Biggest cultural shock you have come across?

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On the subject of cinema, I went to the cinema with my cousins in a small US Midwest town. All looked like any cinema, until I went to buy an icecream. They had never heard of anything so wierd as eating icecream in a movie. Popcorn, perhaps a hot dog, but the idea of a choc ice or a Baskin-Robbins counter in a movie theater caused a bunch of teenage girls to kill themselves laughing for ages!

reetgood I'm all for unpretentious food and would love to see pork pies on all lunch buffets, but my veggie and Muslim colleagues weren't so happy - it hadn't occurred to them that they'd need to alert caterers in advance, what with not being a problem in their careers to date.

I probably ate in about 300 different offices round the UK over a few years so started to notice trends. Ditto with style of decor and food offerings in B&Bs. Thankfully unexpected tinned tomatoes at breakfast are rare!

Conversely though, the French, when confronted with a foreigner who only knows rusty GCSE French, often refuse to translate even if their English is half decent!

Some of this is down to the French education system, which insists that if you're not perfect at something, you're a 'null'. This makes them very reluctant and self-conscious about speaking English, which can come across as arrogance.

tame one

Howling at the juice starters and posh scampi (extra points if served in a basket) and I'm also old enough to remember the intermission with ice-cream tubs from the lady with the vending tray down at the front at our local ABC

Returning to culture shock topics, though it's a time one - I saw David Lynch's "Wild at Heart" in Krakow soon after the Eastern bloc disintegrated and was amazed when they turned the lights on half way through to change the film reels!

I was somewhat outside the British class system, being a foreigner

I found this to be true for me as well. When I was a student in the UK, I found that, as an American, I was exempt from some of the class-based assumptions that applied to others. I had several different groups of friends from working class to even titled folk (I didn't know she had a title until I saw an invitation in her sister's flat addressed to Lady So-and-so).

These groups didn't mix at all though. It was a bit odd.

Where I lived, as in many of the poorest communities, there was only a large co-op

And the sheer prices at the Coop don't exactly help less well off communities

Another "reverse shock" one: years ago I hosted a Ukrainian guy on a NATO "learn English" thing, and he wanted to buy his wife a pair of western trainers. Knowing he didn't have much, I took him to a discount store and had to explain that no, all those shoes weren't just there for display - they were actually for sale. He just couldn't grasp it, and was shellshocked to hear that, when those were sold, more would simply arrive from the warehouse

This was back in the days when anything worth having had to be ordered via Moscow and took 6 weeks to arrive if it arrived at all - it really was an eye opener on an utterly ruined economy

mousymary How do you know how long people have spent in a place?

Treacle, can I work in your office? My office, when they put on food for us (which we have to pay for!), always serve up ham sandwiches, turkey sandwiches, meat chilli, and cakes which seem to be sugar-flavoured. I don't eat meat, and have never worked anywhere I was the sole vegetarian, so am excluded from eating at all the work do's.

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 remember trying to explain the uk class system to my cousin.

(The excellent) Reginald D. Hunter defined it as "a way of discriminating against people who look like you."

brasty DH and I were watching Mad Men yesterday and Betty Draper ordered a tomato juice as a starter and we both burst out laughing, but it was de rigueur in the 60s!

We have regular catered meetings in work and I promise that our sandwiches are very middle class indeed (rocket, sun dried tomatoes and the like) and I'm about as far from London as you can get without leaving the UK

My mum used to think scampi was posh and would go "Ooh they have scampi on the menu! Must be a fancy place. " :o

NotCitrus yes, I only ever lived in Berlin, as a student. Not much experience of rural Germany other than day trips (with fellow English speakers!).

Where I lived, as in many of the poorest communities, there was only a large co-op. That is the only supermarket we went to until my dad finally got a car. Because it was in walking distance. So the choice was not great.
Although probably different now as even Iceland and Heron do salmon. Salmon was a more expensive fish until recently.

*or because the food shopping/provision was being done by others in the family (eg.father/mother/grandmother/sibling)

Niki She also said she had no idea you bought salmon in tesco. There is a difference between being working class and being a total imbecile. Im struggling with how before Uni she apparently either never went to supermarket or if she did walked around it with her eyes shut. Meat, counter, cheese counter, fish counter. How can you not see?

This is totally underpinned with a judgment of "my life is like this so your life must be". It's very nasty judgmental without a proper understanding that people (particularly the disadvantaged) can live very different lives to you.

