The BIGGEST cultural shocks travellers have experiences!

travellers have read it what was your biggest culture shock went to the Philippines on the trip from the airport a group of homeless children took control of a bridge and demanded payment for people crossing it people actually paid to the sheer awesomeness of Japanese convenience stores my local 7-eleven has sticky floors in doubtful looking packaged sandwiches the 7-eleven s in Japan are clean well-lit have a great selection of lunch smashed in of repackaged meals and not only do they have a cold drink section they have a special heated unit for hot drinks when I saw all the technological innovations in Japan I felt like I came from a third-world country in Thailand a little kid had never seen a white person as pale as I was and he put his little hand on my knee to see if it was real or culture shock for both of us I guess I landed in Juba South Sudan there were anti-aircraft guns on the roof of the airport child soldiers in the tiny arrivals hall the airport gift shop was selling loose raw eggs and salt there were no roads no electricity no bank system no running water and no garbage collection so the entire city smelled of burning garbage I'm from one of the most unequal countries in the world but going to India still blew my mind though he is a heaving throbbing city people sleeping in literal dirt next dimensions perhaps the pilgrimage to the Taj Mahal was the most eye-opening by far the most beautiful perhaps most opulent man-made structure I've seen on earth but it's marred in the most saddening poverty imaginable I went to Paris and not one person was rude to me for not knowing French very disappointing being an Ethiopian hearing about a shooting perpetrated by Ethiopian military troops attacking at a mosque in Addis and then hearing that no one outside of Ethiopia would ever know of it because when the government controls the telecommunications they can just turn the internet off for a few days and there is no way to get news out everything is way to begin the us and weights are small in Europe the air pollution in major Chinese cities is so bad that your eyes water the second you step out of the airport you also undergo a sort of acclamation sickness within the first couple weeks the other thing about China is that it's such an old country that you have ancient temples and monuments some one thousands of years old right next to hyper-modern eight-story shopping centers my cousin and I went to Denmark a few years back everyone there is good-looking they all had good fashion and sense of style it was ridiculous it got to a point where we played a game to find an ugly / dressed-down person couldn't find anyone for a solid two hours and we were in the heart of downtown Kapaa jump it made me want to live there because everyone is beautiful but also not want to live there because I'd feel pressured to appear my best 24 / 7 sometimes I like wearing comfy non fashionable clothes when I run errands USA to South Korea for school eating lunch in the cafeteria for the first time on my second day trying to eat ramen with chopsticks and realizing too late that I shall spend more time working with chopsticks before coming to a country with very few Forks thankfully another girl nearby took pity on me and taught me through miming how to make it work USA to Korea this time to teach English you don't quite realize the tiger mom stereotype is real until you're surrounded by a pack of moms at a kindergarten parent-teacher conference demanding to know why their five-year-old likes gym better than learning English not from my travels but I had a client that went to Bhutan real conservative lady I asked how it went she goes it was great they really liked male genitals over there I asked her to elaborate she said there were pains everywhere physical representations of penis on hats on the sidewalk everywhere there was a parade where some important guy had a penis TAF and knighted dignitaries with it that made me happy went to Japan first night at 1:00 a.m. in the Metro and it was loaded with people in suits and other formal clothing looking completely exhausted almost falling asleep on each other's laps just an ordinary day for Tokyo people Japanese discipline I was visiting the hackin outdoor museum a huge sculpture garden at the end of the Torah's our onsen foot baths where visitors can dip their feet in the nice hot water tourists of every stripe gathered around the foot baths and the attendant instructed us on the rules the rules were to be followed to the letter remove shoes remove socks place socks inside shoes place shoes in designated area behind you in basket provided thanks cuffs are to be rolled up in this fashion roll back hem to the outside then fold each additional roll in approximately one inch folds continue folding up trouser cuffs until the roll extends past your calf muscle last fold should be a tight fold to keep your trouser cuff up place feet in onsen foot bath and enjoy when finished with enjoyment take shoes and socks from basket and retire to bench to let feet dry when feet are dry unroll trouser cuffs and reinstall socks and shoes you may now leave this attendant went up and down the line repeating the instructions correcting people whose cuff rolling was suboptimal he wasn't mean about it he was just exacting the Japanese guests complied with bows and hey the foreigners bumbled along trying their best and getting a bit irritated it was a hoot went to San Francisco was shocked to see the amount of homeless people there not to mention the amount of human crap on the ground it's literally disgusting like third-world disgusting you immersions need to fix that crap having to pay to use a public toilet in many parts of Europe I'm from Australia where there are free public toilets everywhere and before anyone asks yes they generally are pretty clean example of culture shock in Reverse I'm an American who has spent the past two years living in China after my first trip back to the US after a full year abroad I was just really shocked by how much grass there was everywhere space is such a luxury in Beijing that it was startling to see how much is devoted to your average front slash back yard I was also shocked by enormously wide the roads in my suburban section of the city felt smart is our chocolate I'm from the US and the first time I was in the UK on the very first day I bought a pack of Smarties thinking it was pure sugar to perk me up from the jet lag I drank the box to get a quick mouthful and was suddenly hit by the taste of chocolate and was shocked also a couple minutes later I found out that I was allergic to the dye they use in the coating which i wuld known if I bothered to read the box anyway Smarties are chocolate they were when I went to Vietnam ten years ago I thought there must have been a traffic jam on the way out of the airport motorbike and car horns kept beeping then I realized it was normal everywhere in Vietnam I was there for work and we had a driver who had worn a spot in his steering wheel from beeping the horn so much Malaysia is a woman from the USA I got harassed for wearing shorts I got rocks thrown at me a gun pulled men wouldn't address me the hotel we were at assumed I was a second wife to my married couple friends in fact I always had to convince them that I wanted my own room I was never miss manga CF laughs I was always misses any male friend I was with the fascination with Westerners in rural China and India within an hour of landing in a second-tier Chinese city I was invited to a random couples wedding who were honored to have a show up they even shuffled family members around in order place my friend and I to front and centered in a table and a shout-out from the DJ in China and in view many people treat Westerners like our celebrities and want to take photos with you while sitting on a bench in front of the gate of India in Mumbai we agreed to take a photo with a few Indian guys and when other Indian pass us we saw this they would hurriedly change places with them and we would take another this went on and amused us for close to 10 minutes with no end in sight before we had to walk away gives you a bit of an ego at first but got really annoying from my blonde friend and most backpacker females we met not me but my dad went to India for business and said there were children missing body parts eyes missing across their face begging for money driver told him their parents did that to them to make them look more pathetic so people will give them money the mistreatment of dogs in Central America it's heartbreaking to see these emaciated dogs wandering the streets and wondering if they are going to get blasted by some crappy driver went to New York City and the summer the whole place smelled like hot garbage probably because of the Sun beating down on all the garbage laying in the streets all day probably the urban-rural divide in Mexico particularly the southern states one thing that sticks out is more than expected poverty of the rural areas and the sometimes seen methods of seeking to make a buck in somewhat aggressive manners like the dude standing with a shovel in the middle of the road who apparently spent all day filling a single hole in the road with dirt from the side of the road and wanting a donation I'm also reminded of a few times when driving and suddenly a rope with flags hanging off it sprang from the road forcing the vehicle to start up jumps a bunch of children attempting to sell tortillas or some other food item the fact you're driving and then suddenly the road is obstructed is rather alarming especially given at the time there had been news reports of people being suddenly stopped and robbed on the roads in Taiwan there was a guy who ate a Big Mac using chopsticks one I went to burkina faso for a day while i was studying in ghana i'm a mexican but i studied in the u.s Ghana was interesting everyone assumed I was a Chinese investor because I had straight black hair and wasn't white haha but Burkina Faso was probably the poorest place I've ever been intermittent power people just laying in the street everything looked broken and unwashed it made the colonias in Mexico City look like the Magnificent Mile in Chicago one I did my undergrad at a big southern state school it was weird being somewhere that people would just drop casual racism like I would never date a girl who had dated a black guy or where my friends of color would get assaulted by waisted racists if they were out alone at night a friend of mine a divinity student who looked like Shaq got beat up so badly he had to be hospitalized he was just walking around campus between the library and our dorm floor it was a weekday that blew my mind 3:00 I went to an Ivy for graduate school the rich are just like you and I they just have more money it was strange to hear people casually drop references to yachting or to have my classmates invite me out to skip classes for a week to go to ballet I grew up squeezing eight people in a five-person car for a day's long trip to the keishon in Texas hanging out with friends who never had to worry about money was strange the feeling of being so small and alone on a remote island looking up to the starry sky of the Indian Ocean I'm used to being in the thick of things walk for half an hour through the woods and you'll eventually pop out alongside a road wasn't prepared for the vastness of everything also the u.s. it was a strange experience a lot like home but not quite like an alternate version of home where everything is a lot bigger and people are more talkative the food and drinks tasted different too although we have our own versions of them back home sodas were a lot sweeter than I was used to this is hard to admit but as someone who grew up in the USA I was taught in a thousand ways that this country sets every standard and deserves deference from everyplace else on earth it was so ingrained that I didn't even know it was an assumption until I was outside the states and it was obvious that the USA is not the center of the universe people are doing just fine all over the place without you know being us what's more the myth we tell ourselves is that everyone in the world would live here if they only could no they wouldn't a whole lot of people see us as a collection of fools greed heads and bumblers who happen to have been born in a place with a lot of natural resources since Trump of course the idea that our system of government is magically self-correcting is also under serious question probably getting off the plane and Rangoon where it was 110 degrees and there was like a swarm of fly button kids missing limbs and crap begging I went to the Netherlands as an LDS Mormon missionary the first person I tried to talk to stopped me and said ha I don't speak Dutch and I'm gay so Jesus won't work for me and he walked away my companion just laughed and said welcome to the Netherlands lived in the UK for most of my life and then moved to Connecticut the first time I walked my dog in my new neighborhood someone engaged me in full-on conversation scary was in mainland China for a while Guam's how I absolutely loved all of it but firstly as a woman I was amazed to feel very safe walking around alone at night I took motor taxes in the dead of night in remote areas and felt very safe with the male drivers I never felt threatened or afraid of anyone everyone was nice and wanted to help the white foreigner also the anarchic traffic system that nobody seems to have accidents in despite all the chaos as well as it being a general rule that others will cut you in lines and think nothing of it Indonesia people just sit next to you in the train / bus ask personal questions immediately want to know why you don't have kids or a husband and why you're fat or that you should get a haircut because your hair is ugly it felt like Christmas at home but then for months from multiple people instead of my mom so I went to Vietnam a couple years back with my friend Marcos Marcos is black I'm not we are eating at this small place tucked deep in the mountains when our server comes up to us his friend in tow the surfer without saying a word saddles next to Marcos strikes a buddy Jesus pros and walks off to get our food I looked at Marcus and said you're on some dudes Twitter right now with the caption not Obama but met my first black guy or something similar I went to France and Belgium from the US and was shocked at the lack of the highway advertising no billboards or anything when my wife and I went to France it was really strange to me to find out that I was considered a lunatic for making eye contact and smiling / nodding at strangers as we passed them on the streets I got the dirtiest looks from people for a few hours before my friend who was living there at the time told me that that was a no-no in their culture white American visiting India the number of people who came up to me and said picture picture and at first I figured they wanted me to take their picture no they wanted a picture of / with me happened at least five times went to Guatemala guy was telling me about how he was doing very well financially because with his $3 a day salary he saved up and bought bunch of baby chicks raised them kept half the hens that made good eggs and sold the rest use that money to buy more chicks rinse and repeat over years once he had enough he sold all the hens and bought a calf baby cow he raised it to adulthood and sold it using the money to buy two more baby calves after five six years of doing this right before he was going to sell the cows and use that money to buy a one-room house for his family not one bedroom one room one of the cows got sick and died it set him back years and only over something worth a few hundred dollars he bought me pizza when he invited me over I visited the US when I was about 10 years old and my brother was five it was required by law that children under seven I don't remember the exact age feel free to correct me needed to sit in a child car seat that wasn't a thing back at home in Pakistan I traveled outside of the US and might winters and my biggest culture shocks were how brewed we as Americans around how far we have our heads up our own asses as an American I had my eyes opened up to what poor really meant that sounds weird I know but when you say you are poor here it's not even close to what