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Culture shock

siddhesh.substack.com

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Re: Culture shock

#181

Post by Fnoord »

> Most cars will immediately stop if they see you’re about to cross the street. It takes some getting used to at first. Pedestrians are given first priority, a concept alien in India.

> But crossing streets is generally a huge pain: you can only do so along zebra crossings, which are always at signals, and you have to wait for the pedestrian signal to show the walking sign. (There are signals for pedestrians just as there are for cars.) At busy intersections, you sometimes have to wait for more than a minute to get to cross. I honestly prefer the “risk your life and cross from anywhere, anytime” model - it’s faster.

Heh, Dutch here, I'd like to regard the zebra as a safety net for those who cannot walk quick. The elder, but also people who are ill, during bad weather, or parents with small children (like myself). When I am alone and commute to work, YOLO, I will manage (and I do take some risks to ensure I make it to say a bus or train). But when I am with one or both of my small children then I really appreciate a feature like this.

Same with our legal responsibility cars have over bikes. Cars drive so much faster than 100 years ago (compare with "A Trip Down Market Street" from 1906).

When I am with my kids I try to follow the traffic laws by the rulebook because they learn from observation.

Re: Culture shock

#182

Post by [deleted] »

ajuc wrote: post #137
birksherty wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not work out or time but diet that makes people obese. They probably eat fast food, sugary drinks, packaged food a lot everyday instead of unprocessed food like meat, veg, fruits, nuts. Edit: Poor people in India are thin and rich are fat, quite opposite, again due to diet. Indian poor can't afford fast food in chain restaurants daily, must cook which is cheaper.

Wealth is relative. Yes you can be so poor that you can't afford enough calories to become obese. It's rare in the developed world. But you can also be so poor that you can afford calories, alcohol and little more as an entertainment. It's easy to get obese then.

[deleted]

Re: Culture shock

#183

Post by codesections »

medvezhenok wrote: post #35
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #27

I worked at a multi-national company that frequently flew people to the United States HQ offices for short visits or sometimes longer stays. For many of the younger developers this was their first direct exposure to the United States. Interestingly, most of them had built up a lot of preconceived notions about the United States from social media sites like Reddit. Many of those sites project an extremely pessimistic…

Obesity is also not evenly distributed across the U.S. If you look at the rural/urban split it's more prevalent in rural areas[1], and if you look at the city breakdowns, the cities that foreigners are more likely to visit have lower obesity rates across the board [2]. So visiting the top-performing American cities (usually in the Northeast or West coast) understates the level of obesity in the country as a whole by…

> I had the realization that there are practically two different Americas after I took a road trip through the south after having lived in the Northeast for ~20 years.

I've lived in ~8 states and can tell you that "two" is a significant undercount of the number of Americas. (And I suspect the same is true for most countries — it certainly is for India).

I'd also be careful about drawing that line in too purely a geographic way. Geographic differences exist, but parts of Alabama and parts of upstate New York have more in common than their geographic locations might suggest (to pick two places I've been lucky enough to have lived in)

Re: Culture shock

#184

Post by lordnacho »

As a European with as lot of US connections, the most striking thing is that strangers will talk to you. Pleasantly. You can just chat with someone, often of you're in an eatery it feels like the people next to you think they are invited to the conversation. Which is fine for me, maybe not everyone.

Size of the people, I think this guy is at university in an affluent place. America is the only place I've ever regularly seen people who wouldn't fit through a standard sized door in Europe. It's very rare over here, hey common over there, by my anecdotal counting.

Infrastructure. The US version sucks. SF has what, 4m people? There's quite small cities with better underground train connections. NYC has one but the whole experience is a bit gross to be honest. Looks like it's never been updated, and it's kept pretty dirty. I drove around Milwaukee, and there were mattresses and burnt out wrecks on the damned highway, and it's stayed there for my whole trip. The roadway itself is made of slabs of something that makes a clunk-clunk noise as you drive from one to the next.

I'll have to go to India to see about class. I thought it was interesting that he thought it was less obvious in America. My impression, and the impression of my 6 year old, was that there's massive differences between people there. Go to Scandinavia if you want to see minimal class differences. Some of my friends who are mega rich (owns an island etc) you will not know from looking or talking to them. Generally in the UK you can hear class when people talk, and I would guess so in the US to a degree, especially as it's tied in with race.

Re: Culture shock

#185

Post by kreeben »

Paul_S wrote: post #143
watwut wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not really true. The amount of physical activity you do absolutely influences both your shape and your health. Also, we do have more sedentary lifestyles then typical 1960 person. Just in terms of how much you walk during the day, we are already not moving.

You have moved the goal posts. Exercise has a positive effect on health, yes. It does not have an effect on whether you're fat. That is down to food intake. That is what the poster was actually saying.

