Over winter break, I had this little Starbucks epiphany. No, I didn’t see the Virgin of Guadalupe in a chai latte. I was just sitting down with my coffee, surrounded by university students and it hit me.

“God, this is boring,� said the little epiphany voice in my head.

“Wha?� I replied, but the voice was gone.

All right, so it wasn’t much as far as epiphanies go, but it did get me to thinking. I had only been back in the country for a few weeks, having spent the previous semester studying in Prague. This coffee shop experience was the first time since I had returned that I found myself surrounded by college students, and I was struck with how dull college life seemed.

What was going on here? How was it that I had been away but a single semester and suddenly college life was a flat, colorless imitation of what I remembered?

To be fair, all of this took place in the course of about 30 seconds. I was shocked, a little repulsed, and then I was shrugging it off. College was not so bad. In fact, I was rapidly remembering, I quite liked college, and I counted many college students as my friends. So, what was this gut reaction, this bizarre response to something that had been, just months ago, so familiar, comfortable and even exciting?

The answer: culture shock. We tend to think about culture shock as sort of a one-sided phenomenon. Student A goes to Country B, encounters some weird custom or cultural peculiarity and has a hard time coping. That’s culture shock, we say, and nod our heads sagely.

But that’s only half of it. Think about this: when you go home for break suddenly, your parents are in your life again. They want to know where you are, what you’re doing, how late you’ll be out doing it. After a semester or two of answering to no one (with the possible exception of your nosy roommate), that situation can be a little hard to adjust to. Going home to parents is just as much culture shock as was Student A’s experience in Country B. Culture shock doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with leaving your home and encountering a foreign culture; in fact, as my Starbucks experience revealed to me, you can experience culture shock in your own town.

The next question that leapt to mind, as I was sitting in those cushy Starbucks couches, was: What culture am I coming from, then, if American college culture is such a surprise to me?

That answer was not as forthcoming as the first one had been. Although, for most of the previous fall I had been surrounded by the Czech culture and language, I was not so pretentious as to think that I had assimilated so completely that Czech culture was now more familiar to me than American. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that it wasn’t the American part that I was having a hard time adjusting to, it was the college student part.

I did study while I was in Prague, but my academic obligations weren’t what you’d call rigorous. School, while it was a part of my life, was really only periphery when you compared it to everything else I saw and did.

That’s the crux of the matter. In general, the lives of most American college students revolve around classes, homework, essays, and grades. My life, for those four months, revolved around the daily discoveries I made in everything from visiting 13th Century wine cellars to buying radishes from a street vendor who spoke only Czech. All of the American students at my university immediately formed our own little subculture, which, while it was based on being American college students, rapidly evolved into something entirely different.

A key element of culture, as any anthropologist will tell you, is a shared history. While all of my American friends in Prague came from different backgrounds and different parts of the country, we all bonded because of the experience we were going through together. Of course, reading that now, it sounds remarkably corny, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s true.

Because all of us were living in the same city, taking the same classes and encountering the same idiosyncrasies of Czech culture on a daily basis, we all had a common frame of reference, despite our various origins. As a result, I became friends with people on whose social radar I probably never would have appeared.

Another obvious affect that Czech culture had on our American frame of mind was the creation of a bizarre little hybrid language we liked to call Czinglish. It was by no means a fully-developed language, but certain words did work their way into our daily conversations.

Take jemný, for example. Jemný means gentle, which in English doesn’t seem like it would be all that useful a word. But not so in Czech. In Czech, you can use gentle to describe anything: Gentle wine, gentle cheese and gently bubbly water (which falls somewhere between carbonated and still). While all of these descriptions sound ludicrous in English, it was a very handy classification in Czech, so my American friends and I adopted jemný into our everyday vocab.

A less obvious aspect of our ever-developing subculture was the difference between our calendar and that of a normal American fall semester. For one thing, Thanksgiving Break did not loom benevolently on the horizon. For another, we forgot entirely about Halloween until the night of, at which point my best friend and I made silly hats out of tin foil and rented Van Helsing.

Stepping in to fill the gaps in our holiday schedule were Czech holidays, like Nov. 17, when we found ourselves freed from classes to honor the beginning of the 1989 Velvet Revolution. Or Dec. 5, Mikulaš Eve, when bands of costumed teenagers visit families to determine whether the children have been naughty or nice that year. There is nothing more surreal than seeing a teenage boy riding a tram while wearing a bishop’s hat, a cotton-ball beard and clutching a homemade shepherd’s crook.

Perhaps the biggest difference between our lives abroad and our lives at home was the setting. From every single one of my classrooms I could look out the window at the Prague Castle, crowning the hill above the Vltava River. Five minutes from the school was the Charles Bridge, made famous by such fine films as Mission Impossible and XXX, but far more impressive without the Hollywood superstars messing about in the foreground. Every day, when I stepped out of the metro station there was a part of me that was ear-to-ear with all the glorious history and architecture around me.

Despite my brief moment of boredom at Starbucks this winter, my semester abroad has not ruined normal college life for me. Instead, I find myself applying the things I learned in Prague to my everyday life on this side of the Atlantic. Jumping from one culture to another can certainly be a challenge, but the result is a deeper understanding of your own cultural identity, and that is well worth the effort.