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Culture shock

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Re: Culture shock

#231

Post by kangnkodos »

bnralt wrote: post #28

> 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 to be done at a big chain retail store like Lidl or Megamart or Target or any of the other big-names. I wonder where in the D.C. area he is. Many areas around D.C. have an enormous variety of places to go grocery shopping, and there a…

He mentions his house is near a street named Baltimore. And he said he's near DC, not in DC.

One possibility is University of Maryland in College Park.

The main street that runs through campus is Baltimore Avenue. And it's just a few miles outside of DC. It's close enough to be on the DC Metro.

There's a Megamart a few miles away. A Lidl supermarket is just north of campus. And there's a very small Target with a nice sized grocery section with fresh fruit and vegetables, etc. right in the middle of campus.

If you're walking from the middle of campus, Target is your best bet. Lidl is a possible walk, depending on exactly where he lives, but a little further. Next would be Whole Foods, two miles south of campus. Maybe he hasn't discovered that yet?

Re: Culture shock

#232

Post by no1lives4ever »

frettchen wrote: post #214
MagnumOpus wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most security you'd encounter in India doesn't even carry sidearms, just Lathi sticks or batons. At a guess you've seen the police with rifles at high value terrorist targets - airports, major stations, national tourist attractions/monuments. Such locations will have police with SMGs or assault rifles in most other places too, including places like the UK where police are rarely armed otherwise...

The mall guys and some of those I saw guarding places in more expensive neighborhoods may have been police, I'm admittedly not 100% not sure - but the building I worked in employed private security with rifles (it was a Tata Consultancy office a little ways outside of Hyderabad, maybe 20 minutes or so from Ramoji Film City, for whatever it is worth).

Most of the guns carried by such security are very old design lee-enfield rifles, some version of the AK-47 or sten guns. The police in India traditionally had 6 shot revolvers as standard issue for the officers. These work well as a visible deterrent when most people you are guarding against dont have guns. These guns are rarely fired by the private security guards. You will also see double barrel shot guns used by security personell at banks and atms.

Re: Culture shock

#233

Post by throwawaygh »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #84
throwawaygh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a multi-national company that frequently flew people to the United States HQ offices... > The people that I see day to day are generally extremely fit. (Or is it just students?) To be fair to your guests, replace "students" with "folks you'll tend to see around the HQ of a multinational / the places those offices tend to be located", and they hit the nail on the head. The US is interesting because it's a HUUUUGE si…

> I guess what I'm trying to say is that multinational corporate HQ campuses and their surrounding communities definitely aren't Real America (TM)(R). The company actually moved away from HCOL cities, so this wasn't NYC/SF/Seattle or whatever top-10 city you might be thinking of. But your comment is precisely the type of Internet comments that create the pessimistic view of the United States: Everything positive is d…

> or whatever top-10 city you might be thinking of.

I'm actually thinking of literally any metro area with over 2M people, or smaller communities totally dominated by highly educated workers (college towns like Urbana or corporate towns or Moline, for example)

> When the topic of the United States comes up, why are you so quick to bring up rural MS or West Virginia? Those locations are notable precisely because they're outliers, not because they're the norm.

Because I've spent substantial time in both.

Re: Culture shock

#234

Post by no1lives4ever »

Markoff wrote: post #207
frettchen wrote: post #196

"Watchmen and policemen are heavily, scarily equipped." This one amused me, as an American who has been to India (though not Pune, so maybe the area was different in this sense), because while I don't remember what police carried (though I saw a fair number), I remember being shocked by the number of security guards I cam across (mostly in front of office buildings and when entering malls) who were carrying rifles (t…

agreed, back in days at least in New Delhi you could see those "war nests" (military points) made of sandbags with heavy machine guns at some locations like Red Fort as if there was actual war going but I can imagine seeing everywhere policemen with big guns can be scary, luckily in my not so multicultural location in Europe it's still odd to see policemen carrying those uzi guns, usually you see just policemen with…

> agreed, back in days at least in New Delhi you could see those "war nests" (military points) made of sandbags with heavy machine guns at some locations like Red Fort as if there was actual war going

This is still a thing in Delhi. You can see sand bags or security shields with some security personell hiding behind them all over the city.

