hey hey hey haz click aquí and then come back maybe.
Done? Okay. I have a few things, but first, a thing I posted on another site, edited to be more on par with Mibba's rules.
My engineering instructor deliberately put us in heterogeneous groups because he was very adamant on pretty much always doing that, and of course that includes different cultural and (often) national backgrounds.
So that's fine. I had to build a circuit with another person in the descent subsystem, Moe. It was fairly easy because we didn’t have to design the circuit or anything (just the code).
Except for the resistors. We just couldn’t agree on what the 10k resistor looked like–the thing about resistors is that they have little ceramic casing with colored bands on it to signify resistance. The bands, as I saw them, were red-black-yellow-gold. I read this off to Moe and hand him the resistor and he gives me this confused look. he kept trying to tell me that it was the wrong one, until I turned the computer around and pointed to the diagram with all the resistor colors on it.
“Oh,” he said. “It’s gold-yellow-black-red.”
We argued for awhile, but then it dawned on me.
My first language is English; Moe’s first language is Arabic. We both were reading the diagrams correctly, but I defaulted to reading left-to-write, and assumed he would too; he defaulted to right-to-left, and assumed that I would.
The point is, I really wonder how many botched cross-cultural interactions/embarrassments were the result of some tiny, silly thing that should be obvious but end up being too obvious. Like, your language tends to assume something that theirs doesn't, and you're always so steeped in it that you forget that it's not the same everywhere.
Also, cross-cultural embarrassments can be funny and benign instead of violent and mean. Like the time I referred to sting rays (rayas venenosas) as "window rays" (rayas ventanas).
Also, I have a college tour tomorrow. I changed schools last-minute (or close), and this school will allow me to major in civil engineering and minor in Spanish. So I get to study in Cuernavaca or Barcelona (probably Cuernavaca, but that's okay because the Spaniard accent is a little weird but pretty to me). But this university has lots of resources. I'm nervous about housing, but they should be okay. It should be okay.
Anyway, if you either want to share embarrassing stories like those above or college info (reassure me that it isn't as scary as I think?), feel free to do so.
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