Different cultures are cool. It's hard to measure how cool or not they are until they are experienced, but from my experience different cultures certainly can be.
First off, I'm Irish/Greek, and on the one side of my family--my mother's side--is VERY Greek. The capeesh-said-after-every-sentence kind of Greek. The go-to-the-Greek-Festival-in-downtown-Philly-every-year Greek. I actually just found out that my uncle John runs that event--just to give you an idea of how REALLY Greek they are. Needless to say, I got to learn a LOT about being Greek.
I didn't get to learn too much about Irish culture except in school and on the news. I hate most of the stereotypes associated with the Irish, even if they're mostly true. Ya know, they all know how to drink a lot; they all like Irish potatoes; and if anyone who says they're Irish doesn't like the color green, then they can't actually be Irish. All that nonsense. I hate Irish potatoes. So, suck it. Green's ok, though.
In high school, I learned a lot about Spanish culture, since I decided I wanted my second language to be, of course, Spanish. Every Spanish-speaking country has different customs. Not only that, but Spanish-Spanish and Mexican-Spanish is like the difference between a northern accent and a southern accent in America--hard to discern.
The most fascinating culture I've got to experience in a few different ways is Polish. I dated a girl for a couple years who was Polish, and her family was very Polish. They all practically spoke fluent Polish or had a very thick Polish accent. I learned some of the language--and by "some" I mean "very little"-- but I didn't learn too much about the culture.
That culture shock happened 2 Novembers ago. A friend of mine got together with me at a bar in the city for a few (too many) drinks. At around 11 or 12, he wanted to meet this girl he worked with at her birthday party. It sounded fun to me! What he didn't tell me was that this girl and her family were SUPER Polish. They held her birthday--which I believe was her 21st--at a Polish catering hall.
Alright, so the first thing that came to my mind when I got there was "I can say 'hello,' 'thank you,' and 'you're welcome.' Welp, hope I don't have to say more than that." Luckily, some were also fluent in English. Those people were who I needed to communicate with. I also discovered upon arrival that this shindig wasn't just for one birthday party. No. There were multiple parties going on at once. It was a menagerie of parties!
My friend decided to sit with the girl he came to see and talk at table. There was a part of the place that was basically just a bar, except no one was really attending the bar and the area was quite dim. That is where my friend and his hopes decided to sit, and after about 5 minutes of being really awkward--and since I had enough courage juice from the previous bar to last me another hour or two--I decided to venture into the main party hall. An MC was playing a mixture of modern American tunes mixed with strange Polish music. Just about everyone was dancing. And not the kind of dancing that Americans are used to. No one was grinding. No one was being belligerent. No one was too drunk to function--even myself, which was surprising at that point, to say the least. It was really hard for me to figure out what to do, because everything was just so proper. You don't just walk out on this dance floor and start dancing. No. You have to find a partner. I'm not joking.
My friend's companion saw that I was awkwardly staring out into the hall from the other room and decided to come over to me.
"You should find someone to dance with!" She shouted over the music.
"What? No, I'm just checking things out. This is pretty fascinating!" I retorted.
"No, stop. Look! How about that girl over there? Want to dance with her?"
"Are you serious? Come on, this is silly. No one here even knows who I am. I'm like a party crasher."
"Yeah, I'm serious. Just go over there and ask her! I bet you she obliges."
"*Sigh* fine. Here goes nothin'"
It's a good thing I didn't bet her any money, or I would have lost. The girl I went up to immediately said yes. She grabbed my hands, and we started dancing in this strange circle. She bombarded me with all of these questions in a thick Polish accent of her own about if I was American, if I'm here for someone's party, if I had been drinking--I said no, I was lying, but she knew that. She laughed each answer I gave off. It was weird. Especially after just being in the bro-est bar in the city where life seldom makes a damn bit of sense, this was a complete 180.
We danced a couple more times before my friend and I had to leave. But the whole experience, despite being a bit inebriated, was pretty memorable. The dancing was definitely cool, but the most memorable aspect for me was that there were multiple parties going on, and everyone treated each other as family! For the common non-Polish cultured American, they likely would have thought they entered the Twilight Zone.
Families generally like to be kept to themselves in our culture; however, I feel like we could learn a lot from other cultures where more acceptance and understanding is more prevalent.
Hmm, just food for thought.
- PatInTheHat
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