I just had a flashback to when I made the decision to attend college in the wilds of central Iowa, after growing up in NYC.
We had an old atlas of the United States, and I remember perusing the map of Iowa with as much wonder as if it had been Equatorial Africa.
Adjustment to living amongst the cornfields wasn’t all that difficult, though the language of the natives took getting used to. The first time I bought something in a drugstore and the person at the register asked me if I wanted a sack, I was expecting them to produce a large potato sack to put my purchase in (“sack” being Midwestern for “paper bag”).
I once asked for lemon for my iced tea in North Platte, Nebraska. The waitress looked at me like I’d sprouted a second head. That was on the drive from California to Ohio to visit relatives when I was in my very early teens.
I didn’t make the return trip by car, but by brother and younger sister did (with my dad), and when they got home they kept talking about not getting toast with their breakfast at some cafe in Arkansas. They got biscuits with weird wallpaper paste gravy.
You sure you don’t mean “Hoagies”. Never heard of grinders in my 25 years in Philly. But the first time we went to Atlantic City, my father warned me they were called subs there.
The first place I lived in after Philly was NYC; no culture shock there. But then I lived in central IL and there was certainly some shock there. For one thing, there wasn’t a decent restaurant in town. The twin towns had over 80,000 total population and, with students, it came to more like 125,000. Not one good restaurant.
I personally have found “culture shock” to be a vastly overblown concept. Myself, I have moved from Texas to Thailand to New Mexico to Hawaii, back to Thailand, then back to Hawaii. Never felt it.
When you moved to Thailand you didn’t have to make any changes to adapt to your new surroundings? Some people do handle culture shock better than others. Maybe you’re one of those people whose so good at handling it you don’t think of it as culture shock.
I make changes to adapt between the two message boards i frequent. But i don’t think I’d say I’m “shocked”. I get the idea of culture shock, but i also get being confused by it.
I think it’s easy to fall into the trap of becoming overly concerned with the minutia of the definition of a word. Shock in this case. Most people who move from one culture to another experience some form of culture shock. They move to a new environment where people speak a different language, eat different food, have different beliefs. and just do things differently which may lead to some anxiety issues. But at the end of the day, most people are able to adapt.
I’ve experienced culture shock moving from Dallas, Texas with a metro population in the millions to Pine Bluff, Arkansas with a city population of 40,000 and a metro population of maybe 100,000. In Dallas, I could go to the supermarket 24 hours a day. If I wanted to go shopping at 3 AM, the local Thom Thumb was open. In Pine Bluff, I tried going to Brookshires a little after 9 at night and it was closed. I was surprised but tried another supermarket only to find that it was also closed. I was surprised to find that I didn’t have free reign to grocery shop whenever I wanted.
I moved from Pine Bluff to Sheridan, Arkansas with a population of 5,000 at the time. I tried finding some beer and was surprised to learn that I had moved to a dry county. When I tried getting a library card they required a letter of reference from another resident. I didn’t know anybody who I could ask so I never got that library card. I actually wrote the mayor complaining but he wasn’t much help.
These were mild shocks to be sure and I adapted quite easily. But they were still shocks.
I moved from Quebec to Ontario in my youth, initially for college but ended up living here. Ontario wasn’t a “shock” in any way, but it was definitely a very different culture. The French or Montreal culture (not sure which was the predominant factor) was comparatively one of laid-back “don’t give a crap”. Ontario by contrast seemed structured and formal, much more Britain than France. I remember when there was an international event of some kind in Montreal, and world leaders like the US president flew in, even as I kid I wondered how they were ever going to get these nonchalant laid-back yahoos to organize security. Such things just seemed so counter to their nature.
To those who think I’m exaggerating, one need only consider the way they drive in Montreal (like maniacs). Also the reason that right turns on red are prohibited in Montreal. If they were allowed, drivers would just breeze right through on right turns – they wouldn’t even slow down.
I can imagine. I’ve never lived in Tennessee or any place even remotely like that, but I was in Nashville for a few days once. We went to a bar and I was drinking beer out of one of those huge mugs that you could take with you as a souvenir. At closing time, I had still a bunch of beer left in it. We were informed that it was illegal to leave with any sort of liquor, and to prove it, there was a guy at the door who looked exactly like the one you’re describing – cowboy hat, immense beer belly, and, most impressively, a six-gun hanging from his gun belt. Somehow I had little doubt that if I tried to leave with any beer still in the mug, this character would shoot me. Yeah, to a Canadian, this was culture shock – the idea that transgressing a liquor law would be met with lethal force. And this was the largest city in Tennessee; I can only imagine what things are like in the rural areas.
The Italian statesman Massimo d’Azeglio (1798-1866) noted that “We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians.” The “state” part of the “nation-state” is a lot easier to create than the “nation” part, in part because it attempts to destroy local and regional identities that conflict with the goal of centralizing power
Similarly, when I, a (NYC resident) visited El Paso, Texas it was a shock to see “no firearms” signs - they seemed to be everywhere, although I’m pretty sure they weren’t actually everywhere. But the only places I’m likely to see such a sign in NYC is outside a jail or prison , not a restaurant or a hospital.
Those signs started popping up all over the Dallas Metroplex around 1995-1996 when Texas made concealed carry legal. But after a few years fewer and fewer businesses bothered putting the signs up.
I was surprised when I went to California seeing signs telling me how carcinogenic everything was. My hotel had a nice placard informing me that some of the materials used to construct the building was known to the state of California to cause cancer. Does anyone in California even notice those signs? Do they base any of their base any of their decisions on the information in those signs?
It was before that , 2015 I think. - but I don’t think you get why it was shocking to me. Lets just put it this way - putting those signs up kind of assumes that there is a significant portion of the population portion that is both 1) carrying a firearm and 2) follows rules. Which would not be the case in NYC.
As one Canadian comedian (sorry, can’t remember who) said, the only qualifications you need to drive a taxi in Montreal are a fondness for Export A cigarettes and a total disregard for traffic laws.
I moved from Toronto to Calgary years ago. The culture shock wasn’t much, but it was there. People were putting clamato juice in their beer–ohhhkay, whatever floats your boat, I guess. Hell, the Bloody Caesar might as well be Alberta’s provincial drink; so much so that you can get a Caesar everywhere. But you cannot get a Bloody Mary anywhere–nobody has tomato juice, only clamato. Every restaurant (well, not the cuisine-specific ones, like Chinese), no matter how small, had a steak sandwich on the menu, because Alberta beef and all. And, weirdly to me from Toronto, people greeted each other on the street. Total strangers, saying hello as they walked by each other. Imagine that! In Toronto, we ignore each other, unless we know the other person. Not here in Alberta.
Haven’t you noticed that many electronics and stuff have, somewhere in tiny print, a similar note. Stuff i buy on the east coast has a bit that it contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer.
I believe it. Texas likes to say it’s like a whole 'nother country but I think that applies to California much better. (But maybe it’s because I lived in Texas for a long time and grew used to it and never spent more than few weeks at a time in California.) Almost every Californian I know who has moved to Arkansan spends the first few years going over the differences between the two states. When I look for human resources courses to take in order to keep my accreditation status, there are special courses specifically for California because employment laws are different enough to warrant them.
Another bit of culture shock I experienced in California was being given directions in minutes instead of miles. Instead of telling me something was 10 miles up the road they’d tell me it’s going to take 30 minutes to get there. This was odd but it was actually more useful than telling me the distance. So culture shock doesn’t have to be in response to something you perceive as a negative.