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The size of grocery stores in the US, coming from Hong Kong. Also, the massive lack of good public transit, urban walkability, and just cars cars cars everywhere.
The things you point our are lacking are the reason the grocery stores are so big. When you go to the store it’s not just a small thing you do on your way to do something else, because when you’re in a car nothing is easy. Parking and walking into the store can take a few minutes, so stopping after work every day gets annoying fast because what could have been a 5 minute stop on fklt inevitably turns into a 15-20 minute stop.
So, you make going to the store a once or twice a week thing, and you buy EVERYTHING you think you’ll want or need in that week when you go to handle that the store needs more in stock.
I must admit that I eventually got used to it and even started enjoying this attitude, which I also took part in, but I was quite amazed by the Finns.
For work reasons, I had to spend three months in Espoo and the interaction with my colleagues was strangely cold in social interactions. Examples:
- In the office canteen, they would sit next to you and start eating without even greeting or making conversation. I wondered why they had chosen to sit next to me.
- When they finished eating, they would get up from the table and not say goodbye.
- The scrupulous respect for personal space: in queues, crowds, etc.
- Small talk was generally non-existent. People often preferred to stay quiet rather than chat about the weather or other common topics. Even in an elevator, silence was the norm, not the exception.
- During meetings, the Finns would often speak only when they had something substantial to contribute. The silence in between wasn’t considered awkward, but a moment of thoughtfulness and respect for others’ ideas.
I ended up enjoying this way of social interaction. It seems to me that one uses less energy in social situations. There’s less stress about having to make conversation or engage in small talks.
Love you Finland.
Going to sound weird but going to one of my childhood friend’s house
He had a loving family where everyone was happy and helped each other. They communicated with each other happily about things that interested them. They were unafraid to share what was on their minds and what they were passionate about. They asked each other to do things without threatening or screaming. When they did have disagreements they talked them out. They’d say, “I love you,” without a hint of pain or irony.
It was jarring. It threw me off. I went over to his place a lot (like literally almost every day for the time were friends) and it wasn’t until I had been going to his place for a few weeks did it dawn on me that I had never seen his parents argue.
And honestly one of the most eye opening experiences from when I was young about how a family is supposed to function.
I guess you could say it was culture shock because my relatives operated on a culture of fear, hatred, and a lack of love. The phrase, “You have to love me, I’m family,” was uttered entirely too many times. Violence and the threat of violence was the only motivator my relatives used.
I was friends with that guy for 3 years. I’ll never forget his parents telling me that they saw me as family. I’d say those years did more good for shaping who I am today than all the years I spent with my relatives. I look back fondly on the time I spent with them. I wish it didn’t end the way it did though.
I hope they’re all doing well.
I grew up in Liberia in the 80s and had to leave due to the civil war. (Remember General Butt-Naked? Yeah, that war in that country) It was a crazy time, not one big shock but a string of many smaller things. For example, I would look out the school window and see a horde of students wielding machetes overrunning the school grounds - I can’t remember what they were protesting.
But coming back to Europe the biggest culture shocks were functioning waste disposal and utilities, and how clean everything was. Also it was hard for me to relate to people’s problems, because they seemed so trivial. Took me a while to adjust.
Yes! Being unable to relate to people’s problems due to triviality was also something that I faced as someone who moved from a third world to a first world country.
Yayy! You understand me! I thought my comment appeared a bit asshole-ish and was almost thinking of editing it.
In Liberia I perceived a different culture of complaining. You’ll get an earful of excuses. Much palaver and lamentation. But in the end, we’ll work something out. We might be mad now, we might laugh the issue off, but tomorrow we drink together. Or maybe not. No biggie.
I live in America, and I would say America. During COVID I was completely shocked on how stupid we were about masks and vaccine guidelines. I am nearly 40 now but at the time I didn’t know this country was so stupid.
How prevalent alcohol culture is in the West. I’m Southeast Asian and it’s more common for us to drink sugary drinks and have food at the local corner restaurant at night instead of having alcohol when we spend time with friends.
When I studied in the West, it really struck me how the only place you really could hang out at night was the bar, and alcohol was often the preferred drink. And they normally closed at 12am, so you can’t even stay out that late.
Personally I’m not very fond of inebriation just due to the issues it creates (not that my friends were alcoholics and got blackout drunk every time we hung out), so I found it kind of bad that it’s so socially accepted to see a need to get drunk in order to tolerate socialising with friends.
I’m not much of a drinker myself but. Some people use alcohol because it makes them “open up” and it’s easier for them to have fun that way. (this is what the finnish song “cha cha cha” is about.)
The Finnish song Cha Cha Cha is awesome. It should have won Eurovision!
Australian here, we have the same culture but it doesn’t finish at 12am, I found the Cinderella rule in the USA weird.
Here in NYC last call is 4am. Whenever I travel I always find it really weird that most places in the US close so early.
as someone from Berlin, it’s wild that you even have a “last call” rule in so many places/countries. Bars and clubs here can just decide themselves, when they want to close. There are even a few 24/7 places.
Well, I personally get drunk quicker due to metabolism and my hangover starts the same day.
