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The first thing that I always notice when I come back to Australia is the sound of the birds. They squawk and squeak and chatter and twitter (not Twitter...) with such intensity, both in the city and in the country, that you feel like there must be something wrong with your eardrums. How can they possibly be so loud? Has something changed?

It took me a day to relegate the chirping to the type of background noise that one’s brain subconsciously blocks out.

It took me at least six months in Jakarta to be able to sleep through the morning call to prayer, but my brain must have been preconditioned to ignore the birds, in the same way it had long been trained to think a black tar-like yeast paste, Vegemite, is an appropriate accompaniment to bread.

That’s the beauty of coming home from being overseas. At first, it takes a bit of adjustment, like squeezing into a pair of shoes you haven’t worn for a while. But then you wiggle your feet around a bit and it’s comfortable again.

This time around, the adjustment period for me was a bit longer. After 21 months of living in Indonesia, I became so used to my life there that my home actually felt somewhat foreign, at least for the first few weeks.

During my first days back, the Australian accent sounded almost comical, as over-the-top as a drag queen’s makeup — gaudy and colorful and thick and entertaining.

Even though the same sounds have always come out of my own mouth, I was amused by the way we say things.

In perhaps the greatest testimony to my geekdom, the moment when it really hit me that my Indonesia experience was over (for now) was when I removed the power adapter from my MacBook cable.

When I realized I didn’t know when I would next need one of those two round prong adapter thingys again, my stomach sunk a little.

But slowly you adjust. I started using my time to wash and iron, instead of wasting it being stuck in traffic jams.

After telling one person that in Indonesia we had a pembantu to do these things, the scorn and ridicule I faced was not worth uttering the word “maid” again.

In an effort to keep at least some of my Indonesian, I’ve taken to speaking to our family pet in the language.

Since he doesn’t understand anything, English or otherwise, and especially doesn’t understand any form of discipline, it hasn’t really made a difference.

He isn’t likely to follow any instructions, whether I yell “sit” or “ duduk ,” so its really just for my own benefit.

Home has started to feel like home again, but I think I will never see it with the same eyes as before.

One of the things that has struck me upon my return is how Australia is becoming increasingly more strict and over-regulated.

In Yogyakarta, I saw a fantastic street band wandering in and out of cafes. In Australia, the band would need a busker’s license and the cafes would need complicated and expensive “place of public performance” licenses.

The buildings would have to have appropriate soundproofing and insurance, and if just one neighbor complained, even if it was some crotchety old lady who wanted to go to bed at 7 p.m. on a Saturday, the whole thing would probably come undone.

Law and order has its place and many would argue that Indonesia needs more regulation, or at least more enforcement, but perhaps Australia needs to go a little in the other direction.

Talking to friends here and telling them about my experiences in Indonesia also put a different spin on the stories.

While I considered the barrage of illnesses I suffered during my Jakarta stint as just being part of a day-to-day life in a developing country, some of my friends were outraged.

Realistically, Indonesia really does need to work hard to improve sanitation and public health. But when you live there, it’s impossible to maintain that level of outrage over a long period of time.

You become used to certain things that don’t work as well as they should.

Just like the way one’s brain can block out the din of the birds, or the wake up call from the mosque, we can fail to see social problems that are right in front of us, simply because we are so used to them being there.

It just goes to show that it never hurts to take a look at something from a different perspective.