Fresh eyes on America: an expat returns for a visit

The biggest culture shock is returning to your own country, especially when it is no longer your home country. In my twenties and thirties I mostly traveled to South America, and when I returned to the US it was a shock how different it felt to me. Bright, super clean, organized, without music playing everywhere, people moving on the street absorbed in their lives and not making eye contact. Foreign, somehow.

In the early 1980s I was working as a physician associate for an American corporation in Brazil, living in a beach compound south of Rio de Janeiro. There were trips to the hypermarket Carrefour in the city from time to time, and weekend jaunts to São Paulo. So it wasn’t like I was always in a small village or a deserted coastal town. But on a trip back to the US at the end of my first year, a friend picked me up at the airport in Denver and we stopped at a supermarket in nearby Boulder, my home town in my teens and early twenties. Something about the market was just too bright for my eyes and too bustling for my brain. I stood gripping the shopping cart for a few minutes, then I told my friend I had to go outside and get some air. The biggest shock was the fact that I found it a shock at all, after all, this was home. I’m not easily thrown into a panic state, and I’m generally adaptable, so it was only a few hours before the strangeness of it all dissipated, and I filed my reaction away in the back of my mind.

It's now 2023, and my husband Jasiel and I have lived overseas for seven years. We first moved to London in 2017, where I was recruited to help start a new physician associate program at Barts and The London. Two years later, our first cohort of students graduated, and Jasiel and I moved to Portugal. My only trip back to the US was in 2019, to get our house in Durham, North Carolina ready for sale. At that point I envisioned traveling to the US once a year to visit friends and family, and a couple of jaunts to London annually.

Enter the pandemic—a state of suspended animation, where everything doesn’t move but at the same time moves too quickly for human consciousness to register. Portugal put the entire country under lockdown and prohibited travel outside your local town except for emergencies. We bought a house and moved in one week before full lockdown, grateful to be in our new home with vistas of the distant hills and hiking trails we were allowed to use for outdoor exercise. As vaccinations became available, Portugal methodically implemented them, achieving the highest vaccination rate in the world at one point. As the pandemic eased things slowly thawed out and people began traveling by air again, but we were content to mostly hunker down at home. Our only international travel was to Brazil to visit family and for the release of the Portuguese translation of my novel The Moon Is Backwards, a lua ao avesso.

So, my arrival here in the US in November is my first visit back in more than four years. I have several impressions that I’ll lay out here, because fresh eyes quickly become same old, same old. And for me, returning to America feels like arriving in  a whole other country.

Huge, wide roads. The interstate highways are a marvel, with excellent signage that won’t steer you wrong, multiple lanes in both directions, and broad shoulders that are available should you need them in the event of an emergency. Portugal has excellent roads in general, but they’re just not as grand. You can put an address in your GPS here in the US and it will take you there the first time—in Portugal I often need geo-coordinates, you even see them on billboards so people can find the stores! The roads in the US are all just huge, which is a good thing because the cars are so gigantic. I’m driving a Honda Odyssey van a friend loaned me, and it’s like driving a ferry boat after my little Honda Jazz (in the US it’s the Honda Fit) back home. I’m staying with a friend and parked the van across the street from their house until their next door neighbor asked me not to park there because the neighbor was having trouble backing out of their garage. Really? You could back up a tractor trailer in that space. Best avoid Europe, where the picturesque, cobbled lanes are a nightmare should you have to back up. I don’t enter one lane roads in Portugal, I’ll drive all the way around a town to avoid them. Jasiel seems to find it a personal challenge and loves exploring narrow roads less traveled. Sometimes I have to close my eyes.

Variety of items available for purchase in supermarkets. There are a gazillion types of cereal, for example, and the shelves of boxes take up half an aisle. Candy, potato chips and similar snacks, salad dressings. Processed foods take up the majority of space in the center of the supermarket, and the options are dazzling. There’s so much convenience available in the frozen section, meals that just need to be microwaved. It’s hard to resist some things I never miss or think about, like chicken pot pies. Nostalgia on the plate. We pretty much cook everything from scratch in Portugal, but I confess that a little more convenience would be an attractive feature from time to time.

The prices of items in supermarkets. This absolutely blows my mind. There is nothing in the grocery store that costs less than five dollars, it seems! How can dental floss be seven dollars? And the packages have gotten smaller, so they are getting us coming and going. How is this still justified by snarls in the supply chain and rising costs of fuel? The price of gasoline has dropped significantly, to less than three dollars a gallon. In Portugal it’s the equivalent of about eight dollars a gallon. But really, food prices look to me like a scam. They jacked up the prices, but they aren’t coming down.

