Choc Culturel -Culture Shock
I have two interesting stories. Back in 2018, I went to Italy and Vatican City. Despite being a history major at the time; I was not prepared on how to communicate with Italian locals. When I was at the train station, all the security guards had ignored my family and continued to play games on their phones. Of course, years later I thought about how my interaction could have upset them as well.
Then there’s moments where you feel completely and utterly idiotic because you get rude responses when doing the right things. During the winter break, I went to Portugal and the atmosphere was immensely unwelcoming despite attempting to speak in Portuguese. I was either ignored when asking for help, or told “No Habla.”, “I can’t understand you, speak Spanish.”, or “I don’t know what you’re saying. Speak English.” However, I don’t let these small moments of annoyance dictate my perception of a country or its people. It’s easy to fall into the trap of disliking a place because of a few bad encounters. But I chose to remember those that did help me regardless. I choose to reflect on those moments of genuine hospitality to define character.
Type Two incidents are when an expat disrupts the norm or environment by insulting a local unintentionally. There are certain things that make locals mad depending on the country. For example, I felt shame seeing litter in the streets of Kyoto, Japan. Why? Because I knew that an American had littered because of the McDonald’s logo. I knew that it was an American that didn’t appreciate the clean streets of Japan due to their cultural being deeply embedded in Shintoism and the desire to keep a clean environment. While it sounds Lubricous and presumptuous of me to say it was an American, I knew because the location was near a Western Hotel in which most of the guests had an American dialect.
A time where I might have upset a local was when I was walking back to my Airbnb in Paris. I relied completely on my maw maw which means Grandma in ‘creole’ to speak French to the locals. Not realizing that, there’s subtle differences and different uses of vowels. This means that some of my grandma’s words potentially could have sounded rude or too formal. A couple refused to help us on our way back. They were owners of a bakery and simply laughed in our faces. Maybe we insulted them by not respecting their closing hours? In the U.S., customers wait to the last possible minute to finish shopping. Perhaps, when Parisians are done for the day then that’s it.
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