Have you ever encountered a cultural oddity that made you laugh or pause? Whether at home or abroad, share your most surprising cultural encounter!
I’ll go first…
Before you say it, yes, I understand that we just moved to a new country on another continent…but did you realize how DIFFERENT things are here?
Yesterday, as I was stepping out to head for Den Haag to scout out possible rentals with our expert expat real estate agent, I saw a man peeing on a tree. It seemed a strange choice given it was broad daylight, we live along a very busy street, and there are two porta-potties facing that tree.
In fact, he was looking directly at them from his vantage point of pissing on the tree yet, one else seemed to notice.
In my life, I’ve been a tax-paying resident of—if memory serves, which it does less and less—eight different states. I know that I’ve had driver’s licenses from MN, OK, CA, CO, and MD! Everywhere I’ve lived, I have always noticed the little oddities. For example, New Englanders call those little single-serve alcohol bottles “nips.” Where I came from, that’s what you call what pokes out of your shirt when you’re a bit cold.
When I first moved to California, it was the “this might give you cancer” notices that were on everything from the walls of my apartment complex’s garage to the food on the shelves. In college in Iowa, it was the tarp covering the towers of beer cans and the rope locks preventing you from even seeing alcohol on a Sunday. Don’t even get me started on New Hampshire municipalities and their ink and paper approach to literally everything (still, through the lens of memory, I loved it there).
As much as we like to pretend that the United States is “one nation,” my experience has taught me that’s anything but true. It’s a vast swath of land full of several distinct biomes, each with wildly different ways of life. And that’s where I was raised, which says nothing of countries outside our own! From my own experience, I was taught to understand other cultures as monoliths, reducing the vibrancy of an entire country into an easily traded factoid - the “single story” so eloquently captured in this TED talk:
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