Hm.  This is a fascinating diary and one of the subjects that lures me to ET.  But no one has commented.  

I have nothing intelligent or insightful to say on the matter, sadly.  Except that maybe I have this experience often in my very own country, in which I often find a cultural barrier betwen myself and my fellow Americans.  Which is especially annoying because you're supposed to be able to be yourself in your own homeland, right?  The place that shaped you?  But no...  So there have always been cultural barriers in my life.  It's just a matter of which ones allow you to live life fully and which ones cramp your style.  

I suppose being outspoken is an American thing.  But I feel more suffocated/alienated 300 miles south of my own city than I did on the other side of the planet...

"This is nothing compared to how Putin rigged Eurovision."

Very quickly:

--my experience with the english tallies with yours.  I don't know which numbers to place in the percentage points, but I'd say that inhibition...(family and school--a legacy of the class system, or the ongoing class system--"I was so embarrassed!"  "Sorry!")...I'll tell you one thing about english: a lot of the ones I've met don't teach their children to day "Hello" and "Goodbye" because, as adults, they don't do it.  This creates that alienation....where as melo put it, you can talk to a person for a good long chat then the next day, nothing!  Not even "hello"!  Kate Fox's book is really great, she's a zen character though.  I think there is also a town/country divide, where the towns are less friendly--but I've only lived in towns so I could be wrong on that.

--other countries.  I lived in Italy for a few years and it all worked fine for me.  The english have a certain cache (for whatever reason), and I was teaching english so I was "professore" or "dottore" for the older people.  What I found after a few years, though, and what made me choose to go back to England, was the group and la famiglia.  Italians didn't usually (again, this is all just my experience) do things in twos or threes.  Typically a two or a three would become a nine or a ten, whereas I do find twos and threes the best for conversations.  Then there's la famiglia which has a determining role, which I found too imposing.

--I have been told by many foreign women that english women simply don't like them.  The theory I have heard is that there's a jealousy.  This may have changed with the next generation, but...ach...

the simplest way I can understand it: The english are repressed.  This can cause strong cases of embarrassed arrogance (where the person is embarrassed in social situations but also judges the other person/people strongly, with them coming off worse.)  This silent judgement (all in the head, no words) creates the suddenly broken (for no apparent reason) relationships...or sommat.

Put repression and alcohol together and you get the english town at night.  Judge others at all times, make sure you're judging them harshly, then stir in a big spoonful of self-loathing (all that judgement has to come back and bite sooner or later)...

A common comment about Italy by the english: "Oh, it's lovely, the people are so friendly!"

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

Nice thoughtful analysis, though of course personal impression.  But it rings true for me as well.

i never thought moving to a "western" country like Deutschland would be a problem.  After finding that these supposedly sophisicated people didn't have Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys tribute bands but did have ABBA bands began the slide down the long slippery slope.

Seriously, 6 years on i find there really are differences, including psychologically, between cultures, and that there are always individuals who transcend all barriers, and they're rare.

Skennah Kowa

Great diary Nomad.  I didn't feel that you'd painted us all as an insensitive lot, more that I feel bad for you that you didn't come across any kindred spirits while you were over here.  

It took me a long time to find people I connected with, largely from growing up in an area with values and a way of being that so jarred with my own personal values.

Moving from England back to my Welsh roots, I found my home, I was finally comfortable and at ease with who I was and where I was.  

The inability of the English to talk, to open up and share, to me explains why things such as child abuse can go on for so long without any intervention.

I must admit that when I travel, especially alone, I come across as being incredibly rude but that is largely down to me not hearing what people are saying to me and protecting my personal safety by not getting drawn into conversations with people I don't know when I am on unfamiliar territory. Were I to stay longer in places or be around 'locals' that would be different I think, because I really do love finding out about people and how their lives are different to mine.

Ad astra per aspera

Hard to say. Berlin is not typically German, quite the opposite, and I live and interact mainly with people who like me moved away from their home town or city to go to the big city. Except for 90% of these people being German, there is not a huge difference. I find that I level with people basically on the basis of personality and interpersonal 'chemistry', or whatever you'd call that, much more than culture. I'm still slightly more complete (or less haphazard and roundabout) in expressing myself in Dutch or English than in German, but that has become a smaller factor over the years.

