"Not Sure If It Was A Joke, A Statement, Or What": 40 Biggest Cultural Shocks, As Shared By The Bored Panda Community

I went to the USA. I was surprised how loud people are, in the restaurants, on the street, in the hotels, everybody is always shouting.

Visiting Aruba for the summer. Found out they keep their milk outside of refrigerators. Which is strange for my family and myself.

Clean air! I live in the US near the mills. Spent like 2 weeks in Costa Rica. 2 weeks it took to get used to the clean air. Get home n step outside the air port and broke into a fit of coughing n gagging from the air. And had bad allergy flare ups for a week.

Not another country but a different part of the U.S. . I'm a city girl from the southwest. When I married (my now ex husband) he had just gotten out of the military and wanted to move back to his home state in the rural upper midwest. Nothing prepared me for the culture shock. I come from not only a very diverse family, but a very diverse area, where people are simply people. Up there though wow...I honestly didn't know racism still existed in America until we moved there. There were a lot of wannabe skinheads who just had so much hate for everyone who wasn't just like them. Needless to say I didn't fit in (I made a few good friends 3 total) but other than that it was the worst 7 years of my life. I finally packed up and left and I couldn't be happier.

Went to one of the Mayan sites in Belize, near the border with Guatamala. At first glance it looked similar any Canadian national park as far as washrooms and signs went. Then I saw the armed soldiers standing guard everywhere. That was a bit of a shock.

The big gaps around toilet cubicle doors in the US so that people can see you having a wee! Us Brits tend to prefer a bit more privacy. (Absolutely love America though)

Seeing a Santa Claus figure attached to a cross at a store in Japan. Not sure if it was a joke, a statement about the commercialization of Christmas, or what. I thought it was hilarious.

I live in Spain now, so my biggest culture shock going home to the US is and has always been the hugging, as a greeting and goodbye to people you don’t know well or have just met. So weird to me now. I do miss the friendliness of Americans, just not that friendly bit.

England, 20 years ago, in a hostel: two faucets, one with scorching hot water, other with really cold. Bed with sort of sewn up sheet instead of a single cover with a really scratchy and heavy blanket on top. Bread for breakfast so SOFT it had to be toasted to be able to smear butter on it. Saying "hello" instead of "good morning" in a shop. Tube being so unbelievably small inside. It was a time when most information about the country were given by my teachers, internet was not that common. So yes, I was shocked in many ways.

Love hotels in Japan, they rent rooms by the hour, I thought I was staying in a rough part of Tokyo. Turns out they're everywhere and it's a pretty normal thing in Japan.

Married a Peruvian, so I have been there often...love the country, epecially the
Andes but Lima is not my favorite place. It reminds me of LA but dirtier, people litter all the time, the roads are torn up with no safety cones and the people drive like lunatics. We were being driven on one of the few freeways in Lima when the driver passed the exit we needed. They stopped in the lane and backed up to get back to the exit. We were sure we were dead... Also, its frowned upon to burp in public yet, walking in the financial district and a well
dressed man walking down the sidewalk stops, whips it out and pees on the wall of the building we were walking by. The disparity between those with money and the poor is saddening. My American friend married a well to do Peruvian and had an amazing home in a gated community, with guards with machine guns at the gates. She loved her home but felt like she had a target on her back every time she left home. There are also guards with machine guns outside banks...its just a little unnerving.

Greece. Amazingly beautiful country with astonishing nature and historical sites but trash everywhere. Around roads, in the forests, seashore, even near archelogical monuments there was a trash dump. Like seriously, Greece, whats the matter? No recycling, everything goes to the same dumpster.

Also you have to throw toilet paper into the the trash can and not to the toilet.

And the traffic... abyssmal.

Otherwise really nice place with friendly and warm people, and the sea is surprisingly clean taken how much trash is everywhere else.

Soweto, South Africa. Under the bridge there were men cooking the donated food for the poor in barrels and such. Also the difference between the housing in Soweto, I never realized that there could be million dollar villas in Soweto smack bang next to a shack. I loved it there though, the people are fantastic.

I'm french and i've recently gone to Guadeloupe, which is also french. But i had the feeling to be in Africa. And i found it full of charm personnally. lot of things were cooler than in the metropolis. like people selling coco water right in the middle of the road, or chicken roaming the town centers. it was really cool

UK: I was surprised that you can have breakfast, lunch or dinner in the pubs and there are even those specialized in pizza. In the country where I am from pubs are just places to drink and maybe have some nibbles such as crisps, nuts. Maybe if smoking wouldn't be allowed then it would be possible in "our" pubs too.

Had been in Rishikesh, India. It’s not aloud to eat meat there and forbidden to use plastic bags and straws.
I was really surprised by it because the common expactation is that Indias Environment ist the worst.

When I went to Germany if there were three tellers people would wait in 3 lines instead of one common line for the first available teller

Prague. 14 yeas ago quite well dressed retired loving people wandering along would casually look into even bin. I assume to see if anything worth selling for recycling

Visiting Rome, Italy and discovering that you can actually get a pizza with Nutella (chocolate spread).