Above Photo: Sarah Menkedick Photos: Jorge Santiago
There are cultures, then there are cultures within cultures, and then there are more cultures within those cultures. Cultures within cultures within cultures. Yes, I’m repeating this that many times to make you feel like you’re watching a spinning top, because that’s what culture starts to look like if you peer at it too closely – all the lines blur together and your head starts to spin and whir. Just when you think you’ve got it and you start to say:
“Mexico is…” some cultural entity pops up and smacks you in the face. Scratch that, you think. I don’t know. Don’t know what this culture is, and don’t know how I feel about it.
That’s why it seems to me that culture shock is the real constant in all of the exploration and exchange that happens traveling. It happens on the first day of your first trip overseas in a foreign country. It also happens on a regular basis in your eleventh year of living abroad. It’s ubiquitous and inevitable and it creeps up at the most unexpected moments.
Even after several years in Mexico, there are still little things that jolt me, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively, most of the time in a confusing gray zone between the two.
Why is it that so many men riding in cars feel the need to bark at my dog? At first I thought it was just the street sweepers in a pathetic, bored, macho pick-up attempt. But then it happened again, and again, and I realized, men notice the dog, they pay attention to the dog and…they bark.
I could make attempts to analyze this through the lens of machismo, which wouldn’t be too hard (man sees big dog, man sees girl walking big dog, man feels slightly less manly, man barks) but I actually think it goes further than that. I think it’s about contact.
If you establish some sort of connection to a person, paying attention to their kid or their dog or something about them, you’ve got to follow through with it. I think it harks back to a time when Oaxaca was still a pueblo, and social norms called for a “buenos tardes, señorita,” or its equivalent for everyone you passed. Now those times have (mostly) gone, but still, passing people on the street, I feel a strange obligation to take them into account like I don’t feel anywhere else.
There’s less of a personal space barrier here overall, and when you’ve made eye contact, you’ve made contact. There’s this pressing, suppressed need for acknowledgment. I feel that a lot, and the dog barking incidents are the most recent manifestation.
So when I came across this gorgeous, bone-deep photo essay on culture shock, I immediately related to it. Yep. As a traveler, this is a familiar feeling, sometimes jarring and unpleasant, sometimes thrilling, but indispensable to that experience of being outside one’s comfort zone.
Thus in all of that squirming around you’ve done trying to get comfortable in other cultures, what sorts of shocks and surprises have you had? What have you found traumatic, exhilarating, or both? Please share your culture shock stories below.
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8 Comments... join the discussion!
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Funny you mention that, Leigh. Standing in line at Houston immigration was a big one for me. The booming young male Texan voice repeating, “Please follow the instructions of the immigration official. Please report any suspicious items…” and the awful, awful videos saying “Welcome to America!” scared the crap out of me. Combine that with those bizarre airport bagel shops and pseudo pubs, things that are in airports everywhere but somehow in the states feel more obscene. And the people! It was another planet. I’ve never had it as badly as that one time, and I had already been living overseas for four years at that point. Who knows when it strikes.
Biggest one ever, though, was my first day in China. Wow. Nothing will compare. I can’t even describe how alien I felt.
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Agreed, the “Welcome to America” is kinda ironic, as our welcome to visitors includes getting fingerprinted, no? Some welcome.
I would also agree with Tim and Abbie – reverse is harder. For me it was the man on the shuttle from the airport, talking business non-stop for 30 minutes during the ride to Arlington, VA. And I’m still occasionally shocked by short skirts and plunging necklines – definite no-nos in Togo (unless you’re at the club).
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I felt very out of place when I first got to Cambodia, but then I felt the culture shock of returning to America with the rules, regulations, and all that.
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Yeah, in my experience reverse culture shock is harder than the initial shock, which is coupled with raw enthusiasm and easier to deal with.
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For me it was colour, or the lack of it. I found it very hard to adjust to the black and solid-colours-only dress code around Europe. I was used to flaming oranges and yellows and pinks. It felt a little depressing. It still does.
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I completely understand. Growing up in Germany, the absence of color in wardrobe contrasted versus what I was used to seeing when in the U.S. It has gotten a little better in the past years in Europe. It hit even harder though, after I left Bombay and came back to the U.S. after a month. My mom even laughed at one of the salwar-qameezes I brought back because of its color. Culture differences are crazy!
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I am a high school student and I just returned from a 2 week exchange with a school in France. I experienced the reverse culture shock like many others. It wasn’t walking off the plane in Marseille seeing no tall buildings and finally feeling fresh air, it was going through customs in Chicago and accidentally answering the questions in french.
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