International Shocking

• Three years ago, I would definitely be caring less about different cultures around the world. I would be living in my bubble, Lima, home, and caring about my own culture which was basically equal to my family and friends. And even though I did visit other countries before, the experience of a full time living with other people from different countries makes you really, really open your eyes.
• I started “opening my eyes” when I first started college in Eugene, Oregon. I still remember the very first week of orientation for international students, where one of the most important things that they strongly wanted to cover was cultural shocking. We had a complete day full of workshops about culture shocking. Starting by how to deal with a new culture, how to meet different people with a different culture, what to do if we were in a situation different than in our culture and all the questions and answers you could ever possibly imagine about the American culture.
• One of the things I remember the most is the talk on “how to say hello”. As random and trivial as this can sound, they actually gave us a talk about it. And this is how I realized that in fact, cultures are different. So, all the students started to talk about the way you say hello to another person if you were in his or her country.
• In Lima, we do not have a strict way to do this but what you would usually do is give a kiss in the cheek of the other person if it is a friend or family, or even if you just met this person. We also do handshaking, but this is more something between men, business situations or just in a very formal circumstance. Here, in America, handshaking works for everything and it is definitely what you have to do. How weird would it be if we just start kissing everybody we just met here in NYC? So I learnt my lesson. I was definitely shocked by how something as insignificant as saying hello could be so important cultural wise at the same time.