Have you ever lived with someone of a different race or culture?

My husband – English and raised Anglican – and me – Jewish, American and raised erratically. We’ve driven each other bloody meshuggenah over the past 37 years.

I had a barracks roommate from Nebraska. He was a walking stereotype: only liked country music, loved corn, was big, husky, and hairy as well. I still listened to a lot of rap, and we conflicted on what music we would listen to. He didn’t even like much of the rock and metal I listened to, but to him it was better than rap. I ended up liking some country songs as well like Can You Paint Me A Birmingham.

He was a hard worker and was all about doing manual labor lol.

My husband – they have been positive. His family is very close knit and a lot less inclined to take things personally. We compare his family to the one in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. I love it! They make me laugh.

Roommates – when I was in the Navy. Did not really effect me. I grew up living here, there and everywhere.

My brother went on a mission when we were younger and he brought back a woman from France. She stayed with us for a couple of years and I learned from her as she did from me. Also one of my sons friends was thrown out of his house and we had him live with us for a while. He was a young African American, he stayed for about a year and then he and his father repaired their relationship and he went home. He comes over and still calls us Mom and Dad.

Right not there is a exchange student from Belgium in my house. She’d be my sister :).

It is nothing but a pleasure! I learned pretty much about European culture, and I learned to hate more some things of my country, as well as to love much more others.

I’ve learned too about America, because some of her friends are from there, other exchange students. So yeah.
Great experience :)
I’m planning on going to Iceland this year as an exchange student, so I guess I will be living only with people from other culture!

Yup. Many times. Its no different from living with anyone else. Everyone has their ticks.

My college was one huge collection of different cultures, races, everything. It was great! I learned so much from the others and a bunch of my fraternity brothers even liked visiting my little redneck town.

Yes.

Depending on your definition of “lived with,” and “culture,” then yes….. maybe.

Once shared Nurse’s lodgings with a six foot tall Nigerian woman called Evodian. She had size ten feet and was training as a Midwife. What a treat to be dellivered by her eh? She was great, had a wild sense of nail colour too. That was 30 years ago; she was going to return home to practise and I often wonder how she got on.

Pretty much all my life. My blood relatives are a very mixed bunch, each interconnected by their history as pioneering sheepherders but from very different ethnicities. Aside from that, I’ve had several longterm relationships, each with a partner of a different race if not also different background.

What attracted me were the commonalities of our core values.

I was in such a relationship for years. We didn’t live together but spent much of our time together. I learned a great deal about his culture and learned to cook middle eastern food.

She is black; she was in her late twenties, on a professional career track. I am white; I was in my late thirties, and just thinking of getting off the “starving artist/musician” career track. That was in 1987. 24 years, 3 kids and a dog later, we’re still married and still talk to each other, and even still laugh with each other!

Im a white boy from Tennessee.I have lived with rednecks, a native hawaiian or moke as he preferred to be called, some Yankees from Detroit and Chicago were another roommate and a young gay couple one was white and the other was black. My last roommate was Dominican.

The rednecks I lived with exposed me to lots of guns, wild game, fourwheelers, and sometimes I had to tune out the word nigger because thats how they talked even though I don’t think they really hated anyone. My Hawaiin roommate loved to sleep and was a bad ass skateboarder. He was Gnar Gnar Brah. He called me Hippie Howlie. He had a rice cooker and cooked rice everyday along with a seaweed sesame spice called Furikake. He also loved to eat fried egg, spam rice and called it MokoLoko. My Yankee roommates were a guy and girl couple. Billy was a Pollock from Chicago, ripper, skatepark builder, vegetarian, and just a good guy. His wife Katherine from Detroit was okay but kinda a bitch not sweet like a small town girl from Tennessee or Alabama. The gay boys I lived with were very bad drunks and pillheads. I saw them fistfight buttass naked in the living room while they were trashed. Anyways Trendon the blackboy who was smaller whooped his boyfriends ass but his boyfriends dog bit his lip and ripped it open. I had to take him to the hospital to get 17 stitches. They fought a lot. I was glad to get out of there house. My homie Ivan the Dominican in Miami was my best roommate ever. We worked together on South Beach. We had a sweet crib with a pool. We always cooked out and had hot chicks over. We always ate bombass Spanish food and drank coladas in the morning. I can’t wait til the layoff is over and I get back down there with my tropical partner in crime.

@buster “My homie Ivan the Dominican in Miami was my best roommate ever. We worked together on South Beach. We had a sweet crib with a pool. We always cooked out and had hot chicks over. We always ate bombass Spanish food and drank coladas in the morning.”

That’s what life should be about lol.

Yup, lived with an Italian guy; and then an Argentina landlady + 2 Italian guys!
(and I’m Chinese).

Food was good (homemade pizza, etc); and I learnt about the attentiveness of dress too.

I grew up in a home of cultural diversity.. or mess.. however one chooses to see it. I was unable to communicate with my maternal grandmom because she was Korean, also with my paternal grandmom because she was Chinese. Anyway, by the time I was born they were both very advanced in age, so they were more or less ancient figures to my young mind.

From a child’s perspective, through partial immersions, I had a feel of what the people from these cultures were like. The exposure was great in a sense that I was more open-minded about the way people could be so different. But did this exposure give me a more pronounced understanding of the way they think? Probably not.

I guess what you could take from this is that not that you don’t already know this kids learn through osmosis and not conscious observation. It’s very hard for them to naturally make adjustments unless you explicitly tell them how.

We had a young Austrian man live with us for a few months while he drove around trying to figure out what to do with himself. Interesting guy.