What tools can we use to become open-minded?
During the lecture we got a task to sort out the familiar and unfamiliar things we see in three pictures of three different schools in the countries of Denmark, Laos, and Eritrea. Here you can find the things and questions we thought of witin our Danish-Belgian-Finnish-group.
This starts from the basic behavior, how we talk and how we address other people. What is our and their personal comfort zone? Are we allowed to surpass this limit of theirs? It is also good to know of the greater cultural habits. Should we appear on the meetings on time or is it better to be a quarter of an hour late?
I was an exchange student in the US when I was 17 years old. The first culture shock I came accross was the school - noise, big size, many rules, short breaks, unhealthy food with all the packeting in plastic and lots of garbage... there was so many things I didn't expect to be SO different. I tried to accomodate, and in that I succeeded, but I never fully assimilated into the school. I always had in mind how our school is in Finland, and I thought so many things were better in our Finnish school system. I think otherwise my assimilation into the American culture started after I had been half a year in the States. This happened when I told myself things were different, not always comparing if they were better in Finland or better inthe States.
On our trip in Southern Europe I crashed on a different sort of a culture shock. In young persons naivé way I had learned the people try to do their job well, not to get as many profits as possible. In the stores or hotels I expect to get the value I have agreed on. I also want to pay the sum I have agreed on - I feel extra charges for cleaning or bedding is cheating. I also assume if I ask for help, I will get the instructions from people that best suits my needs, not the first intrest to be their profiting in money. I give an example that happened at a train station, where we were cheated by a cashier that there will not be any trains going to the direction we wanted to go during that day. He offered as an expensive night train or a hotel close to the station. And clearly enough, when we found the train schedule ourselves, there were four different trains going to the destination that day. We felt very angry and and couldn't believe a customer-service worker can act such way. I have realized later when telling the story to our friends we were stereotyping and prejudging all this nation's customer servers - our message was "be aware, they try to cheat you!" We should avoid stereotyping people by such examples.
