Embarrassing travel culture shocks

[WildBalonz]

Since it’s summer and holiday season I thought it might be fun to share some silly or funny or embarrassing cultural shocks we’ve all had when travelling!

I’ll start with an incident that is both funny and embarrassing depending how you look at it. A few years ago me, my brother, his wife and her brother (my brother and sister in law) went on a trip all through China. We were on a tour bus traveling through some rural areas outside Guangzhou. We had a pit stop to stretch our legs and use the toilet etc and our driver proudly told us that the public loos we had stopped at had western toilets which were very uncommon in these areas. Great we all thought, however what he didn’t mention is that instead of individual cubicals they had very small almost like shower screens separating each toilet. Not much privacy at all! It made for a very embarrassing poo for me my sister in law and two other ladies on our tour 😂. I laugh at it now but at the time it was probably the most awkward and embarrassing experience our lives. Luckily she’s a good sport and we joke about it these days!

I’m also a bidet advocate. We have bidets on both our toilets at home (one fancy Japanese-style and one with a simpler, unheated bidet toilet attachment). I actually get a bit of culture shock when I go and stay somewhere where there’s no bidet function on the toilet. Just wiping with toilet paper feels really gross and unpleasant when you’re not used to it.

I think that's quite a good thing.
It's part of self control.
Not selfishly indulging any expression of emotion.
Of course that can be taken too far.
But I think things have swung too far in the opposite direction now.
As if no one else matters or how one's behavoiur affects others.

I don't know if this is/was typical, but I was quite taken aback in Cairo when visiting a public loo at the Giza pyramid complex. There was no loo paper in the cubicles, but a woman standing at the entrance doled out just two pieces per person to people as they went in. For water, you had to go to a tap in the wall and fill a bucket to take into the cubicle for flushing. It was a very unpleasant experience.

Japanese squat toilets. You need strong thighs!

We mostly found squat toilets in Egypt. There was usually a jug of water and a cloth type towel in them but the hotel had normal loos and beigey coloured toilet paper a bit like the eco stuff. I found the mounds of plastic & general detritus near the pyramids quite strange but there's probably not the infrastructure to deal with it & tourists might be adding to the problem.

Nobody is trained to not show emotion, British people don't tend to do hysteria! Just like you have races of women that scream and wail at funerals, British people see no point in it and chose to generally approach things in a calmer way. It's like we often find Americans too loud and dramatic.

Your post reminds me of all the different meanings of 'I'm fine'.

1. I'm not fine at all, but just leave me alone
2. I'm not fine but give me a moment and I'll cope.
3. I think I might have broken my leg...
4. My whole world has just collapsed, but I don't want to talk about it.
5. I am, amazingly, actually fine!

I remember my dad poking the wires directly into the socket holes and then pushing them in with another plug 🙈

I just remembered a non-toilet related culture shock. I moved to Finland years ago and was shocked at first when I listened to the radio as they don't do radio edits here - songs are played in their original form, fucks and all.

Are you my niece?? I recall my brother, an electrician, doing precisely that if he didn't have time/couldn't be bothered to fit a plug! Certainly in the 60s and 70s plugs were not always fitted to new appliances, it was part of the bargaining process, asking for a free plug. I'm not sure when they started to be always fitted.

Very similar experience to me OP, went on a bus tour with my sister and the toilets didn’t have proper privacy separators, I didn’t think I’s ever have to do a poo next to two other women before, one was family too 😅 sad part is that’s not even my most embarrassing toilet experience

When I first moved to Australia I was a bit stunned at the graphic news coverage of road traffic accidents, with anchors saying things like " And there's been a spectacular accident on the Hume Highway"! Then cutting to horrible scenes of carnage. Not embarrassing but certainly sobering & maybe designed to make people drive more carefully. I was also a bit shocked at how fast they drive there like they're in a real frantic hurry when generally they're quite laid back people otherwise. Americans seem to drive fairly slowly in comparison.

I found the number of stray cats and dogs around the pyramids and Cairo in general really shocking. There were puppies and kittens everywhere and the camel person thought I was mad when I stopped my camel to help a tiny puppy lying in the middle of the desert without its mum.

I disagree.

I think that a lot of children in England are trained from a very early age, not to show a lot of emotion. They are trained to be reserved.

It is part of the culture here. The children become like that because that is how their parents are. Don't show emotion. Be reserved.

When you talk to people in England, the people are much much reserved and stiff than people in other countries are.

It's not right or wrong. Its just the culture and it is different to cultures in other countries.

It can definitely be a culture shock for people when they come to England.

I used to be sniffy about the House of Lords until they saved the word 'mother' in the Maternity Bill in 2021. They've proved their worth several times since.

It's extremely archaic to have a

"House of Lords"

In this day and age.

Have you seen how angry kids and adolescents are now in the UK! You talk like we are some sort of sick regime that terrorises kids out of daring to show emotions! There is no such training! We used to be raised not to lose tempers and to be polite and have manners! British are normally complimented on this rather than being called a nation of child abusers!
The problem we have nowadays is too many kids aren't disciplined at all and many run wild!

You don't think British people cry at funerals or laugh at comedy or get excited for things? You really thought we are all controlled emotionless zombies? We are a nation that does encourage it, in recent years men's clubs where they can talk about issues have cropped up everywhere to break down the emotional walls that men have.

My grandparents generation went through war and having bombs dropped on them and people coped by keeping calm and carrying on and the British just became known as a a race with a stiff upper lip.

Wow. This thread is talking about culture shocks when we go to countries, and culture shocks have been mentioned about lots of different countries.

Are you that immature that you can't even take one post talking about a culture shock in Engand?

So on this thread are we allowed to talk about every country, except England then?

Things have been said about loads of different countries on here. England is not excluded.

Stop being so defensive.

Yes I stand by what I said . I got a culture shock when I came to England at how formal and reserved many people are in England, and I am definitely not the only person that has ever said this.

Don't be offensive then! You know I haven't said we can't talk about England or the UK but you can't go around saying thau we train kids to be emotionless and that everyone is shocked by us! That's funny because we get a lot tourism to say we are emotionless and shocking!

Large metal spittoons in Thailand airport.
Women squatting in the street in Peru to relieve themselves.
Camp toilets in Canada - 4 or 5 holes with no dividers between them down to a deep dark hole of shit.
Male labourers in Dubai just squatting anywhere and relieving themselves.
Men in Saudi Arabia coming into supermarkets to wank off while looking at women.

Where are you from? Bolivia? Because that's a shit show .

Yes. Although it's more like a House of Peers these days.
Most countries have two houses of parliament, that's not the odd bit.
Hereditary peer numbers have been hugely reduced, now many are appointed.
I'm not sure if that's better.
Having the Lords Spiritual in the HoL is archaic though!
But then there are other couontries ruled by mullahs and Ayatollas, so...

You win the thread 😮

Not me but a friend spent some time in Japan and told me he was always doing embarrassing faux pas.
One I remember he said he asked for directions and the person didn't know the way, but stood there bowing head at him for ages.
He later found out he had embarrassed the man for asking a question he didn't know the answer to and he was waiting for him to apologise.

I think that’s a language barrier rather than a cultural difference. As a British person, I always feel quite at home with the Japanese culture of continuously apologising. We wouldn’t do the bowing, but otherwise the interaction would be the same here, I think. If someone asks me for directions and I don’t know the answer, I’d apologise for not knowing, then the normal next step would be that they tell me not to worry and say something along the lines of “sorry to bother you” and then we move on with our day. The apology culture always feels quite familiar and comforting to me. In British English the word “sorry” is also thrown around very liberally.