Does this mean I've adapted?

When you relocate to a very different place, whether it's across the country or out of your home country entirely, you grapple long and often with that thing we call "culture shock."

I prefer to call it "culture stress," because it's not that you are in a constant state of shock; it's more an on-again-off-again state of stress.

Some missionaries have told me that it's sort of like the stages of grief, in that you don't go through the five stages of culture shock in a linear order and then you're done; you go through them once, and may revisit previous stages again, periodically, after you think you've adapted to your new home.

I've also been told that it takes five years of living in another country before you finally begin thinking like people in that country. The same is true when you return home.

So, I suppose it's a bit optimistic to think we've completely settled into the culture here. And I'm not sure if I should be oddly encouraged by an experience I had over the weekend: I became completely enamored with a street I was driving on while going to a friend's house.

It's the first place in Switzerland that has even remotely resembled America to me in any way. In fact, as I cruised this street, everything began to be surreal and I felt disoriented. The narrow, two-lane road was very straight, and lined on both sides with automobile dealerships, complete with the balloons and garish sale ads; there were fast food restaurants -- Burger King and McDonald's -- as well as the big billboards advertising that they were up ahead.

There were one- and two-story office buildings with plain, unattractive designs and corrugated metal rooftops, as well as small, strip shopping centers and big shopping centers, and gas station after gas station after gas station (you don't see them so close together here, usually).

I'm not saying Switzerland doesn't have these things. But I've never before seen them arranged all together, with the architecture so completely ripped off of EveryTown, America.

I began driving with one hand and snapping pictures with the other.

Then I was struck by what I was doing. All my photography in Europe has been of the picturesque half-timber homes and businesses; the Medieval, frescoed villages; the tiny cars and historic farms and castles -- everything that was previously foreign and interesting and photogenic to me.

It was a bit embarrassing, then, to go slack-jawed and camera frantic over fast food restaurants and car dealerships -- stuff that not even two years ago I would not have dreamed of photographing. You'd have thought I stepped straight out of the bush.

Either the architecture that I grew up with is now unusual and foreign to me, or I am a bit homesick. :-)

-- Gina