Biggest cultural shock you have come across?

I was somewhat outside the British class system, being a foreigner, so this may not be appropriate to say, but at least in Britain it's out in the open. Canada is very class-based, including heavy snobbery towards the intelligentsia, but no-one must speak of it. At least in Britain you know why people despise you.

I don't understand why people claim not to understand the British class system. I mean I get that they perhaps don't understand the subtle nuances of how it works, even some British people don't quite understand that. They tend to think that it's either purely money based, which is only partially true. People are often described as 'upper class' on here purely by dint of them being rich, which shows a deep misunderstanding of how it all works and how complicated it is.

But to claim they don't get a class system at all and they don't have it where they are from? Nah. I don't buy that. There isn't a country in the world that doesn't have its own version of a class system, where there is always an 'old money' class in one form or another.

@murphys it was the summer of 2006. We drove from Beitbridge to Capetown. The policeman incident happened in Bloomfontain. We had real difficulty getting a hotel to stay in when in Pretoria. The whole experience in South Africa was horrible, beautiful country but I definitely will not be going back.

For me it has to be India it conflicted me in so many ways. I fell in love with the people, lost count of the number of people who I met that insisted I 'must come home' and would not allow me to decline an invite to their house. They made me feel so welcome and after 13 visits I have some amazing Indian friends.

The sense of family and the friendships they cherish, the way they celebrate birthdays and make it such a special day. Their tolerance and appreciation of different religions and their ability to celebrate all religious festivals.

Loved the spirit of the street kids, their positivity, sales skills and ability to communicate and build an emotional connection with limited English. Their work ethic, out selling mangoes, books or dusters from 9am until 10pm. I wanted to bottle their enthusiasm and inject it into the guys in the office.

The atmosphere when they won a cricket match, they city came to a standstill, it was crazy and celebrations went on all night.

Then there were the things I didn't love so much ....

Independence Day parade with 'mother india's' weapons on parade. Was shocked and aghast at the huge bombs and rockets being paraded in front of me.

The intolerance for those living in slums from the Indians I worked with, I was so shocked by their attitude to the poor. Very much felt it was their fault and a life style choice, no empathy for their situation not even the kids living in poverty.

Their ability to adhere to what I felt were pointless rules - no one challenged them ever! They just stuck to the process and rarely became frustrated.

In Mumbai I was so frustrated by the fact they openly littered, throwing rubbish out of car windows or on the street, their inability to see that one person could make a difference by using a bin!

Finally the lack of senior women in the work place. There are so many amazing women I've worked with who just don't get the same opportunities as men. Drives me wild but also makes me more determined to ensure within my department that we have equal opportunities!

My Scottish colleague is absolutely baffled by Karneval. He says that Germans are so strait laced and buttoned up for most of the year except for three occasions - Karneval, Silvester (NYE) and Oktoberfest and then they go absolutely nuts and it really, really bothers him!

I find Karneval alarming mainly because of the amount of openly drunk very young teenagers roaming around, but we don't go to the parades any more because the tradition near here is for people to wear huge carved wooden witch masks and DS is absolutely petrified of them and they notice this and decide to wind him up more

Kaybush -just checking - could they have been hot desking? If so, perfectly normal to sit by a different person everyday. If they had photos etc up though marking the desk as theirs, then yes, wow, bizarre!

@Ebearhug OMG yes - I remember my first encounter with Karneval in Germany. Drinking on a scale I have never come across anywhere else. There were MASH unit type hospitals in the streets with campbeds where drunks could sleep it off and the pavements were covered with a thin layer of trampled broken glass.

allegretto I don't think I've ever been to the cinema in Italy. They sound very resourceful at your local one, surely anywhere else they'd just give up and send you home!

Matador - I'm in Italy and they have an interval at the cinema here too - catches me out every single time! Once the projector broke down during the interval and they finished the film with a tiny projector with a projection area not much bigger than a tv screen.

Also the shock of experiencing corporate culture if you're not used to it.

I've always worked for small companies and a few years ago I had a day-long meeting with someone at the HQ of one of the UK's big airlines.

I came back from lunch to find he wasn't at his desk, so I asked the woman on the next table if she knew where he was. She apologised and said she'd never heard of that person as he was on a different team from her.

They literally sat one foot away from one another . I made up my mind then to never work for a large corporate...

