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When you step outside your own culture you experience what is often called "culture shock", though exactly what this means is difficult to put your finger on. You know it if you've had it. For most of us it's a nebulous and very vague feeling that often manifests as stress, anxiety, and sometimes outright panic. It's not really fun. It is culture "shock" after all, not culture "embrace" or whatever.
I think what people mean when they say "culture shock" is the severe cognitive dissidence that comes from realizing that everything you think is true, and "just the way things are" turns out to only true for the world you learned those things in. Everything is relative, we say that a lot but by and large we don't live it. Go abroad and you will suddenly live it.
To pick a very simple example, if you're American you "know" that you drive on the right. If you go to Britain, or a former British colony, that's no longer true. That's a tiny, not too difficult to overcome, example.
Imagine that sort of undercutting of your knowledge happening for just about every single thing you want to do in the course of living day to day and you can imagine what it's like to go abroad for an extended period of time.
The simplest things in life become grand adventures. You either thrive on this or you have a very rough time until you either figure out the world you're in or you go home.
This is why, generally speaking, people spend their vacation in little islands of their own culture that have established themselves abroad. People from the United States go to Cancun because there's an entire industry set up to insulate them from having to deal with the vast difference between their culture and the local culture.
Australians go to Bali for the same reason. The British love India. The Japanese have enclaves in Bangkok that put a little bit of Tokyo in Bangkok. You can rest assured that every place you think of as a tourist destination, every place that's on the cover of a glossy travel magazine, is a place your culture has established a kind of bulkhead.
Self-styled "world travelers" and ex-pats tend to turn up their noses at these so-called tourist traps, but that's just one of the many reasons to avoid such people. Tourist traps, bulkheads, if you will, are important gateways between worlds. If there wasn't some way to smooth over cultural differences nearly everyone who ever left their own culture would be back the next day. I know this because I made the rookie mistake of avoiding tourist traps on my first trip abroad and believe me, if I could have flown home after a week, I would have.
It's really hard to relearn every assumption you've ever made about the world. No one wants to spend their two to six weeks of vacation a year doing that. It's not most people's idea of fun. Good tourist bulkheads smooth some of this over, allow in just enough outside culture to whet your appetite for more, but not so much that you spend an entire day struggling to find toothpaste.
The United States is not a good value for the money.
I happen to really enjoy this sort of adventure, which doesn't mean it's any easier for me, but it does help if you enjoy it since it's at least somewhat enjoyable even as it's both physically, mentally and emotionally draining.
All binary reductions are wrong. That said, there are, broadly speaking, two basic approaches to life:
Adapt the world to you.
Adapt to the world.
Contrary to what some people will say embracing either of these approaches exclusively is a bad idea.
Generally speaking is more difficult to adapt the world to you. It typically requires much more money, time and effort on your part. Still, if that's what makes you happy, then by all means. And good luck.
At the same time, there are some things that you simply cannot adapt to. Lack of potable water for instance is not something you can adapt to
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