I went back to Britian in September. I had only been away for three months but I experienced quite a deep reverse culture shock, I felt lost and completely blown away. I thought that I was starting out again back home with a blank canvas. But in reality I had no real ideas, no contacts, little money and a lot of problems. I was living back with my parents near Stratford upon Avon in Warwickshire. The family moved there originally just a couple of months before I started out at university, so I dont have any roots or any friends there. I felt isolated and lonely even with my family around me. My attempts to get a job in a Fair Trade shop all failed, the best I could do was a volunteer position at a shop in a village half an hour away from Bangor in North Wales where I went to university. I was left totally disheartened. The only paid job I could get was working on the tills at a supermarket.

To cap it off my parents house is quite away outside town. its a fifteen minute walk to the nearest village, and from there you have to rely on the buses to get to Stratford (unless you drive, which I couldnt). My parents tried their best to help. They always try their best for me, but it was no good. It is an unnerving feeling that you want to be away from your family even though you love them and they love you.

Part of the reason why I was inspired to travel abroad was my dislike of where I am from. Stratford upon Avon is a great place to visit, but living there is quite different. I found the banal middle class lifestyle to be suffocating and depressing. I am deathly afraid of ending up a boring, middle aged old man living somewhere in middle England. A man like this has a good salary or maybe owns his own business. He lives in a pretty cottage in an expensive village miles from anywhere. He has an ugly wife and two teenage children with very expensive tastes. From the outside he seems to be successful but inside he is desperately unhappy, unfulfilled and spiritually vacuous. He is rude and arrogant and has an often patronising manner. His attitude is materialistic, his outlook on life is characterised by a sense of false optimism, fake smiles and false dawns. He enjoys going to the pub to drink real ale and talk to other boring men about football, or about how stupid American people are, or about house prices. Men like my neighbours, my old boss at the supermarket, my barber or the local solicitor. If you are English you will know exactly the type of man I am talking about, you may even be that type of man yourself. Well, subconciously I think I have have always been motivated to avoid becoming that type of person. To do something exciting and exotic instead of just wasting away in a boring old English suburb.