Lately in the supermarket when the cashier mumbled "What up?" and the bagger mumbled "Help out?" I was proud of myself for actually getting what they said quicker than usual and without having to put on my "what-was-that-confused-look". On my way back I was thinking about how my English teacher back at school used to scold students who would offer a two word sentence as an answer to a question with "Make an intelligent sentence, please!" Well, I leave it at that.
The other day in a therapy session one of my clients was using some slang. I just nodded as I figured the meaning of the word wouldn't change the story but since we are working on co-dependence issues she took good care of me asking if I knew what this word means and explained it to me : )
To be continued...
I decided to write this blog as part of my cultural integration process. After 2 ½ years of living in California I realize more and more that cultural integration is not a one way street but requires mutual openness and willingness to dare to think outside one’s own cultural box of concepts of “right” and “wrong”, “normal” and “weird” without judging and/or ridiculing what is foreign to one’s common ways of doing life. With this blog I hope to make a contribution to the improvement of this mutual understanding and invite my family and friends both American and German to be part of this process. Please note that this blog does NOT intend to reinforce any stereotypes or make unsophisticated generalizations but only portrays the personal experience of a German girl born in the heart of Swabia and her story of immigrating to a Californian metropolis of the extra large kind namely Los Angeles (4 million). Whenever I will post general articles with general opinions I will mark the content that relates to MY personally experienced challenges, struggles, discoveries and revelations. As I am writing part of this in retrospective there is no particular order to the postings. Feel free to share comments on YOUR experience with keeping in mind that the purpose of this blog is to foster UNDERSTANDING and not to OFFEND anybody! Due to the nature of the subject offense of some kind will probably occur at some point so I apologize before hand and encourage everybody to be a constructive part of this. As a good friend of mine who lives in a inter-cultural marriage as well always says: “Remember, it’s just different.”
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment