An online publication for creative work from diverse students at South Puget Sound Community College

May 29th – Double Feature: English Language Learners Student Narratives

Cultural Differences Between my Homeland and the USA

                                             

          It has been only one month and a half since I came to the USA. In this short time, I discovered that there is a huge difference of cultures between my homeland and the USA. And it feels like I’m totally in a new world. Though there are so many cultural differences between my country and the USA, I will describe three cultural differences. Three cultural differences between my homeland and the United States are foods, dress, and addressing by name.

     The first cultural difference is food. There is a huge difference of foods between my country and the USA. In my country, the staple foods are rice and fish. Most of the people in our country eat rice, fish, and vegetables for lunch and dinner. And for breakfast, most of them eat rice, lentils, and some vegetables like potato or they eat they eat roti and vegetables. But I have noticed that most of the Americans eat cereal and milk in breakfast. And one more thing is Americans eat a lot of pizza in most cases. Then Bangladeshi people use a lot of traditional spices in foods and they usually love spicy foods. But most of the Americans don’t like spicy foods. They usually use a very little spices in foods. Hilsa fish is the most popular in my country and most of the Bangladeshis love Hilsa fish. But in the USA. I think salmon is very popular.

     The next major cultural difference is dress. In my country, people usually wear traditional clothes in most of the time. In traditional festivals, people wear traditional clothes mostly. Women wear Saree or Salwaar Kamiz and men wear Punjabi in festivals. But nowadays people wear western clothes a lot in their day to day life. In my country, students have to maintain a certain dress code in schools and it’s mandatory for all the schools. On the other hand, mostly there is no dress code in America schools. But in the universities of my country, students don’t have to maintain any dress code like the USA.

    Last but not the least is the addressing by name. In my country, the students have to call their teacher as “Sir” or “Ma’am”. And it’s applicable for schools, colleges, and universities. But in the USA, mostly students call their teacher by their first name. So, it’s a little bit surprising matter for me. Also, in my country, we are not supposed to call by someone’s name who is older than us. We can call them as “Uncle” or “Aunt” or maybe something in our mother tongue. On the contrary, most of the people can call someone by their first name in United States.

     In conclusion, there so many differences of the cultural between Bangladesh and the USA. Actually, United States is very new to me. There are so many things about this country that are still unknown to me. Every day, in fact, every moment I discover so thing new here. Still I’m not yet used to this culture. But I hope I’ll be very soon.

Monisha Bhadara

Monisha Bhadara is an 18-year-old girl from Bangladesh. She has come to the USA to do her higher studies here. She wants to be an engineer and she loves to play and sing music.