For my first cultural activity and reflection I went with Alice and Jeiun to Global Coffee Hour in the Center for Global Engagement. Here we ate snacks, drank coffee, and talked about many cultural differences and similarities we had never uncovered about each of our respective cultures. I loved learning more about them, because I can honestly say that besides my experience with students from Korea, China, and Japan in my high school (we were a boarding school) I haven’t had extensive conversations with youth or people my age from this part of the world. For this reason I was very excited.
I observed that they were slightly less outgoing than I was, and a little more quiet, but I think I am just generally a talkative person when I feel comfortable. After awhile however, when more students started coming to our table and asking questions, everyone started opening up more, especially Alice. I learned that many college life activities can be translated cross cultures, and I wasn’t really sure why I hadn’t thought of the similarities, or at least explored them, before. For example, we talked about what they do for fun in university, and vice versa. When they are of age, they love to drink with their friends and go to Karaoke bars. I feel like the amount of Karaoke bars (at least in Korea) on each street corner could be equivalent to our sports bars here, that are seen everywhere you turn. A similarity can be seen in coffee shops. I know that I tend to go to coffee shops all the time with friends and Alice and Jieun said that they do this constantly in Korea. I would love to go to a Korean coffee shop and check out the scene there.
We also began to discuss politics and voting in each of our countries. I explained to them how I wasn’t very political but I needed to become more informed to make a good decision come November. Alice and Jieun, being from Korea, said you can vote when you turn 20 and that there are political parties just like in the US. Titan however, who was sitting next to us, commented that in China you cannot vote, ever. This shocked me. I had always known about China’s communist style government having learned about it in school, but I think that being faced with the truth right in front of me was a different form of learning. He couldn’t speak about candidates in his country, things he wanted to change, or the people that would provide the change. He said he would obviously like to see this policy change, but there is honestly nothing that he can do about it. The people in power stay in power, and step in when need be. I noticed how different this was from America and what I was brought up to believe, and yet, Titan and I seem to be the same fun loving, sweet people going through life in University. I can’t imagine a university experience especially this year, without influence from politics and campaigns.
From my own cultural perspective, I guess I didn’t expect to make a lot of connections, just because I knew we were from such different parts of the world. But I was most definitely surprised because we had so many cross-cultural connections. My partner’s perceptions were probably the same as mine about the cultural activity we were doing. It was something neutral and simple, eating and drinking coffee, that there aren’t many other perceptions to be made. I am excited to hear about when I do a second cultural activity and take them to some place very stereotypically America, to see what they think about being exposed to a true cultural aspect of America, like a hamburger restaurant or sports bar to watch a game.
In terms of myself, I learned that I should not be so quick to assume that we don’t have anything in common. I know that across cultures there are many similarities but I didn’t think that the youth across cultures could be so similar and do the same things. Go drink with your friends, go to coffee bars, baseball games, play the same games among your friends, listen to the same indie bands: those are some of the similarities I found between my life and theirs. This experience was pretty much what I expected but I was the most surprised to find out about China’s control to limit Facebook, Youtube, Google, and Twitter. These websites are not allowed in China, and there are other websites available that mirror their functions.
Everything that I learned at Global Coffee Hour relates to what we are discussing in class completely. The Coffee Hour was solely about bridging connections and communicating cross-culturally to form friendships, and I think that is exactly what our class is doing, and on an academic level. There should be more classes that discuss cross-cultural issues in this manner. We talk about media, youth, and academics a lot in class and we did the same while I was talking with Alice, Jieun and Titan at Global Coffee Hour.
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