Have You Experienced Culture Shock Moving Within Your Own Country?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I have. And I just moved one state over! I think, though, that the difference is more urban vs. rural than Illinois vs. Missouri (I lived in a city of 130,000 vs. a town of 800).

Anyway, time is meaningless here. Someone tells you to be at their place at noon, they don’t actually mean noon. They just mean no earlier. Showing up at 1 or 1:30 or even 2 is perfectly acceptable. Similarly, people around here simply don’t understand the concept of getting to work on time; one of the biggest employers in town hired a new CEO from out of state and everybody complained about him being such a hard-ass because he had the audacity to write people up for showing up to work late! And my brother in law, the one time he flew on a plane, missed his flight and had to pay dearly to get on a later one, because he couldn’t be assed to get to the airport on time.

I’ve also noticed a sense of entitlement around here that I never noticed when I lived in the city. If someone asks you to do something for them, as a kindness and not as a transaction (viz, you’re not getting paid for it), they won’t hesitate to criticize. My brother-in-laws asked me to help him with an app on his Android phone, and when I couldn’t help him (I use an iPhone), he said, with no hint of irony, “Come on Aaron, you’re just not trying hard enough!” And there was a huge uproar in town when a local food bank said they were coming through town with free meals at 1, and they showed up at 2:30, and everyone who didn’t get the memo threw an absolute fit. Umm, it was free. Maybe some gratitude?

Have you experienced culture shock in your own country?

2

Moving from Chicago (Liberal, pro-labor) to Waukesha (just off two points from Mussolini).

Moving from Waukesha to a military town (Huntsville, AL).
to the very rural South (Deliverance).

3

Living in Quebec was a bit of an adjustment, but it was mainly the language, not the culture (except to the extent culture is tied to language, of course).

One of the differences that made me chuckle was that the “pause-fumé” (“smoking break”) was built into everything. Quebec City at that time was famous for everyone smoking. I was used to “coffee break”, “bathroom break”, 'morning break", but “smoking break” for everything was a bit of a surprise. That was a while ago, of course, so may have changed by now.

4

The difference between the province I live in (Western Cape, South Africa) and the rest of the country is quite big. Demographically, languages, climate, culture, all very different.

5

Yes, leaving California to go to college in the Midwest.
My friends and I back home had a cynical and ironic outlook on life. We’d joke about anything and everything. By comparison, the Midwestern kids I met seemed so earnest. And though they were away from home, they still comported themselves as if their parents were watching them. For instance, I rarely heard them swearing.

6

I’ve lived near Pittsburgh most of my life, but spent four years in Philadelphia, just a five-six hour drive East. It was like night and day, even a different language. Soda? Grinders? Liberty Bell?

7

Moving around the western US wasn’t a big deal Houston, Denver, Santa Barbara there was no real culture shock. The closest I’ve run into is when I travel east (never lived there) I went to Peoria, IL and it was my first experience with urban blight and it felt like the whole city would collapse if you breathed on it wrong or I worked for a company headquartered in Birmingham, AL and going back in January was eye opening I’d never seen MLK day as a real holiday before.

8

When I relocated here after having lived in NYC, I experienced culture shock that I deal with to this day. For one thing, everything here in the suburbs is so horizontal and spread out. No matter where you’re going, you have to get into a car and drive there. Nobody here walks anywhere, except the Orthodox Jews who walk to shule. I used to walk to work, walk to the supermarket, walk to Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center. I didn’t even own a car when I lived there. Then I moved back here, stopped walking, and became diabetic.

9

I lived for 55 years in Northern California, near San Franciso, and my wife and I moved to Northwest Montana. A massive culture shock, but it’s been 12 years and I’ve gotten used to it. The plusses more than made up for the minuses.

10

Moving (briefly) to Tennessee in 1980ish. Stumbled upon an actual KKK rally/parade in a small town not far from Memphis. I’d call that “culture shock.”

11

I had the same type of thing happen when I first moved to Tennessee. I went to a flea market in Columbia and found KKK robes and Nazi paraphernalia being sold out in the open.

12

Well, Columbia is the site of the National Confederate Museum and the new resting place for the remains of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

I interviewed in Columbia for a job once, long ago. It probably was even culture shockier for a N.Y. native then.

13

I remember moving to Tennessee from Pittsburgh around Y2K. The thing that I often used to explain my befuddlement was a commercial I saw. The commercial featured an older, weathered man wearing a huge cowboy hat, and a six-gun on a holster, talking from the porch of an old-timey, old-west-style wooden “General store”, and the commercial wasn’t for hats, guns, or the old-timey General store. I’m not sure now, but I think it was for insurance. . .

