Culture Differences

Assalamualaikum w.b.t and hello everyone! Welcome back to our blog and this time, we would like to share a fruitful presentation on intercultural communication.

Here is the video.

The presenter, Pallegrino Riccardi described his experiences wonderfully as he had the opportunity to experience three different cultures in his life; namely British, Norwegian, and Italian. The cross-culture differences that he has highlighted in his talk was very amazing and he emphasized on the cultural differences that he had to encounter even with his own family members.

As for me, DJ, when I was 15 years old, I had the opportunity to travel to Uzbekistan for a competition. Over there, as a Malaysian, it has been my norm to shake hands and place it to my heart (as a symbol of acceptance). Then, one local citizen asked me, “why do you have to do that?” and I explained that we Malaysians, welcome and accept people with big hearts. Not long after that, I had the experience to have a tour around Tashkent in a small cab. One thing that was the scariest moment in my life was that the cab stopped in the middle of the yellow box on the junction, and honk as loud as he wants, and waved his hand out from his window. I shouted and said “WHAT ARE YOU DOING??!!” and he calmly replied, “oh that was my friend at the other side, I am saying ‘hi’ to him!”.

In Malaysia, we honk to indicate danger or anger to other drivers. But in Uzbekistan, they honk as a symbol of saying ‘hello’ on the road!

 

In my case (Anne), I have never been to overseas, but I have encountered a situation where I was in high school, my friend gave me a t-shirt as my birthday present which she bought when she went to Singapore. However, my Chinese friend said that “Why you gave t-shirt? Bad luck oh”. She explained that, giving a t-shirt to a person that we love will bring bad luck as if the person will run away!

Thus, cultural differences could happen anywhere, even when we share the same region, the same country, the same language or the same race. Because, people are different in their own way. Therefore, we should accept and respect each other to make a better world.