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How to Travel and Behave in Different Cultures

06.05.2009 · Posted in Home and Garden Articles

The way you handle yourself at the dinner table can have profound implications on how well you impress your foreign hosts. Sheep’s eyes and fried scorpions may not be your cup of tea, but be as gracious as you can about accepting and trying foods with which you may not be familiar. Respect others’ dietary restrictions as well (don’t ask for a cheeseburger in a kosher home, for example, or expect your Hindu hosts to give you steak tartar). nn Realize, too, that your capacity for drinking alcohol may be important to your hosts. Some countries don’t want to see you drinking at all; others judge your capacity as a business person by whether you can drink them under the table. If you really can’t drink or you’re a recovering alcoholic, offer a medical excuse for your reluctance to imbibe. (Hepatitis is a good choice.) nnDifferent cultures have very different ideas about how much distance makes a good “personal space cushion” between two people. These beliefs are often unconscious as children, we absorb many of our strongest cultural norms, and personal space is one of them. nnWhen you stand and talk to other people from other countries, pay attention to their comfort zone, notice how close or how far apart the natives stand from each other and try to maintain the same distance. If someone from another country invades your space, try hard not to take a step backward. If you do, odds are they’ll follow you to close their cultural gap and you’ll end up dancing all over the room! nnWe’re not born with an internal set of automatic gestures we learn them, just as we learn our language, as part of the culture in which we grow up. This is all fine and dandy as long as we stay within our own culture, but when we venture out into international territory, what we know as commonly acceptable may be interpreted as rude or obscene. Other gestures may not have any meaning at all when taken out of cultural context. Read up on what’s acceptable in the gesture department in the country you’ll be visiting to avoid making an embarrassing mistake when you’re traveling abroad. nnAmericans tend to be fairly straight forward and blunt, but many people in other countries care deeply about “face” saving theirs and yours. They may not ask questions for fear of losing face, or they may not want you to lose face if they ask you something and you don’t know the answer. Understand the many implications of “saving face” and try to avoid both looking foolish yourself as well as humiliating someone else. You may think you’re the next best thing to Don Rickles, but humor isn’t universal. Someone who doesn’t speak your language may not have a clue what you’re talking about. Even someone who speaks the same language may not “get” your jokes, especially if there are topical or political comments involved. Puns and sarcasm don’t translate well, and in some countries risque jokes are just plain verboten.

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