My sister is ex-military, as is her husband, and she’s traveled the world a bit as a result. Just this week, she was talking about how weird it was when she first moved to Arizona a couple decades back. She was taken aback a bit by all the people wearing handguns on their holster. She’s not anti-gun: she has a couple of her own, and so does her husband, but that many guns, everywhere, took her aback.

14

Not a move, just a visit. I lived in NYC for 8 years, and before that, I lived in several world cities. Then I visited Louisville KY for a week. It felt really strange to be greeted when entering a store; I was so unused to that type of friendliness to the point that I wondered if something was wrong.

15

Like gkster, this was a long visit, not a relocation. I was installing equipment in the Detroit metro area back in 1980. Coming from Los Angeles I was assigned there for two months.

I was astounded by the friendliness of the Michiganders. There I was, a total out-of-state stranger. I was embraced like a long lost brother/husband/boyfriend…whatever. Within two weeks I was invited to customer houses for dinners and weekend barbeques. Wednesdays became bowling night, even though I didn’t bowl. I was included in a slew of after hours social events. It was wonderful, especially for a single 28 year-old.

I probably went on more dates (with women) in two months than the previous two years. Beautiful and gregarious women in Michigan.

I’ve never experienced anything like it anywhere.

16

Most of you guys have bigger swings than me but I moved from Boston to small town Utah to Seattle. I consider myself a political centrist. I went from being a greedy capitalist to communist guerilla back to greedy capitalist.

17

I grew up in Baltimore. When I was 19, I joined the Navy and wound up in Millington, TN for training. One night, some of us went off base to have dinner. I ordered a crab cake.

In Baltimore, a crab cake is a big ball of crab meat loosely bound with bread crumbs, mayo, and mustard, and maybe an egg. In Memphis, it’s a patty of bread over which someone whispers the word “crab” - THAT, my friends, is culture shock!

18

I live in the burbs of Upstate NY, former blue collar area, famous for salt potatoes, hot dogs, and sweet corn all summer. Delicious eats, for sure. But I spent a little time in Maine and Cape Cod, and maybe they were Touristvilles, USA, but the wonderful fish and lobster and lobster rolls everywhere! I ate my weight in lobster, heavenly. Where I live, there is one food truck that offers lobster rolls, you have to find it and either reserve an order or line up and take your chances, they sell out within half an hours. (A couple of hoity-toity inconvenient expensive restaurants offer lobster rolls.). I find it easier making my own, at home. …that’s all I got

19

Driving through the urban wreckage which is New Haven, CT, (or was: this was 1995ish) and then entering the billion dollar Yale University enclave was one of the more disorienting experiences of my life.

20

I had a similar experience. I grew up in the suburbs of the Northeastern Megalopolis, the famed Acela Corridor, and despite both my parents being from there, I never felt like I fit in there. I always felt inclined to a society that was more, well, earnest, and from various sources, had intimations of the mythical small town, white picket fence, mom-and-apple-pie America which I was given to believe was emblematic of the American South.

Then I moved to Ohio at age 30, and the eight years I wound up spending there, I had a better social life than I had at any previous time in my life, including my high school and college years. I finally experienced what it was like to be what I consider socially mainstream–meaning, I had a group of friends who were always doing something, so I never had to be home alone on Friday or Saturday night if I didn’t want to, it was easy to meet new people and make new friends, and like you, I did much better with women than I had at any other time in my life (though, sadly, probably due to my own personality flaws, not to the point of sticking the landing and getting married.) I mean, I once got a girl’s phone number just from chatting with her while we were both standing in line at the coat check at the art museum. It blew my mind that that kind of thing was even possible!

Despite this, when it came time to move, I chose the South, thinking it would be even better. This proved a mistake, and NOT, I must emphasize, because of what Dopers might think, that the people are a bunch of Confederate-flag-waving Ku Klux Klansmen or whatever. They’re just closed-off and don’t seem interested in talking or meeting new people. I live in a city, one that has ballooned in population from people moving in out of state, so you could just chalk it up to that, but I lived for a few months in a more rural area of the state and the people there weren’t any friendlier.

I don’t know when exactly I’ll be moving away, but when I do, it will definitely be back to the Midwest. I think the gospel needs to be spread to younger people of my disposition, that the culture you’re looking for isn’t in the South, it’s in the Midwest.