Intercultural Encounter

My freshman year in college I took Italian for two semesters. My teacher was Alessandra. She had just finished up University in Rome, and this was her first time in the U.S. During the course of having Alessandra for two semesters, we (as a class) taught her much about American culture. She had some trouble adjusting to American culture. I remember one such encounter we had. Class was at 9 a.m. five days a week so I would usually bring string cheese to eat. One day Alessandra asked me what I was eating, so I told her it was string cheese. She was mostly horrified. She couldn't understand that it was cheese in a chunk that you pulled into strings and ate. Then the class got into a debate over how we ate string cheese--did we break it off into pieces or do the more traditional pulling of strips? Alessandra was even more amazed that there were multiple ways to eat string cheese.

I always felt very comfortable communicating with Alessandra. She conducted the class entirely in Italian, which was more comfortable for her, but outside of class or when we had personal discussions in class, we used English. She would never laugh at us if we misused a word or got two similar words confused. We always extended that same consideration to her. By the time the particular event that I described had occurred, we were well into the second semester, so I had known Alessandra for months. Our class was smaller second semester and she was much more comfortable with all of us, and we were with her.

The experience helped me to look at things that I felt were just a part of my every-day life through another person's eyes. I ate string cheese a lot during that time. I didn't really think of it as something strange. All my friends ate string cheese. It wasn't a weird thing to eat, in my personal opinion. But seeing Alessandra's take on the string cheese made me re-evaluate that opinion. To her, string cheese was a hunk of processed cheese. In her culture, she was used to eating fresh cheese. The sight of processed cheese in a log-like chunk would be disgusting. The experience taught me to look at my experiences and my actions more objectively, through another person's eyes.

Although we did sometimes face obstacles in our communication, it was never awkward or uncomfortable. Alessandra from day one emphasized non-verbal communication, such as hand gestures. Even if she was speaking in Italian and I didn't know everything she was saying, if I could pick out three words, correctly place her tone and identify her hand gestures, I could pretty much guess at what she was saying. She did the same with us. That was the most important thing I took from communicating with Alessandra: even if you can't translate exactly what someone is saying, if you can pick up a few words and context clues, you're good to go.