121–130 of 187 posts
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From a outside perspective America seems like a developing nation in many perspectives. So I think both should be done. The amount of homeless, jobless, bad education, a meme president and all that is nothing you find in 'your usual developed nation'
More jobless in America? [citation needed]
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> My experience travelling abroad... Try doing that with a disability, being a visible minority, being a woman, etc. America is far from perfect, but it's at least accommodating . In other countries they don't hesitate to throw people to the curb. It's the little things: The wheelchair accessible stores and streets, the effort made to deal with vision impairments, institutions that are fighting for women's rights and…
America should not be comparing itself to developing nations, but other developed nations. In that they fall short in many things.
Wheelchair accessibility is simply not a thing here, not even in Vienna and Berlin (let alone small towns or rural areas). E.g. you will often find the bathrooms in restaurants or cafes to not be accessible without going up or down a bunch of stairs.
Another example: get out of the big cities (and sometimes even just get out of the central areas of the big city!) and try to get vegetarian or vegan food in a restaurant. Sometimes the waiters won't even know what that means (when speaking in German, so not due to a language issue).
I feel home at some aspects of each country: Respect for pedestrians (US), friendly warm helpful people (TR), diversity in food and people (US), a hometown where I'd love to live my last days on earth (TR), rich language (US), humble people (TR), startup and business culture and experienced people (US), paradise like vacations (TR), optimism and good luck surface area (US), family (TR).
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This sounds more like what we used to call "This Be Africa" when I lived there, rather than reverse culture shock per-se.
dunno about that. I grew up there, so at one point, all this was completely normal to me. It wasn't till I went back that I realized how INSANE it all was. My family ask me every week, when I'm moving back. lol
When I visited India for a couple months in 2004, it took me a couple of tries to even be able to go out to the street (in Delhi). But after a couple days I started getting used to it and a week or 2 later it was "fine" and not really that shocking (albeit still annoying at times).
I disagree that the jarring bit about home is that it's changed. For me, it was that so little had changed. At the supermarket I worked at when I was 16 were some of the same people, working the same cashier job. Friends were still talking about "getting back into college," doing the same thing they had done every weekend for years. It depressed me.
I disagree that the jarring bit about home is
that it's changed. For me, it was that so
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Very true! In the same vein though, the selection at places like Whole Foods is one of the best parts of coming home (from the third world). One of the hardest things for me to adapt to is how "liberal" America has become. It's not an objectively bad thing, but I feel like I went into a coma and woke up 20 years later in a world I can barely relate to. As an example, I'm thinking about stuff like Miley Cyrus' perform…
> One of the hardest things for me to adapt to is how "liberal" America has become. It's not an objectively bad thing One wonders, if the rest of the world is more cautious about this sort of thing, if maybe it's America that's in the wrong. Maybe other cultures deal with these things more sensitively or more rationally or just better . My experience travelling abroad is that people seem more comfortable in their ski…
That said development is not a simple linear scale. Each culture has good things others could learn from, but it's wrong to see low development level as some kind of purity.
A German-born American with 11 years total living in Germany. Almost all of it with the iron curtain in place. A white guy, I now live in a neighborhood that's 3/4 black, 10% Hmong for 16 years, I feel very normal being permanently out-of-place. In Germany I am the "Amerikanischer". Here it's "he's German". But I'm permanently alone in a crowd, too. Always on the outside looking in. Suspicious of the herd. Skeptical…
I've met a few people who moved across continents in their youth, sometimes multiple times. Almost without a fault, they are somewhat obsessed with the concept of 'home'. My longest time abroad was a year in Chicago, and the place where I grew up is far too boring to ever be considered 'home', so I really have no idea where 'home' would be for me. But I'm largely just indifferent to the idea. FWIW: I have many Americ…
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The bay area is unlike any other place I've ever visited or lived in America. Every aspect of life is more crowded.
Manhattan, though objectively denser, is less claustrophobic to me: though the crowd is thick, it walks fast, you can navigate the area quickly (via the subway), and big open space (Central Park) is never that far away.
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"Man..." you'll keep saying, "Americans really love breakfast cereal..." Though it's true to some degree, I wouldn't go that far. My sense is that the higher the margin on a product or product-line, the more money the manufacturer and distributors have to purchase shelf space. Cereal, Chips, Crackers, Ice Cream, Mayonnaise. The last time I was at the store I counted 21 separate varieties of Triscuit, 10-12 flavors ov…
That explains too much... why aren't high-margin products in other developed nations' grocery stores treated the same way? Or, if they are, why isn't breakfast cereal one of them? Perhaps because Americans really love breakfast cereal ?
This would imply that other milk-drinking Western countries would also eat a lot of breakfast cereal. And indeed it's something I notice when I go back from China to Belgium or the UK.
(Disclaimer: I haven't been to the US, so perhaps Americans like breakfast cereal even more than Europeans)
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A Greek friend of mine said of the Greek diaspora here in Melbourne that when they came out post-war, they became 'hyper-Greek' as a coping mechanism, embracing their culture more fully. They then travel back to Greece for whatever reason, and complain about how decadent it's become. Of course, he says, Greece hasn't really changed, it's just that now the ex-pats are seeing it through the lens of being 'hyper-Greek'…
I've heard this is indeed often the case, emigrants embracing their home culture in a more fundamental way. Maybe the imagined state of one's culture is often that of the grandparents' time, always a bit behind of the reality.
Not just that of the grandparents' time, but an idealised/extremised version of it, blurry and pastel, filtered through the lenses and expectations of those who actually lived it.