Culture Shock

~ Clarissa

In 1998, my father traveled to the US for the first time. He met with his new business partner who was showing him around Orange County, California. In the process of getting to know each other, they discovered that they disagreed about an issue pertaining to world history.

What really shocked my father was that disagreeing about this did not turn him and his business partner into mortal enemies. They had the discussion and their relationship did not sour as a result. For the culture were we come from, that was unheard of.

I had a similar culture shock when after a class on women’s subjection during the dictatorship of Franco, a female classmate overtook me in the street. “This is horrible!” she burst out passionately. “I can’t imagine being prevented from working! That would be the worst!” Young women back in Ukraine did not say such things.

I also experienced culture shock the first time I heard N. say in a melancholy voice, “Well, that was fate.” Since then I discovered that Russian people say this phrase 5-6 times a day.

And then I experienced it in Kingston, Ontario when I discovered that all restaurants and bars (I mean, all 2 of them) closed by 9:30 pm.

Have you experienced any instances of culture shock?

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Published by Clarissa

47 thoughts on “Culture Shock”

  1. When I first went to the UK to study, I experienced culture shock. Shock after shock after shock.

    Going from South Africa, I thought it would be easy. After all, we spoke the same language, didn’t we? Well. not quite. The Brits called a stove a cooker, they called a geyser an immersion heater, they called supper tea. Their houses were all weird and squashed up close together. Their food was horrible (it’s improved now, with all those cooking programmes they have on TV). By comparison, the culture shock I experienced in visiting Thailand (where they spoke a different language) was minimal.

    And when I’d been in Moscow for a week, a guy came up to me in the street and asked the way to the nearest Metro station. I was chuffed that I not only understood the question, but was able to give him the answer. He was obviously from out of town, but I was from a lot further out of town than he was.

    But in Britain I was only beginning to get over the culture shock after a couple of years, and starting to feel at home there.

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        1. In London? First of all, the streets were very dirty! This was shortly before the Olympics, so maybe the streets were cleaned for the purpose, I don’t know. There was also a disgusting stench that followed us all over downtown. The city lost all its Londonness, if I can put it this way, and was like a bad copy of a typical American big city.

          You know how other countries sometimes try to imitate Hollywood? Their movies always look horrible because of their wannabe nature. This was what London looked like to me. An attempt to imitate the US. There was no sense of humor or even the slightest attempt at irony in this imitation. Just a pedestrian, plodding copying.

          I’m sorry if this sounds harsh, I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. But I used to love London and what I saw on this trip was just sad. There is nothing of the kind going on in Berlin or Madrid, so I have no idea why London has Americanized so dramatically and so unsuccessfully.

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      2. I think the London you speak about is still there. I’m new to London so I can’t speak of comparisons but I have found gems of humor and irony everywhere. In the cafe’s pavement signs, the underground staff, and all the time at the office.

        The imitation you talk about seems pervasive but there are still nice areas in neighborhoods once you move further away the center: stylish non commercial cafes, small shops, art workshops and art galleries.

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        1. Unfortunately, we only had just a few days in London, so all we saw was the worst of it. It was a mistake not to have a local person guide us. In Berlin we had a friend who knows the city very well show us around, and that made all the difference.

          One positive difference I saw in London compared to 20 years ago is that many immigrants had arrived in that time and enriched the city culturally and gastronomically. 20 years ago, there was simply nothing worthwhile to eat in the UK. 🙂

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      3. Huh. 32 years ago my mother and I found London to be full of Indian and Pakistani immigrants and after the first couple of strange British meals (hamburger was apparently just the patty with some sort of grey gravy on it) we turned to Arab, Indian, and Chinese restaurants and had great food. What happened in the 13 years since? Oh wait… the 80s.

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      1. God, that’s a coincidence! 🙂 But you are an old married man now, a pater familias. You don’t need bars!

        (Said by a person who can’t drink alcohol and wants everybody else to stop, too.) 🙂 🙂

        Have fun in Ontario!!!

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  4. I don’t know if this constitutes culture shock. But I visited Istanbul a few years ago and the Adhan (Islamic call to prayer) was played throughout the city 5 times a day. And, though I am firmly non-religious, I was really in awe of how beautiful the call to prayer sounded. Istanbul is secular city….so I hardly saw anybody actually praying. People mostly went about their business–perhaps a bit more quietly–but there was something beautiful and soulful about the entire thing. It moved me and I wasn’t expecting to be moved by it before I visited. 🙂

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  5. Coming to London from Barcelona has been quite a shock to me: The aggressiveness of the job market and work’s competitiveness has surprised my expectations and not always in the most positive light. The superficial friendliness of London can get tiring if you’re used to the less polite but more sincere approach of the Catalan culture. That your colleagues eat sandwiches enclosed in an office for lunch instead of eating a proper meal in a restaurant is definitively quite shocking.

