Retrieved from https://studentshare.org/english/1628558-adapting-to-a-new-enviroment
https://studentshare.org/english/1628558-adapting-to-a-new-enviroment.
Adapting to a new environment [Pick the Living in a place for years means literally being a part of that place. When you live in a place for some years you feel like you and that place exist together in this universe as something connected deeply, specially the place where you spend your childhood. And leaving that place to shift in a new place is not as easy as it might sound. For some it is like an adventure or an exciting thing to shift to a place that you have never been to but practically it is not a very easy thing to do.
I realized this when I moved from Kuwait to Irvine. It was like moving from one culture to another, from one country to another, from one continent to another in fact from one world to a whole new world.Being in the prosperous middle east of Asia, Kuwait is not a poor country. In cities there is good infrastructure and facilities and living there is not living like nomads in some backward desert. But when I moved to Irvine, I came to know that although I was not living like a nomad in a desert but still it was a very different place.
I was used to that place and it seemed very natural and comfortable and I never had to do anything special to adjust in my peers. I just moved along naturally. Moving to America was another thing. I had to adjust in a new environment, the weather was alien, and the people were not the people that I had been living with. The first thing that I felt badly in a need of when I moved to America was friends. And making friends in a different country with people who have a different culture is not easy.
And the greatest barrier in that is language. It is very difficult to be friends with people who do not talk like you. But slowly I started overcoming my shyness and found out that the only way to do it is to break ice and put a step forward.Practically adjusting in a very new environment and routine was a challenging task. Studying here was not like studying back in Kuwait. I had to adjust a lot while managing my studies with the new methods and schemes of studies. Also belonging to a different culture we used to have different pastimes and interests but here I had to slightly adjust my taste in various things to live with the new people and my new friends.
I had to adjust with new places, routes and markets that were unfamiliar and it took time to completely settle here comfortably.Apart from the practical aspects mentioned above, what helped me most in adapting to this new place and environment was my flexibility. Adjustment in a new culture also requires a lot of compromise and flexibility. You have to discard a lot that used to be a part of you and adopt what you once thought to be very awkward. But the key is to be as flexible as you can and that has helped me a lot in adjusting here in Irvine.
This flexibility has made things easier for me and I have started feeling at home with the new environment.In a nutshell, moving literally from East to West was not an easy task, I had to undergo a lot of changes and had to adapt with a lot of new things. But the thing that matters most for me is that this place or some other place, we are all humans, all alike in different shades and flavors and now I have started enjoying these flavors and diversity. This has made my new cultural experience even better and has saved me from a cultural shock.
I am a human; I belong everywhere on this earth.
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