Culture

For the past week in class, we've been discussing culture. We've referenced the term culture shock a lot. We did an activity involving culture shock in which we played a card game as a class, but everyone got different rules. Because we weren't allowed to speak, it made it more difficult to understand why the other people in your group weren't following the rules. I remember thinking during the game why are my group members playing wrong? Didn't they learn the rules? It never occurred to me that we all learned different rules. These sorts of issues are seen between different cultures around the world. A lot of times, one culture assumes that another is incorrect in their customs when in reality they aren't. They all learned a different set of rules growing up and we don't always realize that because of our ethnocentrism. When I went to France, I experienced this a lot. One night, me and the french family I was staying with had pizza for dinner. I hadn't thought that there would be anything different about eating pizza, but it turns out the french put mayonnaise on their pizza instead of tomato sauce. I was really confused at first. I couldn't figure out why they would put mayo on a pizza. That's not how pizza was made. In this situation, I experienced that same culture shock as I did when we played the card game in class. It's important to be aware of other cultures and realize that just because something may seem bizarre to you and your culture doesn't mean its wrong.