Jamie’s story: reverse culture shock (part 1)/ Jamesovy zazitky: kulturni sok vzhuru nohama (cast 1.)

We have here yet another great writer/contributor to this blog, Jamie,  who sees the Czech culture from the “outside”. Jamie is an American who has spend quite some time working in the Czech Republic so needless to say, he knows us, the Czechs, through and through. He describes here a “reverse culture shock” which he suffered with once he returned to the US. Listen to what he says – it’s hillarious:

CZ: Tak tu mame dalsiho nadaneho spisovatele, ktery pospisuje ceskou kulturu z vnejsiho vzhledu. Jamie je American, ktery pracoval dost dlouhou dobu v Cechach, coz znamena ze ten nas cesky narod  zna skrz na skrz. Popisuje zde  tzv. “obraceny kulutrni sok”, kterym trpel po navratu do Statu. Posudte sami – jeho vypraveni je dosti vtipne:

A lot of culture shock is caused when someone goes to a new place and
finds his ordinary habits of behavior — and even of seeing — are
dysfunctional there. Reverse culture shock is even worse, because the
person develops new habits in order to function in the new culture but
doesn’t realize he’s changed. He goes back home expecting to fit
right in, but he doesn’t.

I had a lot of confusion when I returned to the States. Various
problems included things like this:

— I could no longer gauge Americans’ ages. At home, I often thought
American 23- to 25-year-olds were 18, much as when I first moved to
the Czech Republic I thought many 35-year-olds were 50, or that some
15-year-olds were 23.

— I was driven crazy by the way waitresses and store clerks were
“singing” to me. This tone of voice is considered good customer
service in the US, but in the CR I had learned to value grumpy
competence over cheerful mediocrity.

— I thought the American ladies pushing babies around in strollers
were grandmothers, but they were the babies’ mothers. This is the
mirror image my assuming at first in the Czech Republic that the young
ladies pushing the prams were helping their mothers, when they
actually WERE the mothers.

— I was paranoid whenever anybody made a business promise. In the
Czech Republic the probability that a merchant or other business
contact will back out on his promise or cheat you is so much higher
that I came back to the US with an inappropriate level of business
paranoia.

— I had forgotten that innocent flirting between men and women isn’t
very common in the US, and I realized I would get into trouble if I
talked to women in English the way people did in Czech. Americans
don’t usually flirt unless it’s a sign of real romantic interest.
Czechs just flirt for the sake of it.

— I got into people’s space too much and touched them too often.

— I had forgotten how to show strangers on the street that I was not
a threat. If I needed directions, I would park the car, get out and
approach people on the street. This is inappropriate in a large US
urban area, where you’re supposed to open the window and speak to the
person from inside the car, or else go to a gas station and talk to
the guy behind the bulletproof glass. (This varies in the US. In low-
crime small towns, you can generally approach people on the sidewalk,
and people in the high-crime ghetto aren’t bothered by it, but in the
low-crime suburbs it freaks some people out. Don’t ask me why.)

— For about my first three months working in the US again, I carried
my business stuff around in a plastic shopping bag, before I realized
that Americans never use shopping bags for that and that I looked kind
of weird.

— I had a lot of trouble shopping in American supermarkets, because
there were too many brands of too many products, and the light was
really bright. I would experience a sort of sensory overload and had
trouble making choices. If it got too confusing, I sometimes didn’t
buy things I needed.

Jamie