the rest of the world means I don't mean this to insult demean or downplay anyone struggles but there are people who would f you at and bang ng fight you to be poor in America when I was in Budapest I visited a couple public baths my boyfriend noticed a lot of people staring at me after a while I realized I was the only one with tattoos the level of freedom they give kids in Japan when I went there as an exchange student at age 16 I had basically almost always had an adult with me when outside of tje house or at the very least they always knew where I was suddenly I'm in Sano Maya a massive shopping hub in Coke and my host brother just tells me to do whatever I want while he's a German lessons for a couple hours it took me an hour before I left the train station because I had to fight the instinct to wait and be told where I could go it was so liberating just going wherever I wanted shopping and buying what I wanted and my only limit was my walking distance in my available time it was my first real experience of freedom and honestly back in America rice still don't feel that way even while driving now I just feel shackled to a car rather than my home old people in China are really rude and cut in line and the idea of a line is not a thing for them when to rome was honestly taken back by the amount of trash just on the floor and sidewalk even the Vatican was just littered with wrappers plastic bottles plastic stuck into any crevice on the wall as an American that never litters I just couldn't understand seeing people just drop trash on the sidewalk also not that cultural but the amount of Africans outside the Coliseum that aggressively approached you and put bracelets on you expecting you to pay I've seen the same people do it in France but I saw the French police monitoring and occasionally breaking them up in Italy there was no attempt to divert them away from tourists I grew up almost entirely east of the Mississippi and in Europe for a few years that job had us moving a lot recently I finally got to go on a trip and see the western half of the US and it was just different states like Idaho Utah and some parts of South Dakota honestly felt more foreign to me than France Germany and even eatle Enid still had an amazing time and highly recommended to anyone who has a month to spare I was born in America lived here all my years when I was in my teens my father and I went to Iran specifically kermanshah Hamedan Shiraz Esfahan Teheran an Tabriz we took several trips out there I know the question is what was my biggest culture shock but the shock when I first arrived in Teheran was well the lack of shock there were pizza places that looked like Pizza Hut's McDonald's that's not actually a McDonald's burger places on every block kokin coke ripoffs in every store it was very Americanized my father speaks a few languages one of which is Farsi but many of the signs were written in Farsi and English like road signs etc even numbers used Arabic numerals in addition to Farsi numbers the pizza was weird though there were no large pies just small pan ones like the ones out of Pizza Hut and they were filled with meat and every veggie you can imagine also people their rate Pizza by dipping it in ketchup ketchup like it doesn't already have tomato sauce maan Iran anyway another thing was that no one was mean to me hell when I went to Persepolis the ground of cheddar covered teenaged girls said in English hello American handsome handsome the taxi drivers were super polite one even offered us a reduced fare when traffic held us up also the people there wore conservatively dressed clothing as I'm sure you all know but the women in Teheran at least knew how to show off morality laws demand that a woman wear a head cover and clothing to cover her entire body but they never said anything about how tight should be a her or the younger women wore their head scarves back a little to show off their highlights at least a bit they wore skinny jeans and tight shirts and sometimes a good amount of flashy jewelry now there was one part that I didn't like few miles out of kermanshah my father took me to a small village near the Iraqi border where they made beautiful pottery and carpets the village was very poor compared to the rest of the modernized scissors it was the kind of village that you would see in a Fox News or CNN broadcasts and hops with shanty wooden doors with little indoor plumbing I felt bad for these people but even being all the way out here they were still so good to us there was a small restaurant that all the workers would come and pay a bit of money to eat this lamb soup / stew called AB gosht I've had it before in the States but oh my god was this something else it was served with fresh bread just baked in the stone ovens I felt humbled and amazed her at the same time in my trips to Iran I got to see how nice people could be I was invited to eat in people's homes even though I didn't even know them people wished me good days and showed me hospitality that I've never seen I also saw the lessor face of class inequality between the modernized cities and rural villages I loved it there and wish to return some time in the future after I finished my studies now let me be clear I'm not posting this sister political crap this is my personal history I'm well aware of the corruption that plagues the Iranian government but it's people I want you to understand don't want to have this picture imposed on them they want to be viewed