Of course exercise has an effect on whether or not you are obese, because if you spend more calories than you absorbed through eating, you will loose weight. Exercise is a way to spend calories.

Re: Culture shock

#186

Post by distances »

paganel wrote: post #150
AutumnCurtain wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in the apparent intolerance of shirtless men, I didn't realize that was a thing.

> I'm interested in the apparent intolerance of shirtless men, Not sure about India but in a lot of European countries walking shirtless on the street might be a fineable offence. A larger discussion on the subject can be found on this recent /r/europe thread. [1] [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/qixnsa/filling_up_a...

And in the places where it's not fineable it still doesn't happen. It would be super weird to see a shirtless person on a street in a Central or Northern European city, you'd either think they have some screws loose or they are pretty drunk.

Parks, beaches, saunas it would of course be normal.

Re: Culture shock

#187

Post by rsj_hn »

lordnacho wrote: post #184

As a European with as lot of US connections, the most striking thing is that strangers will talk to you. Pleasantly. You can just chat with someone, often of you're in an eatery it feels like the people next to you think they are invited to the conversation. Which is fine for me, maybe not everyone. Size of the people, I think this guy is at university in an affluent place. America is the only place I've ever regular…

> SF has what, 4m people?

That's like saying "London has, what, 50 million people"?

We have left the realm of plausible errors and are far into "no idea what is talked about" territory.

SF is a 7 mile x 7 mile box with mostly flat, single family homes. It's ~850,000 people.

Within that box is a small 1 kilometer x 1 kilometer square that has the big buildings.

Here you can see an aerial view of the top half of SF, with the downtown area seen as a little section in the midst of a pool of single family homes:

https://www.thepinnaclelist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/0...

The subway runs through that square underground, and then a few above ground lines connect to it - there is no need to go underground anywhere except that small downtown area. You can walk across the entire downtown area from north to south in about 15 minutes.

The corresponding city in the U.K. would be something like Newcastle.

Re: Culture shock

#188

Post by GuB-42 »

kodah wrote: post #4

> Sugar here is powdered, it doesn’t come in tiny cubes like I’m used to. It’s very easy to confuse salt and sugar (as I have done) because they look exactly the same. Made me snort. I grew up here and I've still mindlessly done this. > There’s no kiraana stores (i.e. small local stores) that sell grains and rice and vegetables here, it seems. (Or small stationery shops, or shops of any kind.) Almost all shopping has…

For the bathroom taps, I think the reason is purely technical. There are two pipes, one for cold water, one for hot water, each pipe gets its tap. It is the simplest setup and with that, you can control both flow and temperature. Systems that have a cold-hot knob are slightly more complex and therefore they are more expensive and less reliable, especially when they are thermostat controlled. And with a single, one axis knob, you can't control both flow and temperature.

I don't know how it works in India, but I know some places where there is no centralized hot water and only a single pipe. When you need hot water, there is a dedicated heater and you control temperature on the heater itself. So I guess that someone who is used to a system like this will find a two tap system unsettling.

Anyways, I think we can all agree that the worst system is the one with two separate taps with no mixing, like they still have in the UK.

Re: Culture shock

#189

Post by LurkingPenguin »

lordleft wrote: post #11

This reminds me of a post by another Indian student visiting the US. The observation that that person made which stuck with me the most was his realization that rich people dressed in a manner that wasn't very different from folks in other social strata -- it was much harder to tell at a glance how much money someone had. I think this is broadly true.

Another factor is that the cost of higher-end/"luxury" goods outside the US is often much higher outside the US.

In the US, for instance, you can easily buy a Ralph Lauren polo for under $100 (on sale online, at an outlet, etc.). When I decided to buy some RL in Japan a few years ago, a polo that I could have probably found in the US for $75-$100 cost me around $175.

Re: Culture shock

#190

Post by lordnacho »

rsj_hn wrote: post #187
lordnacho wrote: post #184

As a European with as lot of US connections, the most striking thing is that strangers will talk to you. Pleasantly. You can just chat with someone, often of you're in an eatery it feels like the people next to you think they are invited to the conversation. Which is fine for me, maybe not everyone. Size of the people, I think this guy is at university in an affluent place. America is the only place I've ever regular…

> SF has what, 4m people? That's like saying "London has, what, 50 million people"? We have left the realm of plausible errors and are far into "no idea what is talked about" territory. SF is a 7 mile x 7 mile box with mostly flat, single family homes. It's ~850,000 people. Within that box is a small 1 kilometer x 1 kilometer square that has the big buildings. Here you can see an aerial view of the top half of SF, wi…

The greater SF area is much more than the the area called San Francisco. I mean I might as well tell you that the City of London is a tiny square a mile on three side with a few tens of thousands of residents.
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