What’s the biggest case of Culture Shock you experienced in the US?

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1. Visiting San Francisco for the first time. Before I did some serious traveling. My parents took me to the west coast, growing up in Philly and Pittsburgh I didn’t think it would be too much different but man was I shocked. It definitely helped me get ready for the next 6 years of traveling I did out of the country and around the country.

2. Newly emigrated to the US in 1985, our first stop was NYC. My family went to McDonald’s for the first time. That day I learned pickles existed.

3. When I moved to Alaska I had to drive 4 hours to the nearest grocery store. That was a huge nightmare for my cravings ass fat ass person. Also knowing I was probably going to die if I had a moderate health scare was at the top of my mind due to the isolated community.

4. A woman being genuinely upset when I called her Ma’am when I went to NJ for a summer internship. I’m from the South, some women here get upset if your DONT call them Ma’am….

5. When I moved from Hawaii to AL the biggest culture shock was the whole “yes sir/ma’am” thing. Maybe this is just a “my family” thing and this is way more common then I think, but I’ve always thought that you only say sir/ma’am when you’re talking to someone whose a REALLY big deal, like your companies CEO or the Superintendent or something. Not your parents or random people on the street.

6. First time in Los Angeles, which was the first time in any major city, and I went to the central library. On the steps in broad daylight in front of everyone was a homeless man with his hand in his sweats jerking himself off.

7. When Katrina destroyed my childhood home my family and I lived with relatives in the Dallas-Fort Worth area for a year. The first time I saw the Dallas skyline I gasped. I’m from a town of 2,000 people in Southern Mississippi. I’d never seen a building with a third floor, let alone a skyscraper.

8. My first trip to Miami was the first time I’d been anywhere in the US that felt truly different. At that point I’d been to around 40 states and many cities, Miami feels more like a Caribbean city than an American one.

9. Moved to Pennsylvania from the California. A friend I’d met through the Internet invited to his parents for Labor Day barbecue the first weekend I was there. I decided to bring some beer. I found the only place I could buy beer was from the distributor’s warehouse and I had to buy a case. After living in CA where almost every store you walked into sold beer it was a shock.

   I later found you could buy six-packs at some bars.

10. Meeting my husband’s extended family of New Yorkers when I’ve lived in the South and Midwest most of my life. Very different way of communicating.

11. Guy begging in traffic in the middle of I-87 in NYC…and people *actually slowing down and handing him cash*

    Definitely a “holy fuck you’re an idiot how do you even exist” moment, for both parties

12. Hopi Mesa kachina dance… just so wildly different than anywhere else in the US and a semi-private dance that not a lot of outsiders are invited to.

    You really felt like an outsider until people started handing you popcorn balls to eat. These people are not wealthy and the dance is for giving out food to the disadvantaged in the community. Like baskets of food. Yet they still have us a snack.

13. moving from New Jersey to Hawaii. Altho I was right next to NYC and lived in some decent sized towns, I had moved there from a tiny one. Everyone knew each other and was kind to each other. Then I moved to Honolulu where the first thing anyone at school told me was calling me a “faka” and a “haole”. At first, they were quite mean to me as I was white. But as time went on I gained a lot of respect from my braddahz and they are actually the nicest people ever once you get to know them. I miss my friends and the vibe in Honolulu, despite the amount of druggies and snobs.

14. When I was a teenager I went from a podunk little town to Indiana Boys School. For starters, it was my first time around black people, and they weren’t the type from the Cosby Show. There were criminals of every kind (including me), but also liars, cheats, bullies, thieves, scumbags, dirties, assholes, morons, the mentally ill, delinquents of every kind, and worse. Kids were in there for accessory homicide. I was young and I adapted quickly, but it was a big shock.

15. Moving from green, leafy suburban Philly to arid, hot suburban Phoenix in ’93. I got through high school and moved back as soon as I could.

    It wasn’t just the extreme climate (though that was enough). My PA suburb at that time was still all White and I was pretty sheltered growing up, so I saw Latinos and Native Americans at my AZ school for the first time in my life, looked at them with great confusion and tried to figure out if they were Black or White. 🤦🏼‍♂️😂

16. Orlando, Florida Walmart. Born and raised in the US but something shocks me there everytime

17. Going to Alaska felt so weird

18. When I was in Michigan people on the street were just waving and smiling to me, very friendly.

    It felt really strange to me

19. I had just moved to NJ with my family after living in the South my whole life. We go to a dinner to get diner and the waitress walks up to our table and goes, “What do youse guyz want?” It would’ve made more sense if she came up to us and spoke to us in French. It took us a minute to figure out that youse means y’all

20. When I got back from deployment, I was only gone for a year but you know those time travel movies where they changed one thing in the past and now the present is “different”, it felt like that.

21. I don’t want to sound vulgar, I’m not trying to be flippant, or cursory, or even generally douchey. I’m not trying to be objectifying, if anything I am in reverence, I just want to preface everything I’m about to say with a friendly and welcoming smile. I want to convey this idea with respect, but I don’t know how else to say it; compared to Brazil, Americans don’t have butts.

    We Americans have a general lack of bunda. Bundão is easily 4x as rare here as in Brazil, maybe 5x. We have bundinhas, but we don’t have the Bunda. And we can’t samba. I’ve been to our parades, we love the samba, but we lack the hips, men and women, to perform it.

    The single biggest difference between the US and Brazil, is our butts and our hips. We are very different cultures. Whereas we have a Puritanical stick up our butt, Brazil has been shaking their booties for 500 years, and god bless them for it.