Well I've just had a massive culture shock there.
Is it what you are supposed to do with the tea towels with 'art' from your DC reception class???
I'm afraid mines have been used to dry dishes and whatnot, just like any other kitchen towels...

Mind boggling

That last post was to lizzieoak. ☺

MsGameandWatch I second rude customer service in the US!

A while back I went to an outdoor public swimming pool in San Francisco. The timed wristband I was given ran out in one hour, so I asked the male receptionist if I could still sunbathe on the grass when it had run out.

He said he was going to have to discuss it with his colleague and spent a good few minutes whispering in front of me, while I and the long queue behind me waited. I thought I must have really confused them until they looked up at me and burst out laughing and the guy said in a really sarcastic way that they "had concluded that yes I could!"

They were basically taking the almighty piss out of me in front of a massive queue of people. In the UK this would have probably got them fired!

Perhaps. Also folks probably don't want to wipe down their kitchen countertops with a picture of the Queen.

“aka as the PBA card is totally alien to Brits too.”

What is a PBA card?

“but you can really tell when you've left London for work, as meeting catering changes from platters of meat, fish, and veggie sandwiches plus fruit plus nibbles, to plates of ham sandwiches, maybe a few cheese ones, crisps and sausages and pork pies.”

I just love a stereotypical comment about anywhere that isn’t London

Seneca, it may well be it's not common, but my friend lived there for a long time & said when she'd give ones from England as gifts, it when her American friends went traveling, that's what happened. It may just have been her milieu?

'I'm from the American South and have never seen tea towels hung as art. But we tend to have very utilitarian ones and call them kitchen towels.'

My two daughters' nursery classes made them and the school sold them to raise money, so I had those two framed and they're hung up in our house.

We always called them dish towels.

But I was struck that they had no other adornments in their very simple home

I wonder if, rather than them not knowing what to do with it, this was more about the value they placed on your thoughtful gift? I once gave an Indian lady a very prettily wrapped box of chocolates, and much later I was surprised to see that, instead of throwing it away, she'd carefully arranged on a shelf "for show"

I didn't dare to pick it up to see if she'd eaten them though

I'm from the American South and have never seen tea towels hung as art. But we tend to have very utilitarian ones and call them kitchen towels.

I was on a train from Euston back to The North one afternoon. The train pulled up at either Warrington or Wigan and a group of people stood up with little overnight cases and strong London accents, obviously on a work conference trip. They grumbled and muttered about being in the back end of nowhere and "I guess it's pie and gravy for the next couple of days" said seriously. I swear they'd never been North of Watford before.

treaclesoda I was about to say what you said- we did in fact have rocket on the sandwiches today! (Do we work in the same place??)

The fruit plate was, however, arranged around a STUNT PINEAPPLE. If the high heid yins hadn't been there I would have taken a selfie.

Back on the culture shock topic, something I have always been prepared for but struggled with in African and Asian countries is my left-handedness. I find it really jarring to use my right hand for things other than handshaking and really struggle with not waving/passing people things with my left hand. I sometimes wonder what it might be like to come from a country where people never use the left hand outside the loo and if it would be shocking to be waved at by me!

@notcitrus I'm from West Yorkshire.Catering options (although sadly sandwiches a lot of the time) aren't anywhere near what you describe. But like I said, maybe it's your industry. But then I suppose we're not used to catering for muslims and vegetarians. We definitely don't have any of those in West Yorkshire

Yes, lizzie, I suppose you're right. But I was struck that they had no other adornments in their very simple home.

Tulips, to be fair w regard to tea towels ... an English friend of mine who lived in the American South for years said non-poor American friends of hers would also hang up tea towels as art. Tea towels may be a mystery to some people?

When I went to India on a gap year a few things shocked me:

• The smell in the small town where I was staying. It was overpowering. Stepping over an open sewer to enter the Internet Cafe is a memory that stands out. I understood why all the women wore fresh jasmine flowers daily.

Secondly, the poverty. I had brought tea towels as gifts to give people I met, you know those souvenir ones with scenes and pictures of beauty spots on them. A family had me over for dinner and I gave them a couple of the tea towels as a thank you gift. The next time I visited them, i was surprised to see the towels hanging up on the wall, being used as pictures.

Watching the local loyalist thugs build a 12th of July bonfire meters from a brand new children's playground and an old people's home. Calling it 'culture'.