Today, I wrote about culture shock in my writing class. I wrote about my experience in Shanghai, and explained my episode to Korean and Filipino classmates.
When my husband and I traveled to Shanghai last month, I felt some cultural shock.
The first cultural shock was the way taxi drivers drive. After we got to the airport, we used a taxi. The taxi driver drove very fast and honked at other cars frequently. It was a raining night, and driver was looking through foggy window. We were wondering how he was able to drive so fast with very limited vision. We were little bit scared about his driving. The second cultural shock was people's argument. Our impression of people in Shanghai was very kind and nice. They were always generous, but sometimes we saw that people suddenly started fighting. They were definitely mad and yelling at each other on the streets. It seemed like nobody couldn't stop them. We saw such arguments three times during our three day travel. On the last day, we decided to use taxi again. The taxi driver was very nice to us and was a very humble gentleman. He couldn't speak English, but he tried to help our heavy baggage to load up the taxi. We thought we were lucky to have a generous taxi driver. While driving on highway, he honked often at other cars just like the previous taxi driver, but we didn't care because I though that was normal in Shanghai. As soon as he got a phone call from someone during the drive, he became really angry. He kept shouting out for a while and finally stopped the taxi on the side of the highway to continue the argument. We were no longer surprised. I assumed that for Chinese people, it is common to express their own opinion and hold their ground even if the other person doesn't understand and is really mad about that.
Today's Vocabulary
・ honk at : ～に向かってクラクションを鳴らす
・ humble : adjective / 〔人が〕謙虚な、腰が低い、謙遜する
ex) Be humble. : 謙虚になりなさい。
・ load up : phrasal verb / 満載する、積み込む、うんと詰め込む
・ hold one's ground : 足を踏ん張る、一歩も引かない、自分の立場を守る［保持する］
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