Allison Culture Shock

I apologize for not getting around to blogging until now.

When I first arrived home, the main culture shock I experienced related to laziness and its effect on the environment. Americans are just lazy. My community isn't very big, but I would get stares from the passing cars every time I walked up town. I even had some people pull over and ask if I needed a ride, who were then very shocked when I told them I wanted to walk. I see people every day using their cars to drive only like 4 or 5 blocks and then I hear them complain about gas prices. I have noticed that even though my town is half the population of Wageningen, it is twice the land area. We really have made everything cater to lazy lives.

With this, I have also noticed more and more obese Americans, children especially. It is really something I hardly ever saw in Europe, especially France and Italy. This really is something that needs to change in our society, but when discussing it with friends back home, they seem to just have an attitude of acceptance.

The final culture shock issue was one that I realized while in Europe but had never noticed the extent, this being xenophobia and naivety of other societies and even our own politics. I had been asked several times in Holland whether it was true that Americans don't pay attention to government issues. I unfortunatly had to say that it was true. I would say that only about half my friends even know who is currently running in our primaries. And if Americans don't know about our own government, they surely don't know what is happening in Holland or Italy or anywhere that we are not at war with. I found myself fumbling when asked about the Italian system.

Xenophobia is also still an issue. Right when I returned, my boyfriend began traveling around the midwest with his company. One night he began discussing how he wanted to get a job that would send him to other countries. The coworker he was traveling with was very confused by this and told him that there was no reason to ever want to leave America and that all other countries were worse than us. He just couldn't understand why someone would ever want to even travel. Since I was told about that conversation, I have had more and more people tell me that they just aren't interested in going anywhere outside of the U.S. and "what is the point of learning about thier culture." I understand that some people just don't like traveling, but this seemed more like a dislike for international travel.

I don't want to ever be one of those Americans.