First, every cell in your body is on high alert. Nothing is the same. In the grocery store, I cannot find anything I want because not only is everything organized differently, the packaging is unfamiliar, too. For example, I want raisins. I look for a red box, because that is what my brain believes raisins come in. I go to three different grocery stores and scan each aisle and each shelf neurotically. It does not occur to me until the fourth, when I finally get myself to ask, that raisins could come in a clear white plastic bag. Brain! Why do you deceive me?

There are thousands of things which my American mind is used to that I do not have here. No car. I must grocery shop the European way. Every two or three days, rather than once every couple of weeks, when I could load my car with everything I needed. I must buy an old lady cart so that I can wheel the groceries home. Grocery shopping is to my mind an ordeal. It requires a list, a long walk or bus ride, and a couple of hours minimum. How can I make it feel like an adventure?

What am I doing here? Challenging everything I thought I knew about life? Deciphering entirely new systems and forms of transportation and methods of devouring time? I never quite know why I do things. I do them with certainty, and then I flail. I am flailing now.

I try to find comfort in old structures: embroidery, series tv, the gym. I am still Sylvia and I still carry many of Sylvia’s ideas and prejudices and assumptions of what it means to be a responsible adult in this world. But with every trip to the grocery store, I find I know nothing. Nothing is as it seems. Nothing is as I expect it to be.

If you have any desire to shake up your worldview, move to another country for six months. Scramble your brain. It’s a terrifying exercise of self discovery. And yet somehow, strangely exhilarating.