What was the first culture shock you remember having?

[MeiganMcSeinna6]

high school for me , thought it would be all sweet an innocent , Wrong

@TheLovleyChebbyMcGee at my university, a tutor found out a student went to a comp and asked, so how did you get in?

But the thing is there were a lot of Germans, French and Singaporeans on my course and most of them would have gone to state schools (as the private school sector is generally for expats) so it doesn't make sense either.

Realising that out of class of 22 students at uni there were only 3 of us who didn't go to private school! I always though we were quite well off growing up, but that made me reconsider

I think most people on my course (at what is now an RG university) had gone to state schools. I was also trying to think what the split was in my university halls - there were 8 of us and I think only one had gone to a private school. Still, there are state schools and state schools, I went to a grammar and there were people from the Hampshire and Berkshire areas who had gone to "posh" comprehensives.

Definitely working in offices.
I’d imagined it to be very nice and maybe a bit la-de-da (thanks mum !)
Full of lazy bullies who bitch and backstab to cement their cliques and get rid of any competition.

A lot of jobs aren’t even that well paid so I’ve no idea why they’re sought after. Learning a trade would have been better.

Moving to London aged 19 to do a secretarial course. It was in South Kensington and quite a few women had just been to finishing school (1983). Do they even still exist I wonder!

Starting work in a school and being told, quite rightly, that not all children have a homework/dinner/bath/story/bed routine when they get home. How naive was I.

Visiting Malaysia on holiday as a teenager from NZ. I had never seen women wearing head scarves in real life and was fascinated by the girls my age wearing hajib as part of their school uniform.

Similar to another poster, my first visit to a GP in the UK. First that I couldn't chose where to go (linked to my postcode). Second that I couldn't really chose an appointment time or day. Then the actual appointment - in NZ you are treated with enormous respect as a patient and given more than 5 minutes time. 20 years on and many more GP appointments later at several different practices it is much the same - patients are treated like the GP is doing them a massive favour seeing them. That does change sometimes if the GP asks what I do for a job and I mention I work for the NHS...

Being given freedom when the Berlin wall came down.
I couldn't get to grips with that I could just get on a bus or a train without having to get written permission from the authorities first if I wanted to travel further than my city.
And being able to freely buy banana's. I'd always wanted to try a banana, but they were banned. I eat at least two a day now 😋
The west in general was a huge shock to my twenty two year old mind.

I was pretty shocked at adults scoffing pick n mix sweets like there was no tomorrow when I started work at the civil service
I thought that once you were an adult you ate ‘adult’ sweets like Mars bars and definitely not at work.

Living in Houston USA after living in rural Scotland 😂😂

Going to Secondary School in 1976… came from a small ‘naice’ school with around 200 pupils and ended up at a huge school with around 1100 pupils 😱
I was struck dumb for about 3 weeks!! The 5th years (15/16yr olds) seemed so tall and grown up… boys had moustaches, girls had boobs and platform shoes… I had a vest and pants and ‘school’ shoes.
The building was 4 storeys high and was massive in size and no-one actually ‘played’ in the playground… they smoked and swore and shoved each other around…
Funny thing was, once I’d settled in, I loved the place!

Going to the west coast of the States. The poverty, the mentally ill roaming the streets of San Fran, houses with outside toilets, people living in caravans with no electricity. It seemed like a third world country.

Going to stay with my boyfriend's parents in South Africa in the 1980s - gated compounds, numerous staff, vast house and gardens. Then the long lecture from his father about how to stay safe when we went off travelling down the coast on our own.

Travelling from London and holidaying in an country barn conversion near Axminster, without access to public transport.

Realising that a lot of my holiday money would be spent on cabs after spending £25 on a bus pass and finding that a lot of buses didn't run on weekends and there were villages which had two buses a day.

I had no idea that people's lives could be so limited by what was an essential service in 20th Century UK.

Going to a friend's house for lunch and having buttered bread with my soup! We were poor, soup normally came with a couple of squares of unbuttered bread. It was a revelation.

Abhannmor
Very hard disagree @igelkott2021. In the USA or here in Ireland it's all about the money for sure . But England's class system is deeply embedded , very subtle and quite complicated. It's had since 1066 to take root so not surprising really.

Hmm maybe - I don't see it myself. To me it just seems to be about what car you drive. If you have a posh car you're worth knowing. If you drive a Honda Jazz, not so much grin

Totally agree with Abhannmor. Money isn't class. A lot of class-related sneering is towards people who spend lots of money, or who spend it on things perceived as flashy (expensive prams, fancy cars etc). Meanwhile your upper middle class people are using second-hand, preloved/vintage, ancient hand-me-downs and driving old cars. Their 'class' is shown by the way they speak, their interests, their cultural capital etc.

"irls outfits on a night out in the middle of winter. Granted it's not the artic, but mini skirts, sandals and cropped top in January was a shock. Still is! Even when I go out I wear a coat and all kind of layers on top of my outfit. It's cold."

I'm British so was used to this, but lived abroad for a few years and when I came back I was re-shocked by it. That and the binge drinking. Vomit on the streets, middle aged people so drunk they were falling off their chairs. Took me about a year to find it normal again.

Chocolate Christmas tree decorations! Australia to England, mid 70s. Most houses weren't air conditioned back then, so they would practically have dripped off the tree.

The universal binge-drinking is a relatively new phenomenon I think. If you go back 30 years or so, it didn't happen on this scale.

Stepping foot in Florence for the first time in my very early 20's and being utterly awestruck that real live people got to live in a place like that. It was a very far cry from the depressed former garrison town I came from...

I can honestly say it changed the course of my life in many ways.

Living on a council estate with teenager parents then going to private school

@FangsForTheMemory

The universal binge-drinking is a relatively new phenomenon I think. If you go back 30 years or so, it didn't happen on this scale.

I have wondered about this. I went to university in Scotland many years ago, and I remember people drinking, of course, but not excessively.

My greatest culture shock was sectarianism in Scotland in those days. Being American, I certainly had experience of racism and prejudice, especially being from the South, but seeing "Fuck the Pope" scrawled out in white paint on a wall in a leafy street in Edinburgh is still burned in my memory.

"Went from that to a village school with about 30 kids total, only half of them in my class, and every one of us was white. Everyone knew everyone and quite a few of them were related. I found it quite tough for a while."

I had this, but with even fewer pupils and half had the same surname.

The shock of British bathrooms when I moved here from Australia in the early 00s - carpets 😖, separate hot and cold taps, lights you switched on with a cord and low water pressure. And that last one was in places that actually had showers - I was surprised to see a lot of people still only had a bathtub!

"Manchester is northern and while nothing bad has happened to me there it does make me nervous in the same way london and birmingham do so I think its a 'big city' thing."

I think Manchester is one of the roughest places I've ever been to in terms of how it makes me feel. I don't know Birmingham, but central London is obviously very different and Liverpool has a totally different feel.

Their 'class' is shown by the way they speak, their interests, their cultural capital etc

Oh yes if you are working class you like football, if you are upper class you like opera. Heaven forbid that you like something different! Interests and hobbies are not about class (although you need a lot of money to do certain things - triathlon is expensive, for example - but then so is having football season ticket).