I was eating my meal in the dinning hall and was enjoying it when a student exclaimed, “Wait, you eat fries with a fork? I’ve never seen that before!” and I retorted “Well yes of course I use a fork!”. Subsequently, another student joined the table: “Wow, you are eating fries with a fork! That’s my first time to see somebody eating fries with a fork!”
With the second student telling me the same thing, I started to look around in the dinning hall hoping to find somebody else that was eating fries with a fork! Unfortunately, my search was not successful, everybody else that had fries on their plates were alternating between hands for fries and a fork for the remaining food. It baffled me why they did double the work: they have forks but they still prefer to use both hands and forks.
I was not the only one experiencing that. A Zimbabwean friend of mine was eating Pizza next to me with her fork and knife, and she received the same remarks: “Wow! You are eating a pizza with a fork and knife! You are supposed to use your hands.” She was also surprised at their shock from observing her use a fork for pizza.
Advice to my fellow international students: know the hand foods before coming to the US if you don’t want to look weird while eating!
This being said, I don’t think that there is a style of eating that is better than the other--whether with a fork or hands, it just depends on culture.
Enough talk about the food. Something that took me by surprise just as much if not more were cartoons.
Most orientation discussion groups I participated in always ended up talking about favorite cartoons!
I was very confused, asking myself how adults talk about cartoons in their first encounter. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve watched a lot of cartoons in my childhood and I still enjoy watching some of them; it’s just that the idea of two adults meeting for the first time and deciding to talk about cartoons was very new to me. It would never happen back at home!
After that, I went to my first math class and it got even worse: our professor introduced himself and he talked about his favorite cartoon and superpower. He even invited us to write papers for him with our favorite superhero character on them!
That got me very worried. I started thinking if professors also talk about cartoons, this is probably something very common in American culture, and people loved to talk about it.
I called my friends desperately telling them about how my university life was all about cartoons and how I couldn’t relate.
Fortunately, after we got to know each other, I don’t know what happened to the superpower conversations but I never heard them again. We had many things in common now, that we could both relate to and talk about , from food, to stressful midterms, to nights out, to being broke without parents around, and the list goes on...
Adjusting to a new environment can take time, but once you do, you no longer feel like you are in a foreign country despite all the differences.