Here in Delhi, you will be checked very thoroughly for guns and bombs whenever you enter a luxury hotel, shopping mall or the subway. That checking includes the combination of a doorframe metal detector, hand held metal detector and airport style baggage x ray scanner.

Re: Culture shock

#235

Post by d0gsg0w00f »

no1lives4ever wrote: post #159
LegitShady wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The traffic thing is night and day different from india. Go look up youtube videos of crazy india car traffic. It seems like nobody follows any rules of traffic there - if there's room to fit their car they just go. The rudest american driver is friendly and accommodating by comparison.

And yet there are a shit ton of unwritten rules that help us indians navigate our crazy traffic with very few accidents ;-)

Please enlighten us as to what some of these rules are. As an outsider it just looks like chaos but you can tell there's some kind of code.

Re: Culture shock

#236

Post by da39a3ee »

> 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 … I honestly prefer the “risk your life and cross from anywhere, anytime” model - it’s faster.

As someone from Europe, this! It’s extremely annoying the way American drivers stop when you’re trying to cross the road. The 2-body problem of planetary motion under gravity would not have been solved if the planets kept stopping for each other.

Re: Culture shock

#237

Post by medvezhenok »

dan-robertson wrote: post #215
medvezhenok wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed - the U.S. has some of the most extreme health differences between the top end and bottom end of the income spectrum (roughly correlated to class). At the top end, the outcomes (and health measures) are better than anywhere in the world, while at the bottom end they are below most first-world nations: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/health/

For an apples-to-apples comparison, one must look at the corresponding distributions in other developed countries. It could be that the poorest people live significantly shorter lives in other countries but that the middle do better than in the states.

If you have any data about similar distributions for other countries (life expectancy by income) I would be very interested - I have not managed to find similar.

Re: Culture shock

#238

Post by iggldiggl »

TheRealNGenius wrote: post #149
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…

Yeah I've been thinking about the two taps thing with shower taps. For my shower tap, you turn it counterclockwise to get water running. Where it goes from slow flow rate and cold, to high flow rate and hot. I thought that it would make sense to have two knobs so that one controls flow rate and the other controls temperature. As it stands, one knob ambiguously controls both the temperature and flow rate of the water.…

In Germany, the thing I'm familiar with is a small lever that you turn left/right to control the temperature and (depending on whether it's mounted horizontally or vertically) either up/down or to/fro to control the flow rate:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Einhebelmischer.jpg

Re: Culture shock

#239

Post by watwut »

adwn wrote: post #199
kreeben wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Although technically true, it's much easier (and quicker) to gain X calories than to lose them via exercise. So if you're overweight, your number one priority is to control your diet. Regular exercise is important for health reasons, but not to lose weight. There are exceptions. If you're a professional cyclist, for example, and able to output several hundreds of Watt for several hours, 6 days a week, you'll quickly…

If only thing you will do is to control calories, you are pretty much guaranteed to get into the yoyo cycle of loosing/gaining weight. Majority, like almost all, people who only focus on calories stop performing in their lives, becomes tired/sick, give up and gain weight.

If you are overweight, if your concern is not purely temporary esthetic, focusing on calories control is receipt for long term failure.

Also, the exercise is not done only so that you immediately spend some calories. It is to build muscle, raise temperature, speed up your metabolism. All these affects you calorie consumption long term.

High level competitive sport has nothing to do anything. It has zero to do with what average adult experiences.

Re: Culture shock

#240

Post by JeremyNT »

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.

> 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.

The types of items tend to be the same (in some jobs/contexts - suits and formal dress are still worn in various industries/events), but even when so the rich person will buy higher quality versions from designer brands.

For example, at a glance many people will not be able to tell Patagonia from Ozark trail, but the workmanship and price are very different, and somebody in the Patagonia-class will be able to identify it when worn by others.

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