Culture shock in Phoenix, Arizona


If you move to Phoenix from somewhere else, you will experience something that can be called "culture shock". That is, the surprise of finding out that some behavior that was perfectly acceptable where you used to be, simply isn't done there.

I grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and moved to Phoenix when I was nineteen and don't recall much culture shock. Of course, there may have been, and I was probably just too young and naive to notice, but to me Phoenix felt a lot like Minneapolis. Well, the weather is different, but the people are mostly the same - midwesterners. Yes, it's true, there are a lot of people from Minnesota, and Iowa, in Phoenix. And they bring a lot of their culture.

But my years in California made me experience culture shock when I moved back to Phoenix. No, it wasn't as extreme as a friend of mine who was from New Jersey and didn't understand that you really shouldn't honk your horn a lot in Phoenix. According to him, back where he was from they did that all of the time. I've never been there, so I don't know. But I must have picked up a lot of California culture. I still thought of myself as a kid from Minneapolis, but I remember that my girlfriend in Phoenix always bought me the cologne "California". I didn't carry a surfboard around, or eat Sushi, but I guess a lot of the culture had rubbed off on me.

Of course, if you've never lived anywhere other than where you have always lived, culture is invisible to you. It's just the way things are done. Other people are weird. Why can't they just learn to behave? So I try not to talk about culture, or etiquette, to people who have never seen anything other than their own. It just sounds like nonsense.

By the way, if you didn't grow up where I did, you probably aren't aware how terribly rude it is to accept something on the first offer. If someone offers you, for example, a cup of coffee, and you just say, "sure, that's sounds great! Thanks!" you have committed a terrible breach of etiquette. That type of impolite behavior is enough to have someone never speak to you again. Here is how it works. It's always one-two-three:

"Would you like a cup of coffee?"

 "Oh no, thanks, I'm fine" (that's number 1)

 "Are you sure?"

 "I would hate to put you to so much trouble!" (that's number 2)

 "It's no trouble, I'm thinking of brewing some right now!"

 "Sure! I'd love a cup of coffee!" (number 3)

 Then it starts again:

 "Would you like some sugar?"

Thank you to my patrons on Patreon who help support History Adventuring! If you like these blog posts, and would like to make suggestions for future ones, please become a patron.

Become a Patron!

Comments

  1. GeelyAugust 17, 2015 at 11:14 PM

    G'grief! AZ native here & if I had to go through the above spiel to simply offer a cup of coffee in order to not offend, it's be the last cup of coffee to be offered. Courtesy is in the offering, one might decline yet, offer stands at ready should it be desired.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Learning to drive in the 1970s

Image
Although most of my history adventuring is done in my imagination, traveling into the distant past or future, I was actually there in the 1970s. In fact, that's when I learned how to drive a car. Time-travel with me. I learned to drive on my parents 1973 Ford Torino Station Wagon, which was a monstrous, clumsy boat of a car that had a hood that a friend of mine in high school described as "getting there fifteen minutes before you did". In fact, the nose of the car was so ridiculously long that my dad actually made a bump-out at the end of the garage for it to fit so you could close the garage door. Parking that car in the tiny garage that my parents had was like threading a needle! By the way, we're in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the neighborhood where I grew up, which was built in the late 1920s. But don't imagine that it was some kind of historic neighborhood, it was just old, and very worn. The streets were terribly narrow, and even more so after it snowed (which...
Read more