Biggest cultural shock you have come across?

[hibbledobble]

What have you encountered while travelling that was your biggest cultural shock?

I'll go first: in Poland I saw families/extended families living 10+ in a 2 bedroom home. The concept of having a bedroom or even a bed to oneself is seemingly unheard of. Everyone sleeps in different beds each night, and beds are often shared. Having visitors in this set up is no problem either: everyone just rearranges. Water also came from Wells, lots of homes had no bathrooms. Ovens were these metal beasts that were plugged into the mains.

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.

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!

tame one

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.

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!

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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'.

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.

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?

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

@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

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!

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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?

“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

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

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!

That last post was to lizzieoak. ☺

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

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...

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.

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!