{"id":1736,"date":"2008-09-28T20:04:40","date_gmt":"2008-09-29T01:04:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/?p=1736"},"modified":"2021-09-28T11:49:47","modified_gmt":"2021-09-28T16:49:47","slug":"cross-cultural-friendships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/1736","title":{"rendered":"Cross-Cultural Friendships…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reader Chris left a comment to This Post<\/a> the other day, about his own experiences making friends of German visitors.\u00a0 I can relate.\u00a0 The landscape is full of landmines…but its rewarding.<\/p>\n

I made friends, briefly, with a British kid some years back.\u00a0 We were both working in a custom plastic shop, and he knew a family in the apartment complex I lived in, so we had some points of contact between us.\u00a0 The kid, Paul, who was so goddamned cute, first told me the joke about how England and America were two nations separated by a common language.\u00a0 And it’s true.\u00a0 You really couldn’t assume that even words we both shared in our language meant the same things.\u00a0 Once, when he cut himself at the shop, and asked for a ‘patch’, all the good old boys at the shop laughed their butts off.\u00a0 ‘Patch’ is the word they use for what we referred to as a ‘bandage’ over on this side of the Big Pond.\u00a0 And ‘torch’ for ‘flashlight’.\u00a0 And so on.\u00a0 But beyond the meaning of words, there were dozens of little cultural differences all the good old boys could not have cared less about, when they weren’t laughing at them, but which I tried hard to pay attention to, because he was cute, and because he was decent and good-hearted, and I really wanted to be his friend.<\/p>\n

You have to work at it.\u00a0 But it’s worthwhile.\u00a0 There are landmines and you have to be careful.\u00a0 Even if you speak the same language.\u00a0 Especially if.\u00a0 Where the language barrier exists you kind of know you they’re there.\u00a0 But even where you’re both speaking the same tongue you have to take care to reach across the fence.\u00a0 The key is trust.\u00a0 You have to hold it like a precious thing, and always take the extra step to keep it.\u00a0 Paul and I lost touch after he went back to England.\u00a0 But I hope he still thinks of me from time to time.\u00a0 He opened my eyes a tad to some of the British stereotypes I grew up with.\u00a0 Swear to God I can’t even watch Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins anymore since I knew Paul.\u00a0 It’s so…embarrassing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I so very much want to be the friend to my crush from my high school days that I was too shy to be back then.\u00a0 I think its coming along.\u00a0 I hope it is.\u00a0 Maybe I’ll get a chance to see him later next month.\u00a0 Maybe not.\u00a0 But I’ll keep trying.\u00a0 He means a lot to me.\u00a0 So I try to learn this and that of his culture and background.\u00a0 It’s worthwhile, even if we remain mostly apart.\u00a0 It’s opened my eyes to a bit more of the world, and that’s always a good thing.<\/p>\n

I ordered some books on German history and culture from Amazon.\u00a0 I’m going to read through them when they come.\u00a0 Even if it doesn’t bring us closer together, it’s having a broadening effect on me.\u00a0 This poor angry world could use more of that in all of us.\u00a0 If I could change one thing about the American educational system it would be this: every kid would have to spend a year abroad…somewhere…before graduating.\u00a0 My countrymen are a bit too insular.\u00a0 We need to see more of the world first hand while we’re still young.\u00a0 Maybe we’d be better neighbors if we did.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Actually…I tried mayonnaise on my fries just the other day.\u00a0 They were…delicious.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reader Chris left a comment to This Post the other day, about his own experiences making friends of German visitors.\u00a0 I can relate.\u00a0 The landscape is full of landmines…but its rewarding. I made friends, briefly, with a British kid some years back.\u00a0 We were both working in a custom plastic shop, and he knew a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[51],"class_list":["post-1736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-friends"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1736\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}