Have you ever been a foreigner?

Yes. It was really stressful because I didn’t know how to behave. It was like waking up to find yourself on stage in the middle of a play, and you know your lines but everyone else was there for blocking rehearsal and you weren’t. So you know kind of what you have to do or at least say, but you keep tripping over yourself to get the little things right.

@EmpressPixie. Where were you?

Only in Mexico and Canada and I was treated nicely in both places.

I spent a bit of time living in Japan with friends of a friend, so yes I have been a foreigner in the most literal of terms. I never felt scared or concerned for my safety, but I did feel like an outsider looking in. Everyone I met was so gracious and wonderful and offered to help me in any way possible, even if it was a stranger offering help in broken English as they saw me looking around with a confused look on my face. And everyone always told me how amazing my Japanese was (it wasn’t) and how impressed they were that I had spent so long studying the language. It was truly a wonderful time.

@GAMBIT: did you learn anything from your experiences in those other countries?

@Daloon: Basically every time I go home with someone and meet their family, be it a boyfriend or college friend, when I haven’t been able to meet their family beforehand.

When I was actually abroad, I felt very little of the stress of being foreign, at least in part because my travel-buddy and I were trying very, very hard to speak the language and follow local customs and traditions. Because we tried so hard, the locals were absolutely wonderful to us. Some of the other students who were on that trip had the exact opposite experience: they didn’t try and all and the locals made them feel every inch the foreigner.

I attended a baby shower for a co-worker from Costa Rica. Everyone there was speaking Spanish, so I felt pretty left out and alone. They were all very friendly, but it was awkward at best for me. So I felt like a foreigner that day. I made the best of it, but didn’t stay for the whole event.

I enjoy being in different cultures. I think the biggest stresses are when I don’t speak the language (or speak it well).

Trying to remember the French for ‘Where the heck is a bank where I can get some Francs’ was stressful.

Realizing that I wasn’t going to find a hotel anywhere near Munich because there was a huge farm tool convention and the hotels for that weekend had been booked for over 2 years. (We wound up sleeping in the car in the Airport parking lot).

I think the MOST stressful cultural difference was going to NYC and having a deli clerk try to short change me. I admit it was bigoted of me, but my reaction was “Imagine that! An entire culture devoted to ripping people off!” (It was an immediate reaction to a single incident, and I don’t really feel that way). That being said I was totally awed by the cultural diversity there. (Living in SC can make a change of culture seem refreshing).

@daloon – yes I learned that if you treat people kindly they will be more than happy to help you and that culture and language does not have to be a barrier.

I’m a semi-Liberal Democrat living where the Bible Belt snaps and stings at the end. I worship with people who have completely different political positions and I sometimes feel it is my job to throw out the money changers and rebuke the Pharasees. It has caused me a lot of stress, but lately, especially during the last election cycle, people have secretly told me, “I guess you were right.” I find that rewarding.

Oh oh…. also, When I was in Germany and could smell the fresh baked pretzles and could not communicate that I wanted a hot one. All they would give me was an old stale one!! I felt like a real foreigner then!

Yes. For the last 14 years I’ve lived in two different countries, other than my country of birth – and both countries have other languages than my native.
It takes some getting used to and even now, after 9 years in this country, I still consider myself a foreigner – something I consider a good and bad thing.
Bad thing because it means I don’t always get what the ‘locals’ think and feel because views, mindsets and values are different.
Good thing because I wouldn’t ever want to lose my sense of nationality or cultural heritage and I find I being one lets me connect with other foreigners more easily, which is such a rich learning experience that I wouldn’t want to be without.

Sometimes I hangout with this Mexican guy Davd I work with. He knows a little english. I know just a little spanish and he taught me a lot of that. I go over to his house after work. He lives in “Little Mexico” as the neighborhood with old rental houses is called in his town. He has a big bbq pit and a pool table in his backyard. I go over there and half the neighborhood comes over. We drink Coronas and play pool. Sometimes David slaughters a goat and bbq’s it. I know some of those Mexican boys are talking shit and making fun of me because I suck at pool. I catch part of what they are saying. For the most part Im a foreigner when
im over there. Its all good though we have fun, laugh, and make jokes

I have been to Canada, but I didn’t feel too out of place there.

I guess the place I most felt like a foreigner was when I was working at a little Mexican restaurant in the little town of 3,000 that I live in with my mom (right outside of a town of about 100,000). I’m an avid reader and follower of the news and have a passion for learning. I also listen to many different types of music and sort of pride myself in branching out from the norm in that area as well as others. I can honestly say that I felt COMPLETELY out of place amongst the small town country folk working at that restaurant. My brain was so numbed by the conversations going on in that place. To make it worse, any time I attempted to have a half intelligent conversation with any of them (including managers, who you would think would be slightly more intelligent), I received blank stares mixed with confusion. It was awful. Is it that they’re just not exposed to the world? I have to think not, because I live in the same area and I make sure to expose myself to the world. So, I guess I don’t feel too bad being judgmental when they have just as much opportunity to expand their knowledge as I do. SO frustrating.

