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I’m American. Moving to Hong Kong for 3 years was a huge culture shock and a huge middle finger to “American exceptionalism”.
But moving back AFTER the worse of the pandemic??? Holy shit. A massive shock - there was a sort of post-apocalyptic exhausted survivors vibe to everyone and everything.
It was truly culture shocking to see.
I'm a NZer living in Australia, some people didn't understand me saying "a wee bit *", like "it's a wee bit annoying".
I'm not very well traveled.
Moving from a rural 10,000 population town, to a multi-million population major city.
When I lived in Italy it always caught me off guard how every business closed up shop after 18:00, the city looked dead past these hours. I'm used to shops and markets being open 24/7, and it was a vast contrast. But I liked it in the long run, people should have their off hours.
Visited canada a few days ago.
I thought that the people would be super nice, in my experience they don't. People working in tourism are super friendly but we felt that the people are super harsh with tourists.
We even had a group of kids saying out loud "I don't like people with big backpacks" (And no my backpack was not touching them or on a seat) or a security officer saying that he does not work on the information department so he was not helping us.
I have family there and I got to meet some incredible people but I felt that they were super hash sometimes.
Also Canada is beautiful!
Actually experiencing racism in Japan.
If you're a white dude in a white country, you don't have any idea what it's like. My incident was super minor (being denied access to a restaurant) but it gave me a teeny peek into what life must be like for some people.
The size of grocery stores in the US, coming from Hong Kong. Also, the massive lack of good public transit, urban walkability, and just cars cars cars everywhere.
Recycling accessibility and street art displays. I live in a place where it's either plain boring wall or grafitti(am super ok with that, they look cool), it just caught me by surprise when I saw some colorful walls with surreal art in Western Europe. Also how people are much warmer and relaxed.
Becoming a civilian again after being in the military was interesting. Simple things felt weird all the time; I kept feeling like I had to show my ID to buy groceries, stuff like that. But probably moving to the East Coast (NoVA) from Colorado in 2002 was the biggest. I was in absolute shock at the price of housing, hours of commuting every day, and most of all, how horrible the people were. Mean, rude people, angry all the time and intentionally threatening on the roads. Being there made me cry a lot in the first year.
I lived in China for a year after college, and that was basically fine since I was already pretty knowledgeable about the country and I went into it expecting to be off balance and that there would be a lot of new things. What was a surprise was the culture shock when I came back to the US. I don't think that the jet lag helped, but I remember feeling really really out of sorts for about a week and just generally in a bit of shock about how different life was here having largely not been exposed to it for a year.