Some European Culture Shockers

Gerard van den Akker

Europe is quite diverse, and even though I am a European, I did get some culture shocks by travelling to other European countries, especially outside of western Europe. Most answers go into details about visits to western European countries, but there is more to the continent than that. There is a huge difference between countries in Europe, and travelling across half the continent can shock even an European. The distance Amsterdam (the Netherlands) to Tirane (Albania) by car is about the same as San Fransisco to New Orleans (USA), or New Delhi to Madras (India), or Bejing to Hongkong (China), or Saint Petersburg to Krasnodar (Russia). I hope my perspective might prove useful.

First off, I am from the Netherlands, a very densly populated western European country where almost everyone speaks English as a second language and has at least some proficiency in German and/or French. As a kid my parents took me to most other western European countries on holidays (Belgium, France, Austria, Denmark, Italy, Luxemburg, Switzerland), so there aren't many shockers there. Except the Belgium roads: for a rich, western European country their roads are so bad, that it keeps me wondering every time. Even in northern Albania the highway (I only spotted one over there) was much better. But maybe I'm a bit spoiled with the Dutch roads: with all the travelling I've done, especially during my last Eurotour, the Dutch roads were the best I've encountered (and perhaps I'm biassed because I'm Dutch, but I found them even better than the German ones).

Last summer I travelled to Eastern Europe, the Balkan and Scandinavia, and there are a few shockers (in random order):

• In the Balkan you can hardly use English: you'd be better of with German. Even some kids in Kosovo spoke better German than I did (which isn't that hard though).
• In former Yugoslavia, and especially Bosnia, you can still see quite a bit of war damage from the war of two decades ago. My country hasn't seen any war on home soil since the Second World War, so actually being confronted with war damage was a bit confronting.
• In Greece, I picked up a hitchhiking American couple: they had missed the only bus that was going that day (or maybe it didn't ride at all). This was a bit of a shocker. We are dissatisfied if a bus only goes once an hour in the Netherlands, let alone if it only rides once a day (maybe).
• When some Russian friends visited me, they remarked how clean Amsterdam was. I couldn't see it back then, I thought it was quite dirty. But when I was in Macedonia, I saw to my shock and dismay how people tended to garbage: they threw it just everywhere, with no regard to anyone or anything (screw the environment). I guess my Russian friends were right: Amsterdam isn't that bad after all ...
• Also in Macedonia, I stayed one night at a camping where there were no toilets: just holes in the ground, above which you had to kneel. That was alien by itself to me, having spend all my life using regular toilets, but the biggest shocker by that was the fact that there was no siphon: you could smell the pile of shit from quite a distance.
• In the entire Balkan there seems to be a kind of disregard to traffic rules (Italians seem like nice law-abiding road users compared for example to Bulgarians), but one big shocker I got in Albania. I quickly discovered that if a sign says for example '80', you should add 20-50 km/h to get the average speed you are expected to drive. So I was driving around 100ish on a road, when I was passed by by a teenager on a scooter: he was riding in just his t-shirt and shorts, barefooted, without helmet, and riding at least 140ish.
• Another shocker from Albania: the amount of horse + cart-use. For me as a western European that felt really different.
• In the Netherlands you can hardly walk for a few kilometers without stumbling accross some sort of house, farm or whatever. When I was at the highway through northern Albania towards Kosovo, I couldn't see anyone. No house, no sign of civilization - except for the highway: I even spotted only two or three other cars during the 155 km long ride. Ok, except for some wooden stairs at some points at the middle of the highway. But for the rest, it was definitely the most lonely place I had encountered in Europe.
• When I was in Romania, an elderly women insisted that I had breakfast with her when I was making photo's in her street; in Serbia, when I couldn't pay for the museum entrance because I hadn't been able to get money yet, I had to enter for free (they even wouldn't accept any donation in euro's); in Macedonia an elderly man just started walking with me and wanted to show me around the city; in Germany, when my car broke down, there was help from all sides, and the garage owner got it fixed within no-time. Maybe it's the difference between the country-side and urban life, but the general friendliness towards total random strangers I encounterd all over Europe did surprise me.
• In Slovakia, when I visited the castle Bojnicky Zamok, I saw a carousel where small live horses were being used to seat small children: they had to walk round and round in the same small circle, their noses against the other horses asses, for the entire time. Seeing that was a bit of a shocker.
• When I visited Prague in 1999 with highschool, the hotel room I stayed in had a bullet hole, allowing me to look into the other room (unfortunately no girls there). I later also held a large chunk of the wall in my hands, because it was falling apart. Those two facts were a bit of a shocker back then.
• When my car broke down on a Saturday in Norway, I learned that all garages were closed on both Saturdays and Sundays, so I would have to wait until Monday. That fact did shock me a bit.
• A frozen supermarket pizza costing around ten euro's in Norway: I had expected Norway to be expensive, but this was really a shocker.
• For someone growing up in the Schengen area, crossing borders with actual border guards is something exciting. I did expect that of course, and I even got used to being searched (or well, at least my car: I learned about so many places to hide stuff by just looking at where the guards were looking!). But I was a bit shocked that at the Kosovo-Macedonian border I had to actually bribe someone in order to enter Macedonia. I was also really surprised that when I crossed the German-Danish border (both Schengencountries), I was put aside the road by the Danish border guards: they wanted to search my car for drugs (which they of course didn't find: I don't do drugs).

And some shockers about western Europe:

• When I was 19, I visited England and was a bit shocked by how strong they make their tea. When I drank without milk and sugar, they called that 'black tea', and not without reason: the tea was more black than coffee!
• When I returned from my South Africa trip, I really had to get used to riding at the right side of the road again. I found it easier to getting used to riding at the left side of the road than to getting back to riding at the right side of the road. Thát was a shocker!