Culture Shifts
One of the excuses that I had for taking another decadent semester to explore Ireland and Northern Ireland was for the purpose of culture shock. I mean , the real reason is that I really wanted to visit Ireland, and doing it for a semester while getting some of my credits out of the way seemed like a good, if not entirely traditional, way of doing it. But then I had to justify it not only to the school, but to myself. So I came up with seemingly flimsy excuses in the vein of “Well, I can study English there, because they have a really strong literary tradition, and studying it in its original context will help me understand it better.” Well, that certainly turned out o be true, although I certainly didn’t know it at the time. Becketts, Yeats, Wilde, Woolf… they’re all Irish. It just didn’t really occur to me because they all scatter from Ireland, trying to compensate for their savage Irish roots by getting the heck away from there, preferably a city that oozes sophistication and culture. Like Paris, evidently, where it seems the majority ended up dying. What is it with Paris and writers? How do they write in English when they live there? I started losing my sophisticated English within the second month of my stay in France. How do they continue to turn out their stylish prose?
Which sort of flows into my reason for my second justification for coming to Ireland. This one I saved for myself, not including it in my application essays. I thought that Ireland would lessen the culture shock of returning home. France, in theory, was Europe penultimate. America is…American. Ireland is Europe, but not continental. They speak English, but they still have narrow streets and townhomes with brightly painted doors. It’s a compromise, right?
Wrong.
I think that coming directly from America to Ireland would not have been an extraordinarily traumatic transition. A few surprises here and there, like cars that continually surprise you from the other side, but not like France, where a strange French woman jabbers at you to eat more cheese that she left in the pantry for the past two nights.
But coming to Ireland from France, is stranger story altogether. Strangers smile at me on the street. People say without fail, “That’s lovely,” when I give them the correct change. There are so many coffee shops that I don’t know what to do to myself. I have never seen a dispute. I heard a belligerent horn today, and when I looked up, a man was gesturing furiously to the trash pickupmen (trashmen? What do you call them? trash guys?) who were blocking the lane. I looked at the lead man, and he was waving hugely at the motorist. “Aye, Harol’, b’gone, ye big rascal!” he shouted, and then they pointed and laughed at each other. And then he noticed me on the sidewalk waiting to get by, and he moved the trash bin out of my way and stepped to one side, saying to “pass roi’ troo.” So I did, trying to decide whether Coleraine is a small town, or if Northern Ireland is a small country. The Borough of Coleraine has 57000 residents, but I still can’t shake the mentality of infinite time and patience. And that, I believe, is the biggest shock, coming from France. As a foreigner, I’m treated with smiles and respect, rather than with the impersonality of protocol.
Number 1 shock: View image