Plenty of families can't afford to shop at Tescos or supermarkets with a fresh meat/fish counter. Plenty of people themselves would never visit a supermarket in a price bracket like Tescos prior to age of 18 either because they/their family couldn't afford it or because the food shopping/provision was being done

I remember being very chastened by hearing a woman from extreme poverty (severely disadvantaged socio-economic background) who had managed to get to university speaking about how she nearly left within the first two weeks because she felt she didn't fit in.

She had to work virtually full time to be able to afford to stay and to support her own family (by which I mean parents & siblings). She said she saw all these other students going out drinking, socialising and even the poorer ones could afford to do this - but she couldn't at all. She felt her background was so different that this was not for her.

She is now a business leader and an inspiration but it was a salutary lesson.

@notcitrus oh the regions, we're so delightfully backward. Maybe it's just the industry you're in.

Any proper wholetail scampi was posh. But I am old. I can remember when a tiny glass of orange juice was considered a suitable starter.

Posh scampi

ShoutOut Not my experience in Germany - outside main tourist areas, the mere fact of being an English person speaking some German has meant loads of people being delighted to speak to me in German. They all apologise for not having spoken any English since leaving school.

As opposed to French people who wince at my accent (or worse, DP's excruciating accent) and launch into English to try to shut him up.

Thinking back to the UK, my first job after a lovely middle-class upbringing mainly in Surrey, was being a youth worker supervising "young people known to the police", for all sorts of reasons such as neglectful parents to 17yos with convictions for GBH, for a summer in inner London. Boy was that a culture shock - the constant loud music, constant shouting, how the teenagers were constantly getting into physical fights, even the ones without criminal records, the fact that bright 14yos had never heard of a university or that anyone might stay in education after 18, the bright lad whom I eventually found out could not read nor write enough to fill in a form saying 'Name, Address, Date of Birth', the prevalence of kebab and chicken shops locally, the inability of most of the kids to argue in words without hitting each other, and did I mention the constant loud crap music? One kid who sticks in my mind was a nightmare, until one of the police organisers told me he was really, really desperate for attention. He told me just to nod or say hello when I wandered past, a couple times a day. Within a week this 12yo was practically like a puppy at my heels.

Obviously nowadays anyone I tell about it is shocked that I was dropped in there with my entire training being 5 minutes on how to separate fighting kids (pull their ears) and to shout for help when anyone pulled a knife. I now live about 2 miles away and the differences aren't so obvious.

Now I've travelled much more of the UK 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.

When I grew up in the 70s, salmon was posh food. It wasn't until salmon started being farmed that it became much cheaper. Hell I even remember scampi being posh food.

Niki She also said she had no idea you bought salmon in tesco. There is a difference between being working class and being a total imbecile. Im struggling with how before Uni she apparently either never went to supermarket or if she did walked around it with her eyes shut. Meat, counter, cheese counter, fish counter. How can you not see?

I didn't go to a supermarket with a meat/cheese/fish counter until I was 20 or so! (I actually thought they had been brought back as a marketing ploy to make it feel you were shopping in the good old days, with specialist butchers, bakers etc. Have they actually been in some supermarkets all along?!) The supermarket where I grew up had no counters, my nearest supermarket only has a bakery counter, and there are things I can't buy there (have to go to Waitrose in posh bit of town ). They cater to the demographic of the area, really. Plus an 18 year old, who likely hasn't been in charge of food shopping could easily not have seen salmon in the supermarket, even if it was something their local supermarket sold.

On that note - I was baffled on being asked if I could "buy some electric" from the corner shop. Thought it was a joke. Utterly bewildered as had never encountered key meters before, and thought they were something from the 70s.

StrangeLookingParasite

Some tourists are just ferociously rude. I evidently blend in as French, and was standing in rue Cler once, and one approached me and just barked 'Eiffel Tower' at me. No excusez-moi/excuse me/désolée, je ne parlais pas français, rien.

Not what you were talking about I know, but re barking, I remember being told that because a number of Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese) emphasise every syllable that people with such a mother tongue typically sound very aggressive when speaking English as a second language -because they are used to emphasising every syllable which is not how English is spoken.

I found that v. interesting.

You don't have to think about electricity and water as long as you pay your bills.

Unless you live in a rural area at the end of the line. You need to be prepared for power cuts, at least.