Before moving here we were warned about this thing called “Culture Shock.” Culture shock has been defined as, “The realization that all of your cultural norms and customs now have no meaning in this new culture.” We were told that everyone has his or her own experience, but you WILL have it. Umm, is culture shock hard, easy, sad, lonely, or all of the above? I think after being here over a month in another culture, I have felt all of these things. As I experience different things daily, the word that comes out of my mouth with a giggle is “shocking!”
Here is one of my “shocking” moments:
After about a month I had heard enough of Alleyah complaining that she had no “pretty” shoes to wear. We took one pair of warm winter boots and one pair of practical walking shoes from America. Her favorite glittery shoes were dirty, smelly and had sparkles missing from the toes of the shoes. So yes, I left them!
I was told I could buy some nice dress shoes in town. So we went after dinner to find Alleyah a pretty pair of shoes. We walked into a nice store that looked like a clothing mall. I asked a woman where the kids’ shoes were by pointing to Alleyah and then her shoes. The lady said the 6th floor. We started walking towards the stairs until she stopped us and pointed to the escalators. “Wow! Fancy,” we thought.
It was about 7:20pm and we started going up. Every floor was hotter than the last. We were taking off our extra layers as we traveled up to the 6th floor. Finally, we reached the top where it was the hottest of them all. Right away Alleyah saw a cute pair of white shoes with sparkly bows on the toes. The lady checked and she had Alleyah’s size. I wanted to see the other shoes just to check that there wasn’t something that Alleyah liked better. We finally decided to get the first pair Alleyah found and we returned back to the spot. The blue shirt lady was nowhere to be found. I had to yell, “Xiao jie,” meaning “lady”. She ran back and put her blue uniform back on. I thought to myself, “Umm, they must be closing.” The lady asked for 80 kuai (about $12). Morgan handed her 100 kuai and she looked kind of irritated at us. Morgan figured she must want exact change, so between the both of us we found 80 kuai and handed it to her. She quickly wrote a receipt and handed the box of shoes to Alleyah, removed her blue uniform top and started running to the escalators.
We quickly noticed that there were no more customers in the store and all of the employees were headed towards the escalator. Morgan and I both said together, “They’re closing.” As we reached the escalators, we noticed they had stopped and turned off. Just as we reached the escalators the lights on the 6th floor turned off. Morgan and I started to chuckle that this was happening and we were not even out the door yet. We reached the 5th floor and about 40 more women started walking down, chatting away as they were getting off work. Then the 5th floor lights turned off. On the 4th floor the same thing happened, 3rd and 2nd as well. The whole time we were getting a kick out of the whole experience. We had no idea how to get out, but knew that the 150-200 workers knew where they were going. It was a shocking experience to be this little white family among all of these women in a dark department store, being rushed like cattle to the only opening left in the building. We followed them into an alley that finally opened into a night market. Thank goodness we had been there before and knew where we were.
As I thought about it later, I did hear an announcement over the loud speaker but I had no idea what it was saying. It must have said, “We are closing in 5 minutes! The lights will be turning off and the escalators will be stopping!” Now I know that the store closes at 7:30pm and they will not wait until every costumer has left to close the doors. There is one word to describe this experience: “shocking”!
