Yesterday, I lay aimlessly on my bed, staring at the ceiling fan rotating at its lowest speed, wondering how I barely noticed its absence over the past year. Hoping to find something better to do, I picked up my phone and saw that I had a message from a friend – another volunteer who’d returned to Bangalore from Berlin last week.

“Me too” read the message, a response to one I’d sent a few hours earlier saying “I want to go back.”

When I left for Berlin a year ago, I was told by everyone that I would (or wouldn’t) listen to, that I was going to go through a massive culture shock on arriving there. Nothing is the same abroad, especially in a country like Germany, I was told. To be fair, that is for the most part, true. Things are very different there and life itself functions differently. But I didn’t go through so much as a shock, as a gradual settling down into a different lifestyle, one that I felt very suited to, after very little time.

The real culture shock actually hit me the morning after I returned to India, when I was angrily honked at by a motorcyclist for blocking his path by being a pedestrian on the already-barely-discernible footpath that he was trying to ride on, to avoid the weekday morning traffic in Ulsoor. All merits and demerits aside, I think what stands out the most about India is that it stands out.

It’s a complex but in-your-face melody – or cacophony, hard to decide which – of car horns and exhaust fumes, broken footpaths and ambitious city-to-airport metro projects, economic inequality, separate seating for men and women in buses, and somehow simultaneously, the potential for social change, ripe for the plucking, especially in the voices of the young and the young-minded.

 It’s all of this and more, with each element playing its uninterrupted and undisturbed role, day and night, in this dramatic theatre that over a billion people call home. And that can be a little difficult to get used to after you’ve spent some (noticeably quieter) time – even if only a year – somewhere like Germany, where every supermarket will have its own brand of the product that you will always invariably find in another one, where the trains and even the buses are almost always exactly on time, and where nobody, ever, rides a motorcycle on the footpath.

When I think of Germany right now, I’m reminded of something a (slightly pompous) couch surfer from New Caledonia told me on a late-night walk in Vienna earlier this year, when he was describing what he felt the first time he visited India as a young boy. He said, “to think that you can get on a plane and go somewhere that’s on this planet, and when you step out, you feel like you’re in a whole new universe – that’s amazing!”

It’s been a year that I landed in Berlin on that crisp, sunny September afternoon. A lot has changed since then. I’ve made friends from many countries and learned so much about the commonalities and differences in life across the world from my conversations with them. I now speak a foreign language decently enough to say that I do, in fact, speak it. I have new habits, new interests and I found love where I almost didn’t expect it.

I’ve also lost friends – some voluntarily, and others the way people just fall out of touch without consciously meaning to. I’ve shed parts of my personality that I no longer identify with and after giving it some thought, I’ve come to believe that I know myself just a little bit more.