Whenever travelling abroad, people usually try to mentally prepare themselves for the inevitable culture shock. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), the UK and the US aren’t so different so there hasn’t really been that much culture shock for me this semester. I like to joke that the biggest culture shock is probably that the doors don’t open towards the outside, and rather open toward the inside of a room. Has nobody noticed that this is a fire hazard?!?!?! Hahahaha. But anyway….
Depending on where you travel in the world, there will definitely be varying levels of culture shock. Going out for dinner in Spain late at night or the calm silence that surrounds Swiss Alpine Villages are just two examples of some that I have experienced during my travels. Last semester I was on co-op in Cape Town, South Africa, and the culture there was definitely very different to what I’m used to. South Africa, for various reasons, has undergone a lot of political turmoil in the past few decades and that has left the country with higher crime rates and civil unrest. However despite that, something that I loved about family culture among the native South African population is that wealth is measured less by monetary assets and more by size of the family. If you have a big family that spends time together and loves each other, that’s more important than living a lavish lifestyle, or at least that’s how it was explained to me by many of the friends that I made there.
All in all, I think it’s important to go out and experience how different people live. We get so used to our own daily routines that it’s easy to think that our way of life is the norm while ignoring or stigmatizing those of others around the world. I think that may also just come from having been raised American. I think we as Americans think the whole world has their eyes on us, which even though they kind of do, having had the opportunity to live on and explore 4 continents during my time at Northeastern, I can confidently tell you that people are happy, alive, and doing their best to make things work all over the world, and we should be more open to learning about different ways of life in order to give ourselves a more rounded world view.
