Question

If you traveled to another country, what elements would most likely cause you to experience culture shock?

Answer 1

• Experiencing culture shock in another country is especially more likely when a person is not prepared for it. The more unprepared you go, the harder it hits you.
• One of the symptoms of culture shock is the preoccupation with either cleanliness or physical health. While staying in a foreign country, you are likely to heighten your awareness of your surroundings, which will naturally raise your awareness of your physical well-being.
• While it is not necessarily a bad idea to watch over yourself, especially when it comes to the foods and liquids you consume or protective measures you take to prevent disease, some travelers will take it too far and will worry constantly about their physical health and cleanliness.
• Some of the frustrations frequently encountered include the inability to effectively communicate in a foreign language or the misunderstanding of cultural customs that are unknown to the traveler. A language barrier can make an individual feel lost, alone, or even silly. He or she may take offense to the differences between the home culture and the foreign culture.
  
• You may find that learning the language necessary to make a simple food order can be much more difficult than you imagined, or that trying to learn the local transportation may leave you lost in a part of the city you have never been before.
• In addition to transportation constraints, if a person from a large continental urban society moves or travels to a small island society they may experience a sense of social and spatial claustrophobia, more so than someone who is from a rural or small town society.
• Another source of considerable distress for some people is not being able to eat the foods they are accustomed to. Anyone who wants to live,travel and work overseas should be prepared to make considerable changes in their diet and get accustomed to the local foods and the sometimes limited selection of familiar foods in the stores and restaurants.
• They may not have the nice variety of very large and well-stocked grocery stores they had back home or the many choices of restaurants and fast-food places.
• And lastly is the issue of values. A person can experience considerable stress and anxiety when they are living or traveling in a different culture with different values from their own. A person may find that some of their own cherished and deeply held values and assumptions about life may not be equally important to members of their new host culture.
• The areas of religion, moral behavior, justice and fair play, racial equality, work ethic and privacy are areas where there may a great deal of cultural relativism, and people living and working overseas need to learn to deal with these differences in a relaxed and nonjudgmental way.