So imagine the difference of today. Not only is the nearest mall 5 minutes away (Oh joy! - its on the right), but the nearest country is only a half hour away. (Which is great because their malls are cheaper. Double joy!) I spend my entire day becoming international. I work at an international school where I interact with students from 14 different nationalities on a daily basis. Not to mention that my university cohort encompasses 10 other nationalities. Oh and then I go home to a houseful of Danes who are trying to teach me Danish.
So what is culture? Sometimes being an American is great and I can relax and follow all of the unspoken cultural rules I have always known and sometimes it is best not to be so unbendingly American. For instance, lots of my friends come from countries that my country... ummm ... bombed. Ouch. Some of them have stories from when they were hiding in their basements while American bombs were dropping on their cities. I remember playing childhood games where we were American spies fighting those evil Soviets. Now former Soviet block countries have given me some of my best friends. (Case in point: here is Jelena who is from Serbia, which is part of former Yugoslavia.)
It is eye opening. Recently, when I was in Spain, I met an earlier batch of my University cohort. I met a few Americans and I was shocked at how "American" they were. They seemed brash, opinionated, and rude to me. Jelena, who is Serbian, came over to me later that night and thanked me for not being very American. I took that as a huge compliment. Not that I don't love the US, because I do, but I want to both love it and love beyond it. I want to learn how to see what things are important, what things are personality, and what things I can change. Its a process that is far from pretty in my emotions, but in the end its a great process. A wonderful, painful, awful, beautiful process that I wouldn't trade for the world.
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