On culture shock: For me it was quite hard to define things, like the concept of public space. There isn’t really any. Everyone except the extremely poor drives from one insulated, air conditioned room to another. Colleagues were amazed when I said I liked to just go and wander in the countryside- they thought this must be deeply unsafe and probably illegal. What if someone followed me with a gun?
I was admittedly in a city, but I was shocked by the existence of whole areas and suburbs that were considered “no go” or “no go unless you’re a particular ethnicity (white/black/Latino)”. I’ve spent most of my life in UK cities and while I don’t wander down dark alleyways by myself at 3am, I would never counsel a visitor that a whole suburb was unsafe or off limits. Just walking about town felt edgy in a way it doesn’t here. And going out on trips to rural places, again, it didn’t feel very safe to wait at bus stops or hang around shopping malls etc. There were the usual range of characters hanging about that you’d also see in this country, but there’s always the thought they might be armed. I felt an undercurrent of violence that I just don’t when I’m at home, though that was also undoubtedly because I didn’t viscerally know the culture and trust myself to read any danger signs.
Yes, they speak English. But the vocab is often very different, including for many many common words, and while we generally understand American English from TV etc, the same is far less true in reverse. So be prepared for a lot of misunderstandings and explaining yourself. I found that over time this began to feel quite isolating.
Social solidarity happens quite differently. Americans are incredibly friendly and hospitable and you will undoubtedly get lots of dinner invitations and lovely food. But I found friendships much harder to build over a longer period: female friendships could be lovely when we were together but somehow drifted when we weren’t. It’s hard to explain, but it’s a whole different way of negotiating relationships. The nuclear family seemed even more important than here, and as with driving from one air conditioned box to another, this meant as far as I could see that people often holed up in their homes and had less time to be out in public or elsewhere.
Also, there’s almost no social security (even less than here) and the individualism is off the scale; hanging out with what were by American standards extreme liberals at my college, all of whom volunteered at soup kitchens and the like, it was striking to me that none of them had any collective or what I would consider even political response to the extreme poverty they were seeing. They were trying to “raise the aspirations” of the individual homeless people they were serving so that those people would make a better life for themselves, not questioning why their society was structured so as to create a huge and growing number of homeless and extremely poor people.
The inner city poverty I saw was like nothing I’ve seen in Western Europe: crowds of literally destitute. Though this was a while back and by now sadly my city in the UK is starting to head that way too.
Oh, and the food. If you’re rich you can eat very well (food is expensive). But if you ever want to eat anything processed or in a restaurant, or if you’re poor, you will eat fairly unimaginable (to a European palate) amounts of salt and sugar. Things like bread are full of it. I found takeaway pizza almost inedible because of the salt content, even from quite upscale joints.
All the above is my recollections only, and not intended to stereotype Americans or anyone else. I actually loved my time studying there and am very glad I did it. But I wouldn’t want to live there permanently.