I always feel slightly like a foreigner here in South Texas. I didn’t realize it until I finally met someone else who subscribes to and actually reads the New Yorker. I am also recognized by name whenever I go into Barnes and Nobles by the book people (but not the coffee people). Whenever someone asks about me at my daughter’s school, someone always says, “You know, the one that reads all the time.”

I really don’t read all the time, but I do carry a paperback for when I have to sit and wait somewhere.

The most I ever felt like a foreigner was the time in rural Mexico when we were driving a 1952 Ford pick up and were stopped by a cop, who took my driver’s license and wouldn’t give it back until we gave him $50 in US money.

The second most was one time when I got lost in London and some nice man from Manchester tried to help me out. I couldn’t understand a word he said, so some equally nice Scotsman translated for me.

I lived in Paris for 7+ years. I didn’t go there with the intention of staying, but I met my wife-to-be, was married within 3 months, and just got swept up in the new life.

This was a transformative experience for me on many levels. Negotiating a foreign culture as a tourist, or even a student, is one thing; but when you have to penetrate the vagaries of the system to get a work permit, find a job, lease an apartment, buy furniture, register a birth, and on and on, that’s when you really drink the glass down to the dregs.

There was the language ordeal, of course (I spoke next to no French before going). Finding oneself with the vocabulary of a child again is humiliating in the extreme. This was strong motivation for me to flesh out my French as quickly as possible, but the French are famously unforgiving of misuse of their language, and it took a couple of years before I no longer felt like a laughingstock. Now, I’m extremely conscious of how non-native English speakers here in the States are treated by us native speakers. I know what that’s like.

The real trial by fire was my attempt to get a resident’s visa and work permit. What a dehumanizing ordeal! The process there, like here, is designed to be nearly impossible. Even with my wife’s French citizenship in my favor, I was put through every imaginable bureaucratic hoop, including having my file “lost” 4 times and having to recommence the process. I have no idea how many days I spent in this line and that line to get this document and that document. Again, I’m now super-sensitive to the plight of anyone having to navigate the nightmare of our own immigration system.

Finally allowed to work, and comfortable with the language, it was pretty easy for me to assimilate into the working world. I worked in various pastry kitchens, staffed mostly with young French guys and a few Arab and African “grunt” workers. It never ceased to amaze me how the French guys would rail against “the immigrants” to me, of all people.

I wouldn’t trade that education for anything. I think everyone should be so lucky as to live away from the comfort and reassurance of the familiar at some point in their lives.

I have never been out of the US but have been a stranger (not to say strange) many times.

Moy childhood was spent in a largely Catholic community in Northern California. when I was 12 we moved to the South where everything was entirely different. Manners, customs, language, clothing, standards. People kept telling me I talked like a Yankee. One of my new friends got married at the age of 13, my best friend got married at 15 (neither was pregnant) One of the biggest thing for girls was joining Rainbow Girls in a first formal gown. My mother had to tell me that I couldn’t because the Masons did not accept Catholics. I almost had a heart attack when a friend threw something at the black maid because she didn’t serve us fast enough. That was my first experience with diversity

Most recently I attended a conference on teaching African American students. At first I was surprised that the 3 teachers attending from my school were the only non-African American teachers. Over the 3 day period I was very surprised to have my opinions dismissed, my experience ignored and generally marginalized by a “how could you possibly understand” attitude. It was an enlightening experience.

I think it’s a great experience to be a foreigner at least once. I spent some time in Germany in high school, with just a basic high school grasp of the language I was dropped into a “family” and school and a new way of life. I have never really viewed my interactions with people, the way I speak to and listen to others in the same way again. I feel like when one is forced by language barrier to actually shut up and listen for once it is an experience that is particularly rewarding. Being a foreigner is an experience that changed me in great ways.

When I had to pay a little old lady, who set up a table in front of the door to the public men’s room, 4 pesos to go in, I certainly felt like a foreigner. And a tourist. I did get 6 squares of tp, though.

I have never been a foreigner but I have always admired their music.

Been a foreigner all my life, so I have never felt any other way. The hard bit is not being a foreigner in a foreign land. You learn to accept that and after a while you simply adjust. The problem is when you don’t have a “home” to go back to. I’d be just as foreign in Adelaide (where I’ve spent only about a month of my life) as I’d be in Poland (where I’ve spent 6).

Yep, a bunch of times, that made me a better person in the long run :D

What places, flameboi, were you foreign to, and how did that experience make you a better person?

