Have you ever experienced culture shock?

I have been to Vietnam, China, Singapore, Korea, Spain, Italy, England, Greece, France, Japan, and Mississippi. I found Mississippi quite disturbing.

I was in America. I was completely intimidated by the huge megastores like SuperTarget, Walmart, Sears, Costco. So. Much. Consumption. Strangely enough, it saddened me.

I came back from Bali one March and almost froze to death.

@Ron_C , in what way?

At first when I went to Japan. When we went looking for homes to rent, the realtor spoke only directly to my husband as if I wasn’t in the room. They will say good morning and such but and be polite but if you are with your spouse at the time they look at them to make decisions and not you. When you are alone then you won’t notice the dismissal behavior at first but it becomes really noticable when you are accompanied by a man.

Moving to NYC was a big culture shock. Milwaukee is relatively small. And people will do anything they want to do here. Also, there weren’t as many homeless at the time in Milwaukee or Madison as there were (and still are) in NYC.

Absolutely. I come from a low-income fairly uneducated academically family. I also come from the Native culture. And from a small town. For me College was a huge culture shock. The majority of people are Caucasian, middle/high income, and come from academically gifted families. The college population was probably larger than my hometown. I remember teachers referring to low-income people as “them”.

After the auto crash that disabled me, I had to withdraw from the world of academia that had been my milieu for 34 years. Furthermore I moved from an urban centre to a small rural community. To be that was a major case of culture shock. Even after six years, I do not feel I have made the transition very well.

I was raised in a close knit, religious family with similar lifestyles and values. In school, I found a totally different culture.

Would that include the first time I went to my in-laws house?

@ZEPHYRA I found abject poverty along with extreme wealth to be an example of what the U.S. will probably become. If you want to see our third world future, look at Alabama and Mississippi.

The poor even seem to speak a different language, it is barely English. If you want a good education in the deep south, you must go to a private school. I am sure that there are examples of well educated and well to do people from that state but those are the exception that prove the rule.

The one incident that sticks out in my mind was somewhere near Kitchener, Ontario. I can’t remember exactly where we were.. but for miles and miles and miles there were identical houses. Kind of minor, I guess, but it freaked me out like nothing else. I was terrified we would get lost and never find a way out. Plus it was just creepy.

one of my dad’s friends was raised in argentina. her parents were both americans. when the moved back to the US she was around age six. she literal had to be hospitalized because of her culture shock. she had some sort of panic attack and passed out.

i lived in denmark for a while. i didn’t have culture shock going out there, but i did have ‘reverse culture shock’. it was sort of like a small bout of depression.

Yes, a little bit. Disney World in 1988.

Yes, my mothers home town was in the deep south, we were raised in California. We were raised color blind, so when I went to visit family in this small southern town with my black husband in tow I was totally unprepared for the segregation which was still in existence there. The black children had to wait outside for their ice cream cones while the white children were allowed to walk inside the drugstore and sit at the soda fountain to enjoy their goodies.I was the dreaded nigga lover whispered about all over town. I was also a bold bitch, I’d take the kids in like they were mine and dare some bigot bastard to say one friggin word. Like I said they just whispered behind their hands as I passed them, not a single one of them had the balls to say it to a grown woman’s face.