" No touch with horses " would honestly be a self-aggrandising one for me too .
If you grew up in a rural town and later moved to the city, there’s bound to have been some level of culture shock. The different things people notice about city life have always been interesting to me, so I decided to ask people in our very ownBuzzFeed Communityto share the biggest difference or culture shock they experienced upon moving to the big city. Here are some of their best answers:
1.“The anonymity. I love how no one knows me in the city. In my hometown, you couldn’t go anywhere without running into someone you know and gossiping about it.”
2.“I’m 26 and everyone my age already has kids where I grew up; and most people have multiples.”
3.“I’m German, so my experience might be different from that in the US. I come from a medium-small town in the hills and live now in a big city with over 1 million inhabitants.”
4.“The political change really struck me. In my small town I was always met with opposite political opinions and it was really isolating growing up that way. Now that I’m in a much larger city with a university, you find such diversity in people’s opinions, and it’s not uncommon to find people who feel similarly to me.”
5.“I can go to the store and never see anyone I know. Growing up you always had to look good outside of the house. If I went to Walmart wearing pajama pants when mom