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.

Yes I remember bed sharing in eastern europe too. Spent a few months in a large bed similer size to two beds together on a platform in lodz. Sometimes 3 people slept there sometimes 6 people. Sometimes a couple would have sex at one end of the bed while the rest pretended to sleep.

I'm in Hong Kong, so its culture shock on a daily basis...
Language barrier is huge.
Some local companies black out the windows a la IKEA so employees lose track of time so stay there well into the evening. I worked for a local company and they did this.
They don't really queue here - they barge in. Not for the faint hearted!
They cancel anything at any given moment and don't give two hoots about your time being wasted.
No such thing as customer service.
And in response the customers are rude, too.
If something is expensive then it's got to be better than the less expensive item.
A conversation preceding a meeting takes precedence over the start time of the meeting...so if you turn up to a 9am meeting don't expect it to start at 9am. But you have to be prepared to cancel your next meeting to allow for the first to finish.

And the list goes on and on and on...

Mercifully though, they are obsessed with food which suits me fine.

In many countries babies and toddlers are considered to be communal property, so people give advice or make comments that would be considered weird in the UK. On the other hand it's probably safer for the kids because people aren't scared to intervene.

Glitter - agree entirely about servants. I find it very difficult to deal with them....

In the middle of the first term, I was having some problems with a bloke who lived in the room above me. I called my brother who brought his friends over and they, basically, kidnapped him and threatened to break his legs. This was a pretty normal way of resolving things where I grew up. My flatmates were completely horrified and news of this event spread all round the University.

What? Well, I'm glad I'm not the only one that's shocked reading this. It seems very violent and a bit... well, rough.

Most people live cheek by jowl in Europe, not just in Poland. In Italy it is virtually unheard of for dcs to have their own bedrooms - most share with siblings and often they or their parents sleep on a sofa bed in the sitting room which is tidied away come morning. I've been in many houses where the dcs/teens most definitely do not have any "stuff" out. Their possessions are kept tidily in one cupboard or box. This is not because people are poor - they just don't attach much importance to sleeping space/privacy.

when i went to uni in the 90s in teh UK there were barely any asian (indian subcontinent people) and i put with 3 years of people eyeballing me everytime i cooked anything. even cooking rice i would get "oh wow what are you cooking?". i'd grown up in london and found this weird.
my second culture shock is that im currently watching a lot of scandi crime programmes on TV (like the killing, wallander, department q, that kind of thing)and without fail, there is always open hostility/ racist phrases used when referring to muslims. Immigration and terrorism is a key theme running throughout everything. I am always shocked, in uk dramas/ films on mainstream tv/ netflix i have never seen this. is this commonplace in scandinavia?

I assure you it's become more and more commonplace in London. Lots of East European families here living in crowded households. I know several people who've lived next door to such families.

tectonic As I said, it was pretty common where I grew up so not at all horrifying or unusual for me.

In the UK, those on mains gas are in rural areas of very low population density.

In Spain, my friend without mains gas lives in a decent sized town about 10 miles along the coast from Marbella.

Squat toilets in the train station in Moscow where you collect some pieces of loo roll from the old lady toilet attendant before going to squat. I changed my mind about needing a wee and decided to hold it until I got on the train!

allworn have you been to the poor rural areas? It was certainly very common there.

In the towns it's also perfectly normal for a family of 4 to live in a tiny 25m2 one bedroom flat.

The toilets in China. The worst I came across were where there was a trough that ran under all the cubicles - so you could see everything floating past. The stench was unbelievable. I had to run straight out of that particular one. Yet in other parts there were high tech toilets with a number of buttons with different functions!

Another example of extremes: there were plenty of shopping centres full of designer shops. Yet we only had to walk 10-15 minutes away from one to find people washing their clothes in the local river.

Cricket Where I grew up was extremely rough. Hence the culture shock of university.

mousy
I'm sure some people do live this way. But I personally really wouldn't make a generalised statement like this. It's definitely not what I have experienced, tbh.

Public defecation in India.

Men holding hands and sitting on each other's lap in Pakistan.

You'll mock me for this one, but I went to university as a somewhat sheltered 17 year old in the 1980s. A few weeks in I'd made some good friends and I attended a party in someone's room. As the evening wore down our host cuddled up affectionately with his girlfriend on his bed and when the rest of us left she stayed behind . I wasn't that sheltered, I knew that people did have sex outside marriage, but the I was genuinely gobsmacked by the idea that two unmarried nineteen year old heterosexuals would not be ashamed of the fact that they were sharing a bed and not care who knew it.

Mind you a (gay) friend of mine was equally shocked by the revelation that I'd been a virgin when I came up to university (and remained so throughout my first year). It came out in conversation talking about our "numbers" and he did a huge double take "But hang on! That would mean! When you came up to university...?!?? "

Game

Oh, yes. that makes sense, I guess.

I grew up very sheltered in many ways. Or at least sheltered towards outside influences. My family is messed up enough to have imparted some weird/interesting ideas...

@Farandole lol you say that but I've seen people shit in the street, in the middle of the day, in both Paris and New York 🙈

I think we all think the way we live in the UK is normal for the UK, and the people we meet abroad are typical of everyone in that country. For example, in my family, it's normal for children to go to funerals. When I was young and didn't have much money, I lived in shared accommodation, with four strangers in one room. Lots of people still use bottled gas here. etc etc.

Underage prostitution in Thailand - and the profound and very obvious corruption among the police

And yes, another one who noted the statee of the toilets in China ...

The driving in China

Children clinging to parents on the back of motorcycles/mopeds with no helmets on. Always blows my mind

@Puzzledandpissedoff the amount of times I saw a 100 baht note slip hands 🙊

How cold English houses are
English children having diner at 5pm, and to bed at 6pm! I am still shocked by that one.
The "dress code" for English party girls in the middle of winter who have pretty much nothing on.
London black cabs. They are amazing.

Indonesia when I had just finished University.

Some of my family were expats - so lived in luxury with maid/driver etc. But I was taken to see the 'real' Jakarta too - and the image that will stay with me forever is a tiny boy - in a shanty town - brushing his teeth in the tiny stream of water that flowed through and served as drinking water and sewer.

We didn't venture into the shanty towns - just skirted round the edges. I felt like a voyeur, like I was in a zoo, staring at these people with nothing.

Mine is also mockable for its innocence. I grew up in the US, and the first time I left it was when I did a semester abroad in Germany and Austria during university. I started my semester in a small Bavarian village in January and was astonished to see men really wearing lederhosen and that there were plenty of women (not just old grannies) in dirndls! I had thought that was just a cliche.