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    1. “That your colleagues eat sandwiches enclosed in an office for lunch instead of eating a proper meal in a restaurant is definitively quite shocking.”

      – Because it’s expensive to eat out? We found that more or less normally priced restaurants in London serve uneatable food. Like Garfunkel’s. Brrr, I still shudder. But maybe we didn’t have enough time to look. There were a few good restaurants we found, with delicious food (Indian, especially), but the prices were sky-high.

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      1. “That your colleagues eat sandwiches enclosed in an office for lunch instead of eating a proper meal in a restaurant is definitively quite shocking.”
        That’s not just London, that’s a British thing. Normally, sandwiches/cold food are eaten for lunch and warm meals are only made in the evening after work. Coming to UK from contintental Europe, this was quite a shock to me and I still get weird looks when I warm up my own lunchbox full of “proper” food, while everyone else munches on sandwiches (and even worse, adding crisps (British name for chips) to that).

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      2. Yes, London is definitely expensive. Chains like Arfunkel’s or Nando’s are to defenitely to be avoided. There are good restaurants with great deals though specially French and Italian (on the £15 pound range), takes time finding them though but for me is just more a cultural thing. Even if people could afford it, they’d rather not spend it and save the money for when they’re traveling away.

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  6. I experienced a culture shock only once, in New Haven. A campus filled with rich white students and poor black servants. Then, I realized that I was the only student in my program to come from a public school.

    Brrr. To think about it makes me nauseous.

    Did you also enjoy positive cultural shocks?

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    1. “A campus filled with rich white students and poor black servants. ”

      – This was the first time I saw pure unadulterated racism in such a close physical proximity. I felt nauseous most of the time, just like you did.

      “Did you also enjoy positive cultural shocks?”

      – In North America I’m very pleasantly shocked by how faithful everybody is to their partners. In the almost 15 years I spent on this continent, there was only one single occasion when a married man tried to get in my pants. (Of course, I verbally eviscerated the bastard.) Otherwise, everybody is very non-disgusting. Compared with my culture, this is very shocking.

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    2. I think besides the Brazil culture shock I describe below, this is the worst culture shock I have experienced as well. Arriving at a private school that had those sorts of arrangements. Horrifying.

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  7. ! Even if I will not sound very original, I must say that the importance of leisure that I found in Spain and in Latin America was a very welcome cultural shock. .

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    1. Is liking a new thing culture shock, though? I thought culture shock was that period of incomprehension, dislocatedness, etc., not knowing how to deal.

      Positive culture shock: Spain, I liked it instantly, Madrid, the urbanness of it and the altitude, the stones, the people the air. This was before I went into Spanish so I was not required to like it.

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  8. I had the opposite experience from you. For me a nice example of culture shock came in Poland where people could engage in _very_ spirited disagreements (raised voices, extreme rhetoric) and then be distracted by a the whistle of a tea kettle. By the time the tea and cookies were distributed the subject changed to something else.
    IME NAmericans are the worst arguers in the world once a dispute is acknowledged neither side can back down until the other surrenders (one explanation for American niceness and attempts to avoid disagreement)and people yelling one minute and quietly talking about something else the next (without resolving the first topic) was completely strange.

    Another was the Polish people don’t use dictionaries (monolingual dictionaries). I used to be unable to think about writing without access to one or half a dozen dictionaries (to check spelling, shades of meaning, etymology etc) and people simply not using them was a shock…

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  9. Oh, several times. The smaller ones were the most memorable for me. When I came to Japan, I was surprised to see that people completely ignored leaflet distributors and what few panhandlers there were. People hurried by, not giving them a second glance when they were passing them on the street. As an American/Canadian, I’m very used to saying some variation on “Not interested, thank you” when I am confronted by them, so to see people act like they were invisible was certainly different.
    Another big surprise in both Japan and Canada was seeing people who continued to live with their parents while in university, and had their meals cooked, laundry did, and chores taken care of for them by their parents. For me, that was unthinkable, I was very much in the mindset of “Eighteen (or seventeen in my case) and you’re out the door!” But it was considered perfectly normal for people in their late twenties to still live, rent-free, with their parents, and only move out upon graduation/marriage.
    Recently, moving from Montana to the West Coast of Canada, a big culture shock I experience now is how students refer to their professors by their first names, with no titles. My professors insist, “Oh, not Doctor/Professor Surname, please, call me First Name!” I’m still getting used to it. I still insist on calling them Professor/Doctor in email, at least.

