Blog 36: Personal Story and Hypothetical Situation

Personal:

In the past I have found myself in various situations where I do not understand the different cultural activities orinteractions that are going on around me. For the past few years, I have had one of my best friends as my roommate, we get along on many different levels, but we differ heavily in our cultural values and childhood influences due to our different cultures. He is Chinese and I am a mix of various cultures, mainly Italian, and when we have conversations sometimes I will have to ask him to repeat a word due to his heavy accent on some words.  One of the large diffences between us is in how we speak, we both put stress on different parts of a word and our pronunciation of words is vastly different. Fortunately we are both able to find humor in our differences in speak and have had some amazing stories to tell from simple conversations. One night I decided I would like to pronounce his name correctly and asked him to aid me in saying it correctly. After a few initial failed atemtps we kept at it for four hours straight. His name is spelled Qi and after he would say his name with the correct vowel sounds that were correct for him, I would atempt to day it and he would just smile and say try again. Since I refused to give up and he was laughing at my hopeless situation he said to simply prounce it “Tea” and that would be fine. So to this very day whenever I mention his name to anyone or say it, everyone thinks I am talking about the drink and not my roommate.

Hypotheical:

Imagine that you are sitting in a rom surrounded by people form all sorts of various cultures. They are all having conversations in their native languages and obviously none of them make sense to you. How could you approach any of them and strike up a conversation? There seems to be an innate fear about approaching people of different cultures because we are afraid to look dumb or be embarassed infront of them due to a lack of knowledge about their culture. Both parties are most likely thinking the same thing, that they are unsure of how to approach each other because they are not sure what the other culture deems as an acceptable greeting or conversation starter. Neither wishes to be disrepectful to the other and this creates a situation in which both parties are bound by that fear. This slight cultural boundary fo a simple hello freezes up and prevents all other possible interactions that could take place. There is a simplicity in saying hello and appologizing if you have done anything disrespectful or wrong and ask them to simply tell you more about themselves and their culture. This moment of education can lead to great conversations and good friends, all that needs to be broken is that cultural barrier that stands betweenthe two parties. Once this barrier is broken an exchange of stories and various other conversation topics can take place.