I lived in Japan twice for the summer, and once for a whole year.
I was really into Japanese culture and language, and was very excited to immerse myself in the whole experience all 3 times. For the two summers, this was not a problem. I took the same approach for my year long stay.
However, after month 4 or 5, I totally burned out. I was spending all week and all weekend speaking Japanese, which I was improving at a lot, but still required a lot more mental effort than speaking English. Beyond that, there are just lots of little cultural things to always be mindful of and this added a small but constant burden, too.
It was at this time that I started attending an English speaking church, attended by ex-pats. One thing I discovered was that, even if the person was Taiwanese and we were speaking Japanese because that was the one common language between us, we still agreed on the same things that were weird about Japan.
Having this support group made a world of difference. I was still in a Japanese environment, spending most days speaking mostly Japanese, but I had an outlet.
I suspect this is what women get from having female connections in the CS/programming world. As much as our society sometimes tries to ignore the fact, men and women are different enough that it is occasionally necessary to get away from the other culture and retreat into your own, even if only to hear someone agree about how weird the other culture can be.
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I lived in Japan twice for the summer, and once for a whole year.
I was really into Japanese culture and language, and was very excited to immerse myself in the whole experience all 3 times. For the two summers, this was not a problem. I took the same approach for my year long stay.
However, after month 4 or 5, I totally burned out. I was spending all week and all weekend speaking Japanese, which I was improving at a lot, but still required a lot more mental effort than speaking English. Beyond that, there are just lots of little cultural things to always be mindful of and this added a small but constant burden, too.
It was at this time that I started attending an English speaking church, attended by ex-pats. One thing I discovered was that, even if the person was Taiwanese and we were speaking Japanese because that was the one common language between us, we still agreed on the same things that were weird about Japan.
Having this support group made a world of difference. I was still in a Japanese environment, spending most days speaking mostly Japanese, but I had an outlet.
I suspect this is what women get from having female connections in the CS/programming world. As much as our society sometimes tries to ignore the fact, men and women are different enough that it is occasionally necessary to get away from the other culture and retreat into your own, even if only to hear someone agree about how weird the other culture can be.