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    1. “Another big surprise in both Japan and Canada was seeing people who continued to live with their parents while in university, and had their meals cooked, laundry did, and chores taken care of for them by their parents. ”

      – It’s exactly like this in Ukraine and Russia. The only difference is that in our countries, people often choose to live with their parents after getting married because it is very convenient to have the grandma do all the chores, take care of the babies, and make all the money for the young family, too.

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      1. I think decades of housing shortages had something to do with it too. In the old CCCP a newly married couple mostly could net set up a new household because there was not enough money/apartments and young couples lived with one the parents because there were no other options.

        Decades of no choice are going to influence peoples’ response make choice appears. The fact that an older woman was usually an asset to the household (in ways an older man wasn’t) also might have something to do with the life expectancy gap in Russophone areas.

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        1. These are all important factors, for sure. But the most important of them all is the fiercely patriarchal nature of our families where the adult children are driven to emotional, financial and practical disability by the matriarch. She then has the burden of keeping them and doing every household chore for them but she gets the bonus of bullying them all day long. When she dies, the long-downtrodden daughter gets a chance to play the role of such matriarch. And so on.

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      2. It’s like that (people living with parents until their thirties) in most of southern Europe, in particular mediterranean countries. The “eighting and you are out” attitude only exists in Scandinavia&UK, everywhere else shortages of space and too high house prices force young people to live with parents for a long time. In Italy in particular men live with parents and there is even a word for it: “mammoni”. Google “Italian men living with mothers” and you’ll see what I mean.

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        1. “In Italy in particular men live with parents and there is even a word for it: “mammoni”. Google “Italian men living with mothers” and you’ll see what I mean.”

          – This also is a vestige of the patriarchal culture. As my Italian friend says, “If you need to get married, choose a creature from another planet or a rubber doll before you choose an Italian man who comes in the same package as his Mommy.”

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  10. I have an example of culture shock within the same country: I went to Virginia, where my boyfriend was from, and was shocked to see so many things named for Robert E. Lee. I had always thought of Lee as a villain, not a hero. But in Virginia he has streets named after him.

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      1. You have to mean West Virginia, right? Virginia Virginia isn’t … nearly as bad as Missouri, right … or did I miss some part of it???

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          1. WV, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana are the four states constantly competing for most poverty, worst education, etc.

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  11. Not just Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis! There are things named for him throughout the old C.S.A. And other Confederate types. It really does make it like another country.

    There is that culture shock, and it is one for sure, but my main culture shock was moving to northern Brazil. I was not ready for the coloniality, never having seen that degree of it before, not having been warned and also being underprepared for being shocked since I had been to other Latin American countries before.

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      1. Yes, it’s not like those countries where you get rid of the names of villains when the government changes … it is more like, you keep the names of each historical era. There are all these Confederate memorial sites, too, battles they won and so on. There is Jefferson Davis Parish, Parkway, and on and on … a major roundabout in N.O. is Lee Circle and it has a statue of Lee … and in VA there is Washington and Lee University, referring to the main generals of each country’s founding war, it seems …

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  12. My former sister-in-law (NY state) experienced culure shock on her visit to our family (edging on the edges of the south). Confederate flags everywhere and other civil war memorabilia freaked her out. She’d always thought of the Civil War as ancient dead history and had no idea of what a large role it plays in many white southerners’ minds.

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  13. I got a few culture shocks in the US. The first was realising that a place called Highland Park ‘in’ Dallas was in fact a separate town and was so that it could make its own rules, like keeping black families out. It wasn’t gated, it was a whole community but if a black family tried to move there, they were made to understand they were not welcome.

    Secondly, in American I was shocked at how companies such as utility companies try to rip you off by selling you services you don’t need or want but imply that they have nothing cheaper. I was also shocked by a second-hand car dealer who was so pushy I felt quite nauseous.

    Thirdly, in Dallas, if you didn’t think the same as everyone else, and express the same viewpoints, you were regarded as suspicious. The mono-thought atmosphere was depressing. Frankly I was glad to get back to chaotic broke old Europe.

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    1. “Secondly, in American I was shocked at how companies such as utility companies try to rip you off by selling you services you don’t need or want but imply that they have nothing cheaper.”

      – Oh yes.

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  14. Moving from Estonia to US (Midwestern university town) – no culture shock whatsoever. Moving from Midwestern university town to Montreal – big culture shock. And in 2005 separatism was not an issue, so the main reason for culture shock was how disorganized everything was (by both US Midwest and Estonian standards), and the impression that most people just do not care. Reminded us of ole’ good SU… 😦 I am a left-leaning person (again, by US or Estonian standards), but certain kinds of socialism are just … pandering to what is not the best in people.

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