I wrote the first draft of this blog post yesterday and this morning The New York Times has reporting on corporate pricing, Corporate America Is Testing the Limits of Its Pricing Power. Turns out my hunch is correct! Companies are raising prices more frequently, pushing them as high as possible to see how much customers will stand for before they quit buying. Companies built huge profits during the pandemic, pushing prices as high as possible to offset supply chain and transportation cost increases. But no, they aren’t dropping prices now that those costs have decreased. Companies have kept prices high and many have decided they don’t care if they lose customers on the lower end. When they raise prices and people keep buying, their logic is that the product was priced too low to begin with. But the Times reporting suggests that consumers may be starting to rebel. Yes, let’s rebel!

Here in Durham, North Carolina, a big difference since four years ago is the number of grocery chains—now there’s only one, Harris Teeter. There are a few other chains, such as Sprouts, or Whole Foods (aka Whole Paycheck). There’s an Aldi but it is such a disappointment compared to the Aldi stores in Portugal, which are much nicer, have more variety at great low prices, and attractive aisles. Here it’s just the basics, and no frills whatsoever. The supermarket sticker shock made me instantly understand why people are so pissed off about the US economy.

Black Friday lasts for weeks. This is the opposite of the supermarket. In department stores at the mall, there are constant sales and extra coupons if you download an app. Everything is 60% or 70% off, with an extra coupon for another ten dollar reduction. Clothes and accessories are so inexpensive, even things of good quality. A friend in London says food is cheaper in Europe and clothes are more expensive, and she’s right. On the other hand . . .

Lower quality, empty stores. This is very weird. Target is a mess, and the selection of items is much more limited than I recall. I went to JoAnn Fabrics to buy some yarn, and the store was filled with empty shelves, and poorly maintained. Nordstrom is a high end department store, but the amount of empty space is astonishing. I guess Amazon has finally killed shopping malls and local retail, and the impression is that many of these stores are on the brink of bankruptcy. How can they sustain low prices and lack of inventory? Turns out in some cases companies are keeping inventory tight to maximize profits, see the Times reporting referenced above.

Credit card practices. Most places have contactless payment as an option, but some places still require insertion of the card at the time of purchase. The stunning thing is being expected to hand a restaurant server your credit card and let them walk away with it. Nowhere else in the world is this accepted. Servers in restaurants everywhere else bring the credit card processing device to the table if you wish to pay by card. Everyone in Brazil, for example, knows that someone could clone your card in a matter of seconds when it’s out of your sight.

Tipping is out of control. Everywhere you make a purchase, it seems, they ask you how much you want to tip. Even for things that never used to be associated with tipping, like take-out food. And of course it’s considered stingy to tip less than twenty percent. In addition to tipping, the cashier at check-out for grocery stores asks if you want to round up your total owed for a charitable cause. Everyone has their hand waiting to reach in your pocket.

Packaging is ridiculously hard to open. For just about everything, packaging is nearly impossible to open. Unless you’re a three year old, of course. Make up like mascara, over the counter medication like eye drops, you name it, is packaged in a box with sealed ends, then the item itself has a tight plastic sleeve that has to be removed and is difficult to grab even with good fingernails. Why is everything easier to open in Europe?

Unhappy looking people that don’t engage. The prevailing mood is much darker than I remember from four years ago. Which is understandable, given the tragedies of the pandemic and the difficulties of making ends meet in this era of inflation and price gouging. Walking the aisles of the grocery store or the sidewalks of downtown, so many people look sullen and stare into the distance. If they do look at you and you smile, it is often not returned. I’ve grown so used to people in Portugal saying “Bom dia” or “boa tarde” or “tudo bem?” (Good morning or good day, good afternoon, how are you?), even total strangers. When we first moved to Portugal Jasiel would poke me in the ribs if I didn’t say good morning to the lady at the deli counter or the cashier at check out; it’s considered rude not to greet people in that way. Even people who look distracted or unhappy break into a smile if you give them one. This isn’t to say everyone is happy and friendly in Portugal, but the proportions are so much higher than here in America.

We Americans are very individualistic, and our culture is one of individual effort and “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps,” rugged determination in the face of life’s challenges. There is a lot to be said about collective culture, about helping one another—we do need the warmth and connection with other people to live our best lives.
Southern hospitality wins the day

Still and all, the Southern US still has a lot of people who exhibit that friendly Southern attitude. Many people in public-facing roles exude warmth and seem happy to see you, the customer. It’s good for the soul to smile at other people, even strangers. It’s good for the mood when strangers smile and say hello. We Americans should aim to do this more. Studies have shown (I’m pretty sure there are such studies) that grumpy people have their mood improve when they give or receive a warm smile and a greeting. And it doesn’t cost a dime.

Photo by Global Residence Index on Unsplash