as good people not the violent freedom-hating thugs you see on TV hate the government all you want but don't hate the people just trying to live their lives just like you and me watching a child crap on a side walk in the Forbidden City in Beijing and nobody batted an eye Chinese culture in general is very different no personal space and men seem to be blatantly piggish pulling up their shirt to air out a drink belly constantly hulking lodges and blowing smoke in people's faces I wouldn't really say this was culture shock really stood out to me even at 11 years old my family and I went to Milwaukee we we just moved to southern Missouri a very white place a year before that from southern MN anyways we stopped at a Wenders in Milwaukee to grab some lunch I looked around and noticed we were the only white people including employees in the entire restaurant it was very eye-opening especially after moving to southern Missouri went a German for six months and didn't have any culture shock came home and went to a County Fair in the very small rural part of the US with my family the number of fat old shirtless guys people without teeth and Confederate flags shocked me - Mike wall went to Armenia I'm Armenian so I went with our church I have heard that our men yar is a Christian country but I didn't know every single person was Christian there are churches virtually everywhere and I'm not joking that everyone in that country is Christian got off the plane in Thailand as we were walking through customs there was a line on the ground the sign above it said if you cross this line and aren't carrying drugs the sentence is death I was never so nervous in my life I was thinking what if they find something in my case they didn't of course because I don't use drugs my first day in China was a strange one due to erratic use of car horns on the way to my to bead bedroom from the airport before getting to the house it was decided we should eat couldn't use chopsticks especially when trying to eat think brain a huge shocker of a first meal final feeling of being able to sleep in a bed and getting rid of jetlag and first they shocks was short-lived dived on my bed with glee only to find out it's common to sleep on a bed that is hard as Frick I was sure I was going home within a week but managed three years there and loved it apart from the first week Thank You China in some mode you'd share toilet cubicles to take a leak how do you tell a huge Samoan bloke you don't wanna cross streams when I was in high school I went on a student exchange to Japan it's not exactly uncommon for exchanges between Japan and Australia the Emperor even went on a student exchange to Australia when he was a young man it's also not uncommon for tourism between our two countries as flights are cheap and we are basically in the same time zone what I didn't understand at the time was that Australian tourists tend to stick to the urban areas and rural state schools in Japan never have exchanges 12 teenage - australians rock up in this pig farming village striding across the hobby farm rice paddies it was like being a member of the Beatles we met the man were in the local news ended up on some game show where we had to sound out Japanese words not one of those violent ones we had people stopping their cars in the middle of the road to take photos with us to be seeing a Japanese person isand news my Japanese teacher was from Japan it's not the same for a rural Japanese teenager in the US I've seen people who ate pizza dipped in ranch a few buddies and I went on a trip overseas we were a closed bunch and knew we would get a little noticed as we decided to all dress in the same outfits well after multiple connecting flights a small layover in Germany and rough landing we finally made it to our destination only to have some rude guy down the street shoot some mortars and rockets at us within a couple hours of landing I don't recommend Afghanistan in the summer went on a South African safari when I was 12 we stayed in some of the most Elbert mansions I've ever seen and would drive past houses made of mud the inequality of wealth there is something I've never experienced before also before I'm brigaded for hunting I was 12 I didn't really comprehend what I was doing furthermore all of the meat went directly towards the impoverished starving locals splitting a bill really isn't a thing in Great Britain all meals go on one bill update thanks for the feedback general consensus seems to be it isn't a thing unless it is I had an uber driver message me saying he was canceling because he saw local drivers who have and will damage his car if he enters their area instead of like $3.00 with ubirr I paid a local driver $10 kettles are a rarity in America like how the Frick do you make pot noodles over there mine was coming home back to Canada after living in CL for a year being back at my mom's house in the suburbs were so flat I felt so out of place took about two months to get used to it again went to Spain super friendly and accepting of all cultures had menus printed in every language available people spoke several languages ranging from English to Russian loved it drove up to France where they only speak French I fortunately speak enough French to get by but it was really intimidating [Music] [Music] [Music]

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Id: 4lNDgCz2NVs

Length: 29min 40sec (1780 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 17 2020