Having spent a semester in Cameroon before coming to Toulouse for the year, Nina knows well what “culture shock” is. She thinks that “it isn’t really culture shock here” and she hasn’t observed “anything as extreme as in Cameroon.” She finds Toulouse fairly “similar to the United States,” whereas in Cameroon, “everything is very different : the buildings, the language…it’s very hot, there are people all over the streets.” She remembers her precarious situation as a non-African woman, with men who cat-called her: “white girl, white girl!” She thus was able to “understand in a visceral sense that we’re lucky to escape this fate.”
Instead of culture shock, her arrival in France brought on a feeling of nostalgia. She explains: “Here, I see things that happen in my hosts’ home and I start to miss my American family,” whereas the cultural differences in Cameroon were “so extreme that I didn’t miss American culture at all, I didn’t recognize anything.”