Confident in my travel abilities, I set out for Galway on the second to last day of November … and by the end of the next day, was wildly sick and bedridden. On my own. In a strange city. With no one to help me. 

Aarthi Pookot remembered her first moment of “reverse” culture shock when she returned home from spending a year abroad in Japan. Pookot — a first-year Japanese major — was at an airport in...