What was the biggest culture shock you ever experienced?

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I graduated from high school in 1995. The community I grew up in was incredibly diverse. It was a decent sized city (100k+) and we had about 3,000 students the year I graduated.
That summer, we went to rural Idaho for a family reunion. It was probably the first time in my life that I visited a place that was exclusively white. I’m a white dude myself, but like I said, grew up in a diverse community.
The lack of diversity was a giant culture shock to me. I was in a small community with a population that was about half the size of the school I had just graduated from.
- Wow, I have exactly the same experience but from somewhere totally different. I grew up outside London in the UK and then had to move to the Czech Republic (essentially Eastern Europe) with my parents. Going from a very diverse city where I had friends of many nationalities to a relatively homogenous one was something I definitely noticed.
  
  Please do not refer to Czechia as Eastern Europe. It' simply wrong: Czechia rejected the Eastern Christianity even before the Great Schism, it never was a part of the Russian Empire and it spent most of the last millennium as a part of the HRE. The only connection - being part of the former Eastern block was so long ago that in only 4 years Czechia will be a EU member longer than it was occupied by the USSR.
  
  Counterpoint: https://youtu.be/zGUY5_OObZI
  
  Czechia has a racism problem sure, but that map has no data on actual Eastern European countries so there is no comparison possible. Also you can't reduce the question of being Eastern European on one metric. Was Belgium under Leopold II. Eastern European? Nazi Germany? USA before 1863?
  
  Ok sorry sorry I was just trying to make it easier for an American to imagine. I know it's practically the definition of Central Europe but EE served well for what I was trying to describe.
- Sounds like my hometown 😔

226 comments