Jamie’s story: Reverse culture shock (part 2) / Jamesovy zazitky: culturni sok vzhuru nohama (cast 2.)

Hi everyone/ Ahojte vsichni,

here is the second part of Jamie’s experiences when he came back to the US. As I said in the first part of this post, Jamie is an American who spend many years working in the Czech Republic. When he came back to the US he experienced so-called “Reverse culture shock”. Here are the last tasty pieces of his insightful observations:

CZ: Tady je druha cast Jamesovych zazitku po navratu do Spojenych Statu. Jak jsem jiz vysvetlila v prvni casti teto story, James pracoval nekolik let v Cechach jako ucitel a kdyz se vratil do Ameriky, zakusil tzv. “kulturni sok vzuru nohama”. Tak si vychutnejte jeho posledni postrehy:

— I would fret over a $1.00 purchase, even if I needed the item and
it was a good deal. My sense of proportion between price versus
income was distorted by the lower prices and salaries in the CR, so I
thought of all the things I could buy (but in reality couldn’t) with
the dollar I was spending on a package of pens. I thought in terms of
a dollar (35 crowns at the time) buying me a haircut and a few
groceries, when all I was getting in the US was a few Bic pens. When
I paid $3.50 for a burger and fries at a fast food chain, I felt like
I should be getting an elegant meal for the price. It was a gut
feeling that didn’t take into account the difference between my $2,000
Czech salary and my $40,000 American one.

— I had forgotten that in America I couldn’t chide a stranger’s
child on the street when he was doing something wrong. In the Czech
Republic, a parent who sees you do this will probably thank you and
assure you that he or she hadn’t seen what the child was doing. In
the US, they’ll tell you you have no right to tell their child what to
do — even if the child is doing something really bad or endangering
his own or other people’s safety.

— I would get mad cravings for a piece of grilled kielbasa with hot
mustard on a piece of grey cardboard, but I couldn’t get it anywhere.

There are a whole lot of habits of behavior and perception that I had
to change when I came back home.

If you want to hear a story of culture shock, ask a Czech who
emigrated from the CSSR to the US about the first time he tried to buy
a pizza here.

One of my friends pointed out an interesting bit of cultural
miscomprehension that he experienced after moving to Chicago as a
young man, and I realized I had had the same problem in the Czech
Republic but had been unaware of it. We grew up in a rather
conservative suburb where most of the people are professionals of some
kind. The girls we grew up with dressed very modestly — typical
social attire for young women would be a blouse underneath a pullover,
and a pair of Levis or a skirt or kilt down to the knees. This is
what desirable girls dressed like, in our minds. Where we grew up,
wearing really short or tight skirts, or showing cleavage, was
considered a sign of stupidity, low education or promiscuity, so we
assumed that girls who dressed that way were not a good choice. When
he got to Chicago as a young man, and I got to the Czech Republic, we
encountered cultures where many young women were dressing sexy at the
age where they were looking for a husband, and they dressed
conservatively after they had found one. The style of dress had
little relation to their intelligence or virtue. So he in Chicago,
and I in Marianske Lazne, ran around thinking that many young women
were stupid, promiscuous or otherwise iffy, when in fact they were
intelligent and perfectly okay.

Jamie