Culture Shock in Ushuaia

How it caught up to me in the shampoo aisle

I was born in Peru and grew up in Chile, Panama, and the US. I lived in Colombia after college, then returned to the US. The strange thing about living between cultures, as I have, is that I feel at home in all of these places…and, at the same time, not fully at home in any of them.

So during my three-month trip in Chile and Argentina, I was more or less comfortable culturally. There were small reminders that things were different from what I’d become used to in the US, like when I accidentally bought an armful of shredded coconut instead of the four cups I needed for my recipe. But I didn’t really feel the extreme longing for home, fatigue, irritability, and anger toward my host culture that are commonly part of culture shock.

And then I needed to buy shampoo.

A generic picture of bath products, because I didn’t take a picture of my shampoo or the grocery aisle.

When I moved from Chile to Kentucky as a nine-year-old, I had a memorable moment of culture shock when I realized a stranger standing near me and my mom could understand what we were saying—English was no longer our private family language. I felt so disoriented, like the world had become a fun-house mirror. My signposts of normalcy had been uprooted, and that was the last straw that sent me reeling.

When my family moved to Panama, a few years later, I was so overwhelmed by the skyscrapers and the sirens and the traffic that I didn’t want to leave the apartment where we were staying. My culture shock veered from anxiety toward anger. Why was Panama so noisy? Why couldn’t people just turn off their car alarms instead of leaving them blaring at 2am?

After moving from Panama to North Carolina as a teenager, I remember being in a grocery store when I got overwhelmed by the wide aisles, bright lights, and sheer quantity of things. There were so many choices for the same thing. So many colors. So much stuff piled on stuff, mounded in carts and stacked in the aisles. Why did Americans need so much stuff?

In Colombia, one of my American roommates experienced culture shock one day at the local McDonald’s. Missing home, tired of the inconveniences of being in a different country, and fed up with her rudimentary Spanish, she yelled at the person behind the counter for not understanding her order in English.

In Ushuaia, it hit me when my travel bottle of shampoo ran out.

Culture shock can make you feel as out of place as penguins dressed up as cows when everyone else is wearing color. (Painted penguins from an art gallery in Ushuaia.)