The biggest culture shock I got was moving to Georgia. I had grown up in Western New York and gone to school in NE Ohio, which are close to being interchangeable. I moved to Georgia to teach school and for the first two weeks, I had a hard time understanding what my kids were saying. The two biggest issues for me were:
1. The slooooooow pace. The grocery store cashiers had scanners and I could have hand-keyed the stuff faster than they scanned it. I don’t need a lot of hurry-hurry in my life, but I do need people to move along. Of course, I’m sure my pace would have seemed hurried to them.
2. The fake manners. Everyone was polite to my face. I learned later that this was how the other 5 teachers who were from the north were being treated. Any time we tried to go the next step past polite and into friendship, we were met with a chill. This chill came far more often from the white teachers than from the black teachers. I never did figure it out.
I spent some time in Cambridge, England. The only thing that was odd for me was that the family with whom I lived only changed their clothes once a week. I’m sure that they thought that my roommate and I were laundry divas.