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/737\/revisions\/30117"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dorjegurung.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dorjegurung.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dorjegurung.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dorjegurung.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}