I particualrly like the post-doc campus culture.. it's awesome.

other than that.. in myc ase it depends ont he mood.. or what kind of person i want to be during that visit... it is so great to change pshychologichal profiles as much as one can!! :)

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

Hmmmm...

I think a more difficult cultural barrier I was faced with was with my far-right colleagues. Obviously no dissolution of barriers possible there, really, but one can still find common themes to get by. (Say, extraordinary weather events or comets.)

Like poemless, I can find barriers very close. Say, a week ago at a family gathering, when I told about the Stop Blair! project, I earned bafflement, one cousin even burst out laughing, it's so much of a non-issue for them.

There is class, too. A few months ago, I went to a local gallery to check out the work of a painter painting the local landscape. But the other guests were apparently my town's upper-class, and there was such a suffocating air of snobbery I had to flee.

In the opposite direction, I had lost two friends due to complexes I had no clue about: a peasant boy who never got more than 100 km from home whom I shouldn't have told about my foreign holidays, and a schoolmate turned mechanic who, I learnt years later, felt like a loser seeing me going to university and having prospects.

Geographically, I can't strongly relate to what you tell about, maybe because I was not embedded enough anywhere. Adaptation always took time and was never finished - be it as small kid in Croatia, then dropped into a Budapest kindergarden, then moving from one Budapest district to another with a rather different makeup, then Frankfurt & environs where I first didn't know the language and was the poor immigrant... Meanwhile, whenever I travel, I feel I am 'acclimatising' and blending in fast (don't feel like a tourist in Disneyland but just a Man on the Street), but that's superficial with the limited amount/necessity of social contact.

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

I try to write a comment several times now and it always gets too much for me to want to put in Google.

Thanks for this diary, it really got me thinking. It's big stuff.

Maybe I'll manage to get a comment out tomorrow.

I went over to Australia in 1996/1997, and, in terms of cultural barriers, it was a mixed experience.

Compared to some other people I knew, I had a fairly easy time of it. I had a baby, which is pretty much a ticket-in anywhere.

But most of the friends I made over there weren't Australian.  None of them were English, but very few were Australian.  I did feel as if I was facing barriers, sometimes: barriers that had more to do with people's assumptions than who I really was.  

But, frankly, most English people in Australia are an embarrassment.  God, they whine.  Nothing's ever quite right or quite as good as at home. There's a reason why we get called whingeing Poms.  

What's more, we exported a lot of our unlovelier characters during the White Australia years.  Those who didn't like immigration at home went to Australia in droves.  Australia has reaped what it sowed in that regard, and a noticeable chunk of the Australian English aren't the sort of people with whom I tend to get along.

I haven't had that experience with the people from UK (I've been a bit everywhere there apart Ireland). Maybe because I was raised surrounded by the old british army sort of blokes with the chotta peg, the social noises, and so forth... :-)

I usually never say goodbye or hello, specially to close friends, keeping our meetings as a continuous feast with no meant interruption ? :-)
The french hugging I don't do "naturally", though all my relatives are from the south and south-west... Go figure!

I discovered my own country at my early teens and did find it hard to integrate as I was more raised as Kipling's Kim (or the Summerhill's pupils). My childhood friends were from everywhere, either Indians (most of them) or from most europeans countries but then they didn't stay long enough !

My parents, as theirs, were all born in far away countries and I almost feel like betraying my family that my children were all born in the same place ! :-)
Cultural barriers, maybe... Languages ones surely, but I find quite easy to blend in, without loosing much... Maybe because I don't have much too loose :-)

"What can I do, What can I write, Against the fall of Night". A.E. Housman

I grew up in Minneapolis, where the local culture was largely created by German and Norwegian immigrants. I moved to Boston when I was 25 and lived there for four years. Boston's culture was primarily created by extremely conservative English immigrants.

I couldn't handle the difference. Ultimately I wasn't willing to expend double the personal effort for half the results I would get back home. I won't go further into it lest I write many pages of slander. I'm still trying to not beat myself up for not leaving after two years at which point I knew it just wasn't going to happen for me there.

I spent a week in London a few years ago. In that very brief time, I noticed extreme differences between English folks from London and folks from elsewhere in England. [ok, some quick slander here just to stir the pot - I was so shocked by the fickleness and fussiness of Londoners that I wondered how they manage to get together to procreate. I thought New Yorkers were bad.]