That is, compared to most Europeans, but I’ve heard that for SE Asia this would actually be the norm.
So one can say in this case culture just follows structural difference.
But - yes, it’s much nicer to be with friends when they are not drunk.
Except for beer, there are weaker sorts, and the effect of hops on people I actually like.
Plenty of people in the West find the alcohol culture frustrating, especially recovering alcoholics. Personally I can’t drink much, so I tend to find myself sipping on a cranberry juice.
I immigrated to Vietnam. That was ok.
Visiting north America again years later was quite a shock!
Going home after living abroad was a way bigger shock to me than living abroad was too. You suddenly see your own culture from outside.
I left home for a little over a year, here I am almost a decade later fascinated people here can’t see that things can work so much better than they currently do.
Can you explain more about this? What was shocking about it?
Ack, my long response got eaten.
I guess in North America, people I know seem to think that developing countries in Asia are these oppressive, miserable places.
While I do technically live in a slum, it’s safer and the residents are happier than any place I’ve been in Canada. The people here have so much freedom to do the things that matter! The barrier to starting a business is very close to zero, zoning and tax laws are not prohibitive either. You can do whatever you want with your home – no home owner’s association. Raise chickens on your roof, if that’s what you want to do. Anything not dangerous is OK – maybe talk to your neighbors first if it’s something unusual.
Going back to North America is something I do for family. It’s inconvenient, everything is far apart and empty, it feels dead. The food is less good. People are angry and divided about politics. There’s some low-but-everpresent degree of hostility towards people who look like foreigners, and overall it seems people have somewhat strange ideas about Asia. It’s not terrible, and there are many good things there too (it is clean and many forests!), but I feel woefully out of place.
Interacting with people from North America who visit Vietnam has always been the biggest cultural shock though. Often, they outright ask me how to commit crimes (I maintain a presence online to answer questions for confused tourists – Vietnam is not that accessible sometimes). Work permit compliance is low, also many fake university degrees and fake passports. Lots of people running MLM and crypto scams. Many drive without any valid license, and if they hit someone they flee back home. I met many selling drugs illegally (I wasn’t looking for them, either). It used to be shockingly bad. On the bright side, it drove me to integrate culturally and pay careful attention to my immigration paperwork.
So I guess I consider myself culturally Asian now, which I suppose is a reasonable outcome after 10 years. The language is still hard for me though, I still speak like a child – running a business doesn’t leave so much time to study human languages.
Nowadays, we’re getting more qualified professionals and tourists that are decent people, so things are generally way better than they were 5 or 6 years ago. Overall the things I’ve seen make me ashamed though. I don’t think any amount of progress can really wash that feeling away. I try to assist tourists online as a way to prevent myself from turning that shame into prejudice.
German living in Canada since 2018. Couple of things:
- There’s no bread culture. It’s all toast, with the exception of French breads. But I saw brown colored toast sold as pumpernickel. A travesty.
- The love for bland food. I know, there was a demonization campaign against salt in the 80s or something. But you gotta get over it. Feels like you’re saving salt from the cooking to put it on the road in the winter.
- The healthcare system is a joke. “bUt It’S bEtTeR tHaN iN tHe Us.” As if that’s difficult. Only difference is your dumpster isn’t on fire, yet.
- THE ABSOLUTE TRASH THAT’S SOLD AS TOILET PAPER! Honestly my biggest pet peeve. TP here is flimsy and overpriced. >1$ for a roll of 2-ply or >2$ per roll of 3-ply, but both tear if you so much as look at them the wrong way.
Bread: you are right. It’s universally terrible. In larger cities there are European bakeries that are better.
Bland food: Yep. It’s a mix of the worst of American northwestern food with bland British food. It’s getting better though, especially in BC.
No comment on health care.
Toilet paper is this way in Canada due to so many people living with septic tanks or lagoons, I believe.
Look into bidets. There’s cheap seat addons you can buy but there are also portable bottle-like ones. I’ve got one of these: https://happypo.com/products/xl-bidet
Not me, but the first time my boyfriend traveled with my family somewhere, he could not believe that sitting quietly in a living room reading was a thing. My family didn’t feel the need to fill our day to the brim with tours or shopping or other activities. And that was shocking to him.
That’s shocking to me too. Why travel if you aren’t going to make the most of being in a different place?
So you don’t burn yourself out.
A lot of people end up miserable on vacations because they don’t give themselves time to relax and enjoy it.
I spent a few years in the US, coming from Scandinavia. It took several months before I was able to navigate the whole “strike up a conversation with anyone”-thing. The issue wasn’t so much being “forced” into conversations (which I got used to fairly quickly) as it was knowing when these interactions were considered over by the other party. I’d often, unintentionally, overstay my welcome. The general vibe and attitude were also quite different.
The biggest shock was however moving back home. I’m originally from one of the larger cities in my home country, but ended up in a tiny village through a series of coincidences. Going from a multi-million US city to a tiny Scandinavian mountain village was rough. Went from a place filled with outgoing people to a place where the cashier in the local store still took me for a tourist after having lived there for a year. An almost impenetrable society. I’ve been here for a decade now, and have long since realized that I will always be “that guy from XYZ”. On the plus side, it’s nice not having to deal with people beyond my own family an coworkers. On the negative side I have almost no sense of belonging here outside of my wife’s family who are all local.
