Well, it’s been over two weeks since I made my way back from the bustling metropolis of Shanghai to the breezy seaside town of St Andrews, and I can say with confidence that reverse culture shock is a very real thing. Not that I didn’t know it before, but Shanghai and St Andys really are polar opposites in most every way.
-You all knew this was coming, but I do have to put in a bit about the weather. When I got off the plane in Edinburgh, and for about three days afterward, my body was racked by a chill that went so deep I simply could not get rid of it. The jeans, cardigans, socks and boots that would have been stifling back in Shanghai did nothing to shelter me from the dampness seeping into my skin or the wind pressing on my body. It hasn’t been that cold—around 13 degrees, or 55 Fahrenheit—but being thrust into it immediately after my gloriously sweltering summer amplified the effect. I’ve managed to adjust, I think, helped in part by the storage company delivering my boxes of winter clothing and my reunion with my Uggs. People have pointed out to me that it’s only the first week of October, though, and I’m already bundling myself in my warmest sheepskin coat. So there is probably still a risk I won’t survive the winter.
-One thing to which I haven’t managed to adjust is the painful lack of any kind of decent East Asian cuisine here. St Andrews has its fair share of restaurants—Hugh Grant has to eat somewhere when he comes up for the golf—but Chinese? Forget it. Malaysian, Burmese, Sumatran? REALLY forget it. Last night I was on the phone to my mother literally in tears because I felt too ill to leave my room and all I really wanted was a bowl of Xinjiang-style kuan mian (thick noodles), which I could have been enjoying for a mere 7rmb in five minutes’ time were I still in Shanghai. Needless to say, there is no kuan mian to be had in our little town, and certainly not for the equivalent of 70p. Oh, food of Shanghai, how I pine for you.
-If I had run into someone I knew randomly on the street in Shanghai, I would be shocked. In a massive city of sixteen million people, the chances aren’t terribly high. Here things are quite the opposite. The walk to Tesco, for example, takes eight minutes (yes, I’ve timed it). When I tried to walk to Tesco the other day, it literally took half an hour because I kept running into people and having conversations. It’s been one of my favourite parts of small town life, really, and I will miss it when I leave. There are downsides, though: it can take a ridiculous amount of time to walk short distances, leaving the house on a ‘low maintenance day’ is pretty much unacceptable, and you always seem to run into the people you least want to see—either at that particular moment, or just in general.
-St Andrews is notorious for this, but holy Christ, I’ve blitzed through a shocking amount of money in the past fortnight. When I remember the time I thought 38rmb was a lot to pay for a taxi ride, I weep a little bit.
-Free champagne at 100 Century Avenue or the Apartment is a distant memory now. If a pub in this town had ladies’ nights, the results would be somewhat disastrous in that the streets would be littered with girls rendered paralytic from free booze and the pub itself would go broke with shocking speed. I have stubbornly refused to buy any drinks so far, preferring to get my kicks during pregaming (sadly). I also miss the wonderfully laughable assortment of pick up lines I would get in Shanghai, ranging from the clichéd (‘so what do you do here; are you a model?’) to the bizarre (‘do you play for the Australian beach volleyball team?’) to the direct (‘my associates and I would like you to come drink champagne with us on our sofa’) to the simultaneously hilarious and alarmingly inappropriate (‘I want to $%&# you @%$#&# on this dancefloor’). A girl hears a memorable pickup line in St Andrews only on occasion, owing to the diminutive size of the town and the degree to which everyone’s social circles overlap. That is to say, if you make a tit of yourself trying to chat someone up, most of your friends (and their friends) will hear about it within the hour.
-Needless to say, I don’t get people coming up on the street asking if they can take my picture, blowing kisses, mistaking me for a celebrity or offering free cigarettes or flasks of green tea and vodka. If I walked down the street and people started staring like they do in China, I would start to worry that, I don’t know, I had a hole in the bum of my trousers or had had someone draw something rude on my forehead in the middle of the night. Considering that rural Fife is one of the least diverse places on earth, being white will not garner you any special attention here.
-When I speak in English, passersby understand what I’m saying. This means no more making fun of the taxi driver on a night out, which yes, I’ll admit we tended to do back in Shanghai if he did something particularly amusing, stupid or both (‘Why does he keep giggling unnervingly; do you think he’s stoned?’ ‘I think so; he’s been going in circles and singing “Hit Me Baby One More Time”’). If I tried that in the back of a Scottish taxi, I would probably get beaten up, or at the very least chucked out of the car and told to learn some manners. See, it’s the little things you miss.
However, I have found one thing that St Andys and the ’hai have in common: in both places, you will see genuinely weird things happening in public on a regular basis. It’s the same thing I’ve found in San Francisco, the unofficial world hub of weirdness, and you’ll see it in Amsterdam in New York as well. The other day, for example, when Natasha and I were camped out in Starbucks rehashing the events of the night before, a parade of people in period costume marched down the street, their leader hoisting a 10 foot-high lance into the air. As the line snaked on, we realised that these weren’t just large ugly girls in mediaeval garb; no, it appeared to be a procession of men in drag. They then proceeded to walk up and down Market Street for the next half hour or so and crossed in front of Starbucks no less than four times. No one knew exactly what they were doing and no one seemed to care all that much. Really, the sight of the mediaeval drag queens was comfortingly similar to the man walking backward down Xinzha Lu singing ‘Poker Face’ to himself, or the Rastafarian who once ran in front of my friend’s car in San Francisco, and when she screeched to a halt, banged his fist on the bonnet and yelled, ‘You ugly, bitch!’ I can’t even imagine the reverse culture shock had I gone back to somewhere…normal.
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