Cultural Observations

Culture; it’s different everywhere you go: from city to city and even from household to household.  During my first time off of the continent of North America, I noticed so many cultural differences that I lost count of them.  That alone made my experience awesome, because I had really learned to take things for granted, in fact many of the little things.  One cultural aspect of America that I missed during my journey was having a free public bathroom available in every eating establishment.  It felt very weird having to pay to use many of the bathrooms in England and France, because we just don’t do that any longer in this great country.  During my time overseas, I really thought that the language barrier—especially in France—was going to be a down right struggle, but pleasantly to my surprise it was not.  Even the reputation of the French being rude to and hating Americans didn’t hold true during my visit.

                A huge cultural difference that was absolutely impossible to not notice was that in every city we went to, the population tended to use public transportation, and walk, instead of the typical, American habit of driving.  In both Paris and London it seemed like it would be just too much of a challenge to own a car, especially when you can just take the Tube or the Metro.  I also noticed that if there were cars on the streets, seldom were there any pick-up trucks.  Honestly, I thought it was really cool to see that people in Paris and London didn’t depend on cars like we do in the Motor City, where we simply cannot live without our metal stallions.  From what I had seen, it would have been pointless to drive a car from outside the city of London into the city anyway considering that almost every day it would cost around fifteen euro for a congestion fee—which I imagine is there to help the city of London be green.

                While in Paris and France, in general I noticed a bad case of racial profiling against a group called the Romani—or Gypsies.  The Romani have an extremely bad reputation for being pickpocketers and going into France I thought that I would not witness any pickpocketers trying to fool tourists and citizens into letting their guard down, but, to my surprise I witnessed close to twenty of these Romani pickpockets in Paris.  It is very sad to see that the typical Parisian cultural view of the Romani is so negative.  Then come to think of it, their cultural view of the Romani is quite similar to the white American’s commonly negative view of African Americans in the 1960’s and earlier.  When I witnessed the police of Paris rounding up the Romani to be questioned, I noticed that their police treated the Romani very similarly to our racist society before the civil rights movement.  I witnessed first-hand what would have been considered police brutality in America and would have surely made the news.  A policeman on a bicycle targeted a Romani girl around the age of a high school junior, and as he continued riding he grabbed her by her ponytail forcing her to keep her speed up to the speed the police man was going on his bicycle literally dragging her along; and you know what, the people around cheered and clapped for the policeman.  That was a chilling cultural similarity to the racial prejudice against African Americans in the United States—especially those events surrounding the civil rights movement.