Culture Shock

So, in class we learned about how each culture has their own perspective to look at things as simple as hand motions, to things as complicated as rules. Playing the card games, with different rules, and not being able to talk really gave me a better idea on how most of us tend to be awfully ethnocentric. I was already judging poor Alissa when she started to play differently than how my table had played. However, it really got me thinking how judgemental we tend to get just because something is different than how we are used to- it taught me to remember every culture is different, just like Sal's example of not classifying all Latinos as "Hispanic". Then, when we spoke about different eating habits from different cultures, I remembered I can connect that to me. So, all my grandparents are from Poland and to them finger-food is viewed as "dirty" and "a bad manner"; everytime my grandparents are with us and we have BBQ's or pizza, they always ask for a knife and fork. It's so strange to us just because here, we are used to picking up a pizza and biting into it. Yet, when you ask my grandparents to do that, they think that it's equivilant to chewing with your mouth open. That reminded me of the fishbowl metaphor- we are used to what we see everyday, and when something new is placed in our enviornment or around us, we often tend to judge ourselves due to culture shock or because of our ethnocentrism. A time where I had culture shock is finding out that in Paris, it's perfectly normal for men to pee outside, in public urinals...not public restrooms, but urinals that are placed at random in the city. I'm not even sure who thought of that, but obviously it's something normal the men in Paris do. Here in the US; i'm sure you'd get a fine.