I did find all the Northern English folks I met to be superior conversationalists in comparison to Americans. The conversations I had over beers had a palpable flow and honest exchange to them - which, I was shocked to realize after the trip, rarely happens to me here. There may be some bias to my story in that cracking "the English shell" is trivial in the context of hostels and the travel culture.

I also learned that if I'm feeling lonely during my double-secret year long backpacking trip all I have to do is find the nearest Australians.

you are the media you consume.

I wonder whether the climate is more important than generally thought. In the southwestern US, which is a sunny place pretty much all the time, people seem to have taken big doses of happy juice every morning. I mean, you're standing in line at the grocery store and people talk to you to the point where you know more about them in five minutes than you do about your 20 year neighbors in the Northeast...

At our house, at least, the prospect of a sunny day--straight-out winter, well below freezing, a bit of snow, but still brightly sunny--is so easy to contend with in comparison to the telephonic reports we get from relatives in the East who are dealing with 10 cm of freezing rain, flooded driveways and basements, and months more of cloudiness before that one pleasant spring week in June...

How do the British in Spain compare to the British in Britain?

I was reminded of a cultural game today and I'd be interested to know if it's purely English or whether anyone else recognises it. It looks like passive aggression, but it's a bit more subtle than that. I call it the Don't Mind game and, essentially, the aim is to gain kudos/control by being nicer and more unassuming than everyone else.

Hardcore version: A group of colleagues decides to go to a restaurant.  Almost always in an English group there's someone who flatly refuses to have a preference.  Anything is fine by them.  They Don't Mind.  So everybody else decides.

Cue Mr/Ms Don'tMind.  "I don't really like Chinese."

They don't really like the next choice either.  And eventually the whole group ends up at the restaurant of choice of the Don'tMind.

Medium version (as attempted on me yesterday): A school trip needed an extra body and one of two of us had to go.

My colleague didn't mind.  Of course I should go if I wanted to...but she'd also go if I wanted her to.  It was no trouble.

I don't think she did mind, really.  The options she had lined up were to do me a favour by going on a fun trip, or to stay behind saying, well, she would have quite liked to go, but...

"OK, we'll flip a coin," I said.  "Heads or tails?"

"I...don't...mind..."

I've now lived in the Netherlands 2,5 years. I've maybe just about now managed to make Dutch friends, or not friends, but maybe pals. Before this, all my new pals were other foreigners.

What I've mostly had trouble with:

• The difficulty of getting to know people. We Finns are reserved, but still, if you work on a project with someone or meet him/her every week in class, it is quite normal to ask her for a cup of coffee at your house. Here it seems not that common. It seems to me that it's very easy to chat with people I don't really know, but it most often doesn't go any further than chatting, even if you see the same person all the time. So, making friends seems to be difficult.

• The quality some Dutch call their directness or straightforwardness. I've never had so many rude things said to me before. (Sorry, but this is how it is.) Seems like it is fashionable to open your mouth and say whatever comes to mind, no matter how offensive it might be.

• The concept of personal space is different. People tend to stand closer than I'm used to, and they can actually touch your shoulder or arm while talking to you, even if you don't know them. And the kisses on the cheek! In Finland I hug my very closest friends but the others just get a friendly wave. :-)

Still.. as cultural barriers or differences, these are quite minor indeed.

What I love here:

- The diversity, the openness, the attitudes towards glbt folk, the concept of gezellig.

You have a normal feeling for a moment, then it passes. --More--

Like poemless, I feel more alienated in parts of my native United States than I have ever felt anywhere in Europe.  As a native Californian, Texas mystifies me far more than Tibet does.  That may be because--as someone theorized long ago; I wish I could remember who--the Pacific Coast of the U.S. belongs to a different culture zone (i.e., the Pacific Rim) than the rest of the U.S.

A curious phenomenon I've frequently experienced in my native country is that other Americans mistake me for an Englishman.  I don't have a British accent, and I consider myself as American as apple pie.  But from high school up, people just meeting me have often taken me for a Brit.  The tenth or twelfth time this happened, I politely asked the person (a new female co-worker) why she thought I was English.  

"I don't have a British accent, do I?" I asked.  (In fact, it's California "dude.")

"No," she admitted.  "But you always use complete sentences and, you know, pronounce all your words correctly!"

Apparently, in much of the U.S., this makes you "English" until proven otherwise!