I visited Jamaica in 2002. We stayed at a real hole-in-the-wall kind of place, not a resort. (We wanted to experience Jamaica, not rich white people.) The little two-story vacation hut had no window glass, no hot water or electricity, and mosquito netting around the bed. The kitchen was do-it-yourself, and you bought vegetables on a half-hour walk to the next hamlet over where the old woman came by every day with her donkey. On the donkey’s back were baskets of fresh (delicious!!) produce.

We were surrounded by, of course, Jamaicans. They speak English there, but it’s British English, and the combination of the unfamiliar dialect, a heavy BBC-influenced British accent coupled with the Jamaican “hey mon” accent, and the howdoyoutalksofast?! conversation left me almost totally uncomprehending. Luckily, they’re really friendly and were mostly OK with repeating stuff really s l o w l y for the foreign chick. (It wasn’t always bad to be foreign there. It’s true what they say about fat being perceived as healthy, wealthy, and desireable in a woman!)

There are people whose sole source of income is investing in a 6-pack of Red Stripe, breaking it apart, and selling the bottles individually to passers-by. I went to buy some, but I only had the large bills from the airport money exchange. I handed the guy a bill that was worth about US$10 and he actually had to go to a couple different nearby stalls to get change. I was clearly stupid and far too wealthy and I was mortified. I knew there were people in the world that were even poorer than poor folks in the U.S., but I didn’t realize just how rich I was in comparison.

Also. When the other woman in my travelling party got her period, she asked the wife of the hut owner what the local women did at that time of the month. The lady pointed to the big cotton (bush? tree?) in the yard and said, ‘You go to tha cotton-tree, mon!’ The look on my friend’s face was priceless!

So yea. Good to get out and be the stranger. You learn much more than you think you will!

I love this question! Try being Scottish anywhere, I get treated like an alien in many places, but usually in the nicest possible manner, because remember ” Were all Jock Thomsons bairns ”

@mij I used at an office for a company with a global presence, and we had a sister office in Reading, England. Once a group from the Reading office came over, including a Scottish developer with a strong brogue. In our office we had a guy from, I think it was Sharon, SC, but way out in the sticks and you could cut his Southern accent with a knife.

The office joke was that you couldn’t have the two of them in the same room without a translator. We could communicate with either of them, but neither once could understand the other.

I’ve never been a foreigner but I have been a .38 special.

i was also a night ranger for a time…

@Blondesjon – Have you been to Asia, Europe, Boston, and Chicago?

@laureth….Yes I’ve also been in and around the lake.

I’ve been to Asia and Europe a few times, but never Boston or Chicago.
Just got home from two wonderful weeks in West Java, Indonesia.
Visiting my daughter in laws family in the village of Cimaja, a great surfing location.
Near the main town of Pelabuhan Ratu.

When I travel for fun, being a foreigner isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Part of the cultural experience of the trip, to examine the similarities and differences.

But trying to negotiate paperwork in a foreign country makes me feel really helpless.
Not only is there a language barrier. But their system may be entirely different
than what you’re used to. Incredibly frustrating and humbling.

On top of that, I was walking around with this gnarly black eye.
This only made me stick out even more.

Rough trip.

I just remembered my first job at Taco bell some 30 plus years ago. They told me to turn off the beans and I was so intimidated by that big stove that I didn’t think the dials would be in front like on any other residential gas stove! I was looking for some on/off valve on the preasure cooker! I felt like a foreigner then!

i’m a foreigner every day in 5th hour, as i am the only moron who doesn’t understand a thing about chemistry.

@tiffyandthewall kiddo, you are one of the silent majority (reference Nixon era), We are all around you but have been shamed into silence. The only way I passed Chem was by getting as a lab partner a science geek who was afraid of chemicals. I carried out the experiments and she wrote them up beautifully. By scoring D’s on the tests, my final grade was a C. Just remember the most use you will find for Chem knowledge may be answers in crossword puzzles.

@galileogirl thank you for the reassurance. (:
i really do (well, did) try to learn chemistry, though i’m not a fan of science whatsoever, just because i think it’s do me good to know something about science. but now i’m just really concerned about my F that has only been getting lower and lower. hopefully i’ll at least be able to get and maintain a D (C feels like wishful thinking at this point), and just keep the grades in my other classes up.

@tiffyandthewall: just curious. I don’t know if you can answer this, but what do you think chemistry is so hard for you?

@daloon i’m not really sure, i wish i knew. i just cannot grasp any of the concepts for some reason. if the right teacher is explaining it to me, i can usually get interested in it, but i can never really get it. maybe it’s science in general – i’m much better at english and social studies – but i have a good grade in/love psychology, so i’m not sure. ):