Alien on your own planet

[chickenfeet]

I've been thinking a lot about cultural differences recently. It's mostly been fairly light hearted stuff about Australian cricket, Scots teeth, New Zealand accents and the like but it has its serious side too. I'm a fairly well travelled person. I've seen a pretty good chunk of North America, Western and Northern Europe, Australia, New Zealand, French Polynesia, Thailand and a few other bits and pieces. Most of that has been for work too which definitely provides a different perspective from being a tourist. My experience of the third world though is limited to Thailand, Mexico and parts of the Southern USA.

So I wanted to ask my esteemed flist where was the most culturally alien place they had been and why they felt that way.

For me, it's a place called Jena, Louisiana where I worked one long, hot, summer in the mid '80s (date not temperature - it was hotter than that). I suspect Jena is fairly typical of towns of that type. I've spent shorter periods of time in not dissimilar places. It has a motel, a couple of diners, a high school, a couple of automotive parts plants where most people work and a metric shitload of churches. Racism is never far below the surface but it's not as bad as the nearby town of Nebo where there are no black people. The Jena little league team leaves its black players at home when it plays there. It's just not safe to take them.

All the people in the plant, except for the plant manager, were local. Most of them had never been outside the state and the most travelling they ever did was to the occasional football game in Baton Rouge. A handful had been overseas but that invariably meant a military base in Germany. They weren't bad people, just stuck in a very limited world with almost no comprehension at all of the world outside. I, for instance, was a total enigma. I wasn't a "good ol' boy", I didn't really fit the spec for a "damn Yankee" and I "sure as hell weren't no nigger" ('scuse my French).

Just one small example, I was having lunch one day with the production manager (no. 2 guy in the plant), Ernie, and I was telling him about the running battles my (then) wife was having with squirrels in our back yard in downtown Ottawa. Ernie wanted to know why I didn't just shoot them. I decided it would be too complicated to explain the potential implications of discharging a fire arm midway between the parliament buildings and the Governor General's residence so I told, him, perfectly truthfully, that i didn't own a gun. He was flabbergasted and it was probably a full minute before he recovered enough to offer to lend me a pistol for my next trip home. At this point I had to explain that hand guns were illegal in Canada etc, etc.

Now, it has to be said that I saw things that summer that made Jena look like a demi-paradise. If you ever want to see the US that doesn't feature in the tourist brochures just take Highway 98 east from Natchez, MS to Interstate 55. You know those early photographs of black sharecroppers outside their shacks in the post-bellum south? It hasn't changed much. It's certainly at least as bad as anything I saw in Thailand, even going through the slummy outskirts of Bangkok on the train.

Comments

[itchyfidget.livejournal.com]

Wow.

Most alienated I have ever felt was in Turkey. I was in my early twenties and had never been further East than Slovakia. My then-partner and I travelled around by coach (the Turks have an excellent coach system that rivals Greyhound in the US) for two weeks, seeing most corners of Turkey except the tourist-crime-ridden and malarial South East.

We were treated amazingly well by everyone - Turks are incredibly hospitable. In spite of this, I felt lost and angry a lot of the time because they would principally talk to my partner and not to me (it being disrespectful to look directly at me). I loved Turkey but I never wholly got my head around women's place in it - Erzurum, in the East, for example, is a university town, so there are very westernised looking women wandering around, but also women dressed head to toe in black and with just a slit in their veils to see through (I think of this as in purdah but this may be inaccurate, inappropriate, or possibly politically incorrect. Would welcome instruction). I didn't show a lot of flesh on the holiday (not a beach babe in any case) and tried to be respectful. It was just quite different, and it made me think a lot about my rights. On the one hand, women are treated well and for the most part with extreme respect - but it's a big change for a woman reared in a Western society.

[amaliedageek.livejournal.com]

Substitute "southwestern Pennsylvania" for "Louisiana" and "coal mine" for "automotive parts plants" and you've described where I grew up. It hasn't changed much in the 20 years I've been gone.

[bumponalog.livejournal.com]

For me it was Interior Decor school.
The attitude where fashion is all and terribly important and you must impress this upon your client and pretty much force them to buy into it (literally as well as figuratively) completely blew my tiny little mind.
No one liked to consider any other POV - they just would not condone it.
Now I am doing Production makeup and I was fully expecting this to be the same but I now recognise I am older than the others and am a good deal more mellow about things.
Also - I am in an industry that freely acknowledges it is about make-believe
And we are having a lot of fun with the tutors expectations.

[metalana.livejournal.com]

Life was definitely different here:
http://www.toybox.ca/~alanab/gallery/Hmong

But then I feel out-of-place anywhere where people are worshipping a television.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I've never been to a Muslim country (unless one counts Bradford) and I have a feeling I would find it pretty weird. I think having lived most of my life in places where people were, more or less, treated as individuals makes me very sensitive to being in a position where some people are being treated differently simply because they are black, female, catholic or whatever.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I have a friend who is from Kentucky and she says the same. Oddly enough she now works for some ultra feminist group in Berkeley which must be about as far away, culturally, as one could get.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I can see how weird that would be. I think I had a glimpse of something similar when I was at Durham. There was a set (to which I, most emphatically, did not belong) where all the men drove MGs (most of them were destined for the army) and both sexes wore Barbours and green wellies, had very loud voices and were forever zooming off to Hunt Balls in North Yorkshire and Northumberland and so forth.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

But then I feel out-of-place anywhere where people are worshipping a television

You'ld have a rough time in Quebec then.

[nanila]

Dunfanaghy, County Donegal, Ireland. I sat alone in a cafe there and the entire cafe watched me eat my lunch. I smiled at people. The children smiled back. The adults didn't.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Hehe! Reminds me of the time my ex and I were driving from Cairns to Townsville (or vice versa). It was a Sunday and freaking hot. We stopped at a pub in the middle of nowhere at lunchtime and went in. The place was packed and every person in the place stared at us. The landlord looked up from bar and uttered two words "We're closed".

[itchyfidget.livejournal.com]

I think, being male, you might notice it rather less. I genuinely didn't expect that men would politely ignore me.

[rparvaaz.livejournal.com]

Haryana, India.

Okay so I was born and brought up here, and still live in the state, but it is an alien place. People stop and stare at you, gaggle of kids follow you around when you go to villages, people have to be almost hit on the head to realise that a woman can have a brain and responses....

Okay, it is not *as* bad as I am making it sound right now but it still feels more alien than the other polaces I've been to - UK, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Bulgaria etc. Oh, South Korea is pretty weird too - people are all polite, the streets are incredibly clean, and their train time-tables are written out to the seconds. And the trains are actually always on time, down the seconds!