Chapter 1: Getting Acquainted

Overview

Getting to know a place, like getting to know an individual, takes time. Even new names can be confusing. Fifteen years ago I was on a ship in the middle of the North Sea on my way from England to Sweden, where I had a job waiting for me. On the ferry I met a few Swedes and we started chatting. I asked one where she came from and she told me, Yutterborry. She must have seen the look of incomprehension on my face. You know ”where this ship lands.

But I thought we were bound for Gothenburg . I must be on the wrong ship! Well, actually I wasn t. The Swedish name for Gothenburg is G te-borg, which when pronounced correctly appears to your average English speaker to have no connection whatsoever to its written form.

There was a lot I had to learn about Sweden ”not only the language. The next lesson followed quickly. During the bus trip from the ferry into the center of the city on that dark January night, I came to the conclusion that I d had no inkling there were so many Jews in Sweden. Unlike my home country, England, people in Sweden don t draw their curtains at night, and I could see clearly into houses and flats as I drove past. To my surprise, an illuminated seven-branched candlestick was shining in every window. The only other menorahs I d ever seen were through the windows of the local synagogue back home in England.

It turned out, of course, that I was wrong ”the candlesticks were simply a traditional Swedish Christmas decoration. (This was before the Swedish furniture company IKEA had become a household word; ten years later my [non-Jewish] parents in England had bought their own seven-branched Swedish Christmas candlestick at their newly opened local branch of IKEA.)

The day after my arrival in Sweden, I went for a walk around town to get my bearings and do a little shopping. During the course of the morning, I decided that Gothenburg shop assistants must be the rudest in the world. They simply refused to serve me or, indeed, to pay any attention to me at all, whether I went to the liquor store to buy a bottle of the local snapps , or tried to pay for a pair of socks. I was beginning to think that the shop assistants had made some sort of anti-British pact when, on my third attempt to make a purchase (this time in the post office), I noticed a ticket dispenser in a corner. I discovered that everyone who wanted to be served took a ticket and waited for the number to be flashed up on a little screen (a bit like bingo without the prizes). By the way, this system is now widely practiced at the delicatessen counters in English supermarkets, another example of the globalization process in action.

Getting acquainted with a new country or making sense of a whole new culture takes considerable time. But meeting an individual from an unfamiliar culture does not have to be a difficult experience if you get to know the relevant customs first. In every culture there are well-defined conventions and rituals surrounding the process, which make the exchange of names and greetings with strangers relatively straightforward.

Naturally, it is good to be aware of these before traveling outside the borders of your own country, but there are times you might try a bit too hard, like the North American businessman who, determined to make a good impression on his first visit to Japan, learned how to bow in the correct Japanese fashion. However, his counterpart knew all about the Western habit of shaking hands, so he stepped forward with his hand outstretched just as the American brought his head smartly down. The resulting impact made them both see stars. Perhaps that s one concrete example of culture clash .

• Moral Getting acquainted with a new country or making sense of a whole new culture takes considerable time, so don t trust your first impressions .