Cross Cultural Experience

Introduction

We are living in global era. Active communications, collaboration between individual, businesses and high connectivity to world have been achieved today. With advent of globalization, we are also exposed to various different cultures today; we can easily experience impact of cultural differences from people from different cultural background in our daily life. I will describe two anecdotes which gave me experience of impact of cultural differences while I was studying in Bristol, England and assess it objectively from few perspectives.

I have made charity work in Camp-hill community for mostly one year while I was a college student. People who were working in this community were mostly from Europe such as England, Germany, Netherland and Swiss. I was the only one who was from Korea and there was nobody from Asia. At the beginning, I was unfamiliar to them, their culture and the ways of thinking. However, we became intimate naturally through working together. I had great time with them and party sometimes. I kept trying to understand their culture and get close to them. As a result of spending much time with them, I got to know their culture and the ways of thinking better and I was getting used to it gradually and naturally. During the 2009 summer vacation, I traveled to Amsterdam with my Dutch friends and visited my aunt who lives in Almere. I had so much fun with them. One day, when we traveled to Amsterdam, we went to coffee shop together after the Van Gogh museum. There were many people in the coffee shop when and some of them looked like college students or tourists. There were also old men in the shop. We ordered tea and coffee and some of us also ordered weed. I didn’t know what weed is and I ask them, they said weed is kind of marijuana. They rolled the cigarette with weed then smoked with coffee. I was immensely shocked by the sight. They were smocking weed without a qualm in the public coffee shop. They recognized my astonished face and told me that I do not have to worry because buying a fixed quantity of weed and smoking weed in given places are legal in Amsterdam. Even if police officer is in front of us, it is okay in this coffee shop, they said. I got a shock once again. Being honest, I treated some of my friends as something like criminals in my head and regret to make faulty friends at that time. I felt disappointed and frustrated for them and bad perceptions of those friends were made in my head very quickly. Because the sale or smoking marijuana are strictly prohibited by law in Korea, moreover it is rare to get marijuana. If you are arrested by the police officer for smoking weed in Korea, it is very serious level of crime. You can be sentenced to life imprisonment and ruin both yourself and your family. Actually, some of celebrities were arrested by police for smoking marijuana in Korea. They had to stop their all of activities and serve five years