You need to join a club or take a class. That is the Norwegian way of breaking the silence. Instant connection.
Oof. I feel this one. I spent most of my childhood in - what we consider - a small city (10k people). My school class was like 20 kids with a few different ethnic backgrounds. Then we moved to a mountain town where the elevation (in meters) was a multiple of the population count, my class (including the neighboring villages) was 4 and there was exactly one family who didn’t look like they were at least 20 generations Swiss.
My dad is a very outgoing person, passionate volunteer firemen (most towns here have their fire department on a volunteer basis), contributed to the town council, was pretty religious (BIG up there, when there was a mass during the day then all the classes from school attended) - but they literally were just happy to take his work but not give anything back. The protestant priest from the neighboring village checked in on our family (protestant) and him (catholic) more often than our “our” priest. My mom befriended another “immigrant” family who had been there for 10-20 years and basically had NO connections in town. My father made 1 good friend and 1 good acquaintance at work.
For us kids it was a lot easier. The other kids were welcoming and friendly and even the adults were somewhat accomodating to us. But I was approaching adulthood and started to experience this myself. Town tradition was that for christmas the oldest kids in primary school would dress up as the 3 magi and lead the younger ones around town to sing christmas songs. And they would also participate in the christmas mass. They were in a pickle that year as from a class of 4, half were protestant heathens. I was still expected to stand in the front of the church as ornament but when the edible paper was distributed I was rudely shoved away.
I went to India (New Delhi, Goa, Chennai, Jaipur) as a middle class Canadian.
People hanging off the side of busses, monkeys running around everywhere, open sewage, cows eating garbage on the side of the road, literally everyone staring at me, tons of people following me trying to give me directions to tourist sites, different views on personal space.
Shit was wild.
This is going to seem minor, but it was a shock to me.
I grew up in Texas. I lived in very metropolitan places – near downtown Dallas, and near the Houston medical center. So I never thought that I was culturally isolated or anything.
When I finally left the state for a job, I went to Los Angeles, circa 2007. In my first week there, a lady pulled up next to me on the street and asked me where the courthouse was. I had a vague idea, but explained that I was new to the area so my advice should be taken with a grain of salt. People familiar with the LAX area will know that the nearby courthouse is a tall building with something resembling a crown or halo, I pointed her toward that.
It wasn’t until a couple of minutes later I realized what seemed strange about the encounter. The lady was of African-American descent.
I thought back on 3 decades of living in Texas, and I cannot once remember being approached by a black stranger and asked a question. Not one single time. Houston has a large homeless population, I had many encounters with panhandlers. I couldn’t remember one single black person.
In fact, as I thought about it, a HUGE difference between Texas and California was that black folks on the street behaved very differently. In California, they looked you in the eye, they said “hello”, etc. In Texas – at least, up until I left in 2007 – black folks were strictly “heads down, eyes on your own business”. Even thinking back on some black friends and co-workers, I realized that they behaved very differently in public than my white friends did.
The whole thing made me sad for my black friends back in Texas. And now that we know how police treat black folks, I guess I can see why they behaved the way they did.
I moved from California to Texas, and that has not been my experience at all since getting here. Perhaps it’s the city I live in, but black people here seem no different than any other person, same as my experience when I lived in California. The percentage of the population that is black here is much, much higher, though.
I’ve lived in Houston my whole life and I have no idea what this guy is talking about. It’s one of the most diverse cities in the country of course we talk to each other lol.
Same here in Houston. I have no clue what this person is talking about. I have had many black people talk to me, and I work with quite a few. There’s nothing odd about our encounters.
This was not the kind of answer I was expecting. Thank you for sharing.
They only use darn cash in Germany. Feels like going back to ancient times.
i prefer cash, gives you anonimity and an easier overwiev of your spending
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I also find card payments easier to track. My bank also provides a budgeting application integrated into their online banking, with automatic categorisation which is very useful. It shows how much you spend where and what your end of month balance will probably be. You can also set an alarm to warn you when you go over budget. Basically, they provide you with the same payment history analysis tools most banks probably have running in the background already.
You can almost always also pay with card, but it’s often only Girocard, not Visa or Mastercard. The fees of Girocards/Giropay are much lower, because it’s run by the banks themselves, i.e. the companies most likely already have accounts at those banks, so they can subsidise the transaction fees with the banking fees the companies already have to pay anyway. Larger stores often accept credit cards, however.
Becoming a civilian again after being in the military was interesting. Simple things felt weird all the time; I kept feeling like I had to show my ID to buy groceries, stuff like that. But probably moving to the East Coast (NoVA) from Colorado in 2002 was the biggest. I was in absolute shock at the price of housing, hours of commuting every day, and most of all, how horrible the people were. Mean, rude people, angry all the time and intentionally threatening on the roads. Being there made me cry a lot in the first year.
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I had a friend in school who went to South Africa for half a year and he was mugged several times. He always had like 20 Dollars of cash on him to get out of the situation. That was 15 years ago, no idea what it’s like now.
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