22. When I went down to Oklahoma. People weren’t that passive. If you wanted something, and they didn’t want to give it up, the outright said no.

    In Minnesota, they just say “fine take it”, and grumble under their breath.

23. Traffic.

    I don’t think, unless you’ve seen it in person, most people understand how much of a free-for-all traffic is in India.

    Vehicles use their horns to communicate. Side mirrors are often missing. Cars and trucks and buses and minibuses share space with auto rickshaws, cycle rickshaws, motorcycles, scooters, bicycles, pushcarts, pedestrians, and, yes, bullock carts and draft animals. Making a protected left (right, actually, since it’s left-hand drive) is an exercise in how to seize the opportunity. Outside of major cities, traffic lights are nonexistent or ignored.

    You have *no idea* what traffic is like in developing nations. You could be on Broadway or Fifth in New York City on the hottest day of the year with every third person being a beggar or pushcart peddler, with traffic moving two feet every ten minutes, and it would. Not. Fucking. Compare.

    Americans have *no idea* how orderly their traffic is, and how nice their roads are compared to developing nations.

    This is not to say infrastructure can’t and shouldn’t be improved. But we make marvels in this country, and we need to stop taking them for granted. We are also an incredibly orderly and courteous people, and we need to give ourselves some credit for that too.

24. I can experience culture shock just driving 30 minutes outside the city. Probably the biggest shock was when I was around 13 my dad drove me to visit a coworker of his about an hour north of the city where we live. After we exited the interstate, we drove by the courthouse where we happened upon a KKK rally. We come to find out that the county we had found ourselves in was a well known sundown town.

25. I grew up in Southern California. When I moved to Florida for college, I was shocked seeing Confederate iconography so brazenly and publicly displayed.

26. Humor.

    Different areas of the country have very different types of humor. I’m from NYC/NJ area, and am used to a dry ironic humor/wit, often deadpan.

    When I moved to the midwest, no one ever knew when I was joking, and took me literally, all the time. This matched really badly with their own habit of making bland inoffensive comments as conversation, just to be pleasant.

    Example: We’re at a County Fair and it’s 102 degrees Fahrenheit.

    Midwestern friend: “Geez Louise! Sure is a hot one today!”
    My own NYC ass: “Huh, I thought it was freezing.”

    Midwestern friend (with puzzled concern): “You do?”

27. When I saw a show at the Filmore in San Francisco for the first time. I ordered a beer about every 15 minutes and thought nothing of it.

    When I went back for my fourth the bartender asked me if I hated my life. Then when I went back for my fifth, the other bartender asked if I was from Wisconsin. (I am lol)

28. How white some areas can be.

29. I’m from the Chicagoland area so everything is relatively close to me, with me being in a suburb. Walmart 2 minutes away, movie theater around the corner. Convenience was amazing.

    Then I met my girlfriend who is from a small farm town in MI with about ~800 people in it. The nearest Walmart was 20 minutes away. The largest city was about 45 minutes south. They also knew mostly everyone in town too, something I’m still not over 😂

30. I’m from Massachusetts, and when I turned 20, I’d never been further south nor west than DC.

    I flew to California with friends. The palm trees and pampas grass felt like something out of a movie, and all the stucco made the buildings feel practically foreign. It was way more disorienting than I ever would have imagined.

31. Circa 1993 driving with my parents from the D.C. area to Orlando for Disney World. We stopped just off I-95 in eastern Georgia for the night. My old man was balding and would always wear this very ‘90s pink trucker hat with a purple and orange beach scene on the front of it. He walked across the motel parking lot to a convenience store for a six-pack of beer. He gets back to the room and he says “the lady at the counter told me she’s never seen a man in a pink hat before.”

32. Going on a business trip to backwoods Louisiana (rural area behind Carencro) and hearing two old men, drinking coffee at a gas station and conversing in French. Probably the last of that generation.

33. People in Oklahoma don’t refer to pizza as “pies.” Also, there’s all kinds of “salads” from the Midwest that are not what I would consider a salad to be.

34. Mine is dumb, but I’ve been all over the country and lived in 6 states and the only real culture shock I’ve ever experienced was in the Texas Panhandle (think Amarillo). I just constantly had this feeling of *I really, REALLY don’t belong here*. And I’ve never felt that strong a feeling anywhere else in the US.

35. From NJ originally and found myself in Orange County, CA. On several occasions I was invited to, and did, attend a mega church. You know, with like a rock band and Jumbotron.

    As somebody raised in the Catholic tradition, it was not at all what I was used to.

36. The first time I went to the Louisiana bayou

37. SoFlo girl visiting Boston!
    Had a panic attack being a passenger in a car and going through a huge rotary like whyyy are they so big! Everyone was nice. Loud but nice.

38. I lived in Germany for four years followed by three years in Seattle. Then I went to Georgia. The racism felt like I’d traveled back in time to the 50’s. Just so casual. An elderly teacher lived on our block and came to welcome us. We asked her how she likes the neighborhood and she said, “I love it but there is this black family on the block”. My husband and I were waiting to hear what was wrong with the black family. Partying too loud, driving too fast but she just looked at us and we slowly realized that for her the problem was they were black. All those years out of the south and I had forgotten and was shocked.

39. When I went to TN I got called a “yank” a few times and when I went to Georgia I saw people selling bbq inside of a gas station. Like they took a few chip isles and they were straight up bbqing in the gas station. Also, drive through liquor stores.

    Also might count but getting to know Dominican customs while I was meeting my girlfriend’s family. They all feel so normal now, but I remember a few “wtf” moments.