Acclimate = become accustomed to a new climate or new conditions
This a process with different stages, the duration of the stages depend of your experience, your expectations about the host country, your original culture and the destination culture and the gap between the two, if you know the language, and many other factors.
Second important preliminary remark, it depends of your degree of immersion in the culture. You can live, share, work, speak or live-share-speak, or only share-work-speak. In Rome, I'm not living with italians, I'm working in an international environment, but I master the language and I'm spending a lot of time with non-internationalized italians: I'm the configuration share-speak what gives me a lighter degree of exposure than a live-work-share-speak but still a good immersion.
Stages are evoluting over time:
(1) DISCOVERY PERIOD
You arrive in your new country and you discover a new way of living. You are curious and list mentally what they do differently from you and you learn to behave like a local or at least avoid the traditional tourists mistakes. e.g. ordering a cappuccino in the afternoon. Maybe you are also in the process of learning the language. You can have a first few initial shocks, but you adapt.
(2) HONEY MOON
You think this is a better place than home. When you are away, you just want to come back. You could even see yourself living there forever (with some compromise).
(3) OBJECTIVITY DAYS
One day you wake up and start to feel the "dark side" of the country. You now have lived long enough there to be able to identify the main societal or behavioral trends. The sun is not enough, you have a job but you realize that the economical situation is actually really bad... that the country is struggling with issues that seem overwhelming.
(4) CLASHES
While the objective days are a general feeling or comprehension of the culture, the clashes are made of personal confrontation between you and the local people. The attacks can touch your personnality as the locals may have totally different expectations from you than your vision of life. You fight, but you will never exactly understand it because you were raised in different cultures/environments.
(5) LAUNDRY SORTING
You adapt. You understand that you will always be a stranger. You choose to conform on some points and keep your differences on others. You try to get the best of the two worlds. You decide to stay with compromise or you might decide that you have to give up too much in staying.
(6) THE DIVORCE
Enough is enough. Time or a particular event can push you towards the exit. You decide that you want to leave the country. It was a nice, (or a bad experience) but you need some fresh air or maybe feel the urge to come back to your roots. You change life, and take with you the memories, the pictures and the contact details of friends. You start again somewhere else and slowly become nostalgic about the lost paradise. It was not so bad afterall...
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