5 February 2014: Still Getting Culture Shocked

Now that I've been in England for over a month, I'm starting to falsely feel like I have this place all figured out. It only takes me ten minutes to figure out how much my loose change is worth rather than fifteen, I've started craving such delicacies as beans-wrapped-in-pastry-dough, and I only have to ask for slang translations a few times on a typical night with my friends. I know that a Malteasers Teasesrs bar is superior to any other kind of chocolate, Walkers Cheese & Onion crisps are better than any crisp flavor that we've got in the States, and that if you want to order lo mein at the Chinese restaurant, you have to ask for chow mein. Really, whenever I'm feeling a bit caught up in everything, I'm forgetting that I'm an American at all.

However, like I said, this sense of security is false. Even now, I'm still experiencing culture shock in a way that I didn't think was possible.

For example, the other day in my American Lit seminar, we were discussing the poetry of Frank O'Hara. In one of his poems, the poem's narrator states that he doesn't have an American body. My tutor asked the class what we thought that he meant when he wrote that line and asked what an 'American body' is. I mentioned how there IS no such thing as an American body, because everybody's 25% German, 30% Dutch, has Greek skin, Spanish eyes, etch. As I was saying this, one girl in the class looked at me and said, "Do people in America actually do that?" A bit confused, I go, "Yeah. I'm 25 Italian, 25 Bohemian, and 50 Slovak." She looked at me and goes, "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard." I looked down a bit and went, "Yeah, it all IS kind of stupid," and everybody chuckled.

I'm not posting that story to whine that "Awwwh the other kids were being mean to me!" Actually, no one was. I just never realized that in the rest of the world, people don't have that mixing-pot mentality that Americans have. Taking a step back, I'm just now realizing that people rarely identify as American. I mean, in England, I tell people that I'm American, but whenever Americans meet each other, we still ask each other what we are. And if there's a common country of ancestry, we ask what part of that country, what city, what street, which house...it's odd to take a step back and realize just how much Americans WANT to have an identity that's different than their neighbor's.

Last night, when we were coming back from the club (for Mimi's 20th! Shameless shout-out Happy birthday!!), we took something called the clubbers bus to get back to campus. The clubbers bus is essentially the ski club bus in the middle of the night when everybody has been having a bit too much fun and there's no chaperones to tell us not to try and pile fifteen people onto the back of one seat. Last night, when we boarded the bus, my friends all turned to go up the staircase to the second level. I started internally freaking out because I was actually in the second story of a double decker bus! Of course, this was no big deal to my English friends, but once the bus started to move, I looked at them and said, "Okay, random dorky side note, but this is my first time on the second story of one of these and this is a really huge moment in my life." They didn't know that America only had single deckers and completely indulged my excitedness.


Perhaps that's not a good example of "culture shock," seeing as how I knew that I'd end up on the second story of a bus at some point before returning to the States, but it IS a good example about how I'm not as "culturally assimilated" as I think myself to be. However, upon reflection, maybe I DON'T want to become THAT assimilated to York. I don't want there to be a moment when I'm over here when riding on the second story of a bus isn't that big of a deal. I want everything to be as cool and exiting as it was when I first got to this city on January 4th.

Also, let's take a moment to look at this picture of me getting into Kuda. Smiling at the camera. What a nerd.

And I'm glad to know that my Facebook friends are just as excited that I climbed some stairs on a bus as I was. Maybe we're ALL a bunch of huge nerds... ;)