Culture Shock

Today in class culture, both material and non-material, was compared to a fish bowl. One of the things that stuck out to me in this metaphor was the idea of culture shock. I knew, from Human Geography, that culture shock is when people with one culture are brought into a different one and they experience "Culture shock" because everything is so different. But the fishbowl really got me thinking about it. The example used was the owner wanting the fish to swim into the castle, but that’s not what the fish wants because this wouldn’t have occurred out in the ocean that it is used to. This aggravates the owner. In real life thought I never thought about people being aggravated when others are confused due to them being new to the surroundings. Stevenson ahs exchange students all the time and most people are really nice about it. They treat the new students well because they know that these kids dot speak the language or aren’t used to the way things are. But then I thought about my new neighbor, she is an exchange student from Germany. She speaks English pretty well but she struggles with some words and concepts. I was talking to her about homecoming and she said they didn’t have anything like that back in Germany and she didn’t really know what to wear or how to act. Whets more I found it difficult to explain some things to her because she didn’t have the vocabulary to understand. This wasn’t really aggravating because I could see that she was trying really hard, but I could see how it would irritate someone if they really needed to get a concept through to her.