End of Week 5 London/Dublin 2015

The biggest cultural difference to me between my hometown in New York, and Dublin, is something called slagging. The Irish like to do this when first meeting a person, especially Americans. It’s simply a term for harmless teasing that an Irish person does when they first meet you. They’ll do it dead-pan sometimes and one could take these words as serious, but you just need to laugh it off and realize they are messing with you because they like you. Even the British did this too, but not to the same extent where there was a common term for the action.

This was a point of culture shock for me. At first, I thought I was being publicly mocked and didn’t really know how to respond other than laugh and awkwardly look away. But I realized eventually that this was slagging and that it was okay to slag people back, in a very respectful way.

My first point of culture shock came to me as I was crossing the street, and had to read the “Look Left” and “Look Right” signs written in the pavement in order to orient myself. Then, I got confused about the monetary terms for British Pounds. I didn’t know what their equivalence of cents was, and struggled to ask a grocery store employee that the self-checkout machine didn’t give me back enough coins (they’re called pence by the way).

Then came ordering food, and going to stores and having to speak with the local people. I had trouble understanding the British accent to be perfectly honest, and it was a struggle at times where I had to ask what the person said, repeatedly. All in all though I didn’t have a majorly difficult time adjusting, and being in such a big group made it easier to understand the local culture. I’ve now even natural become used to looking to the right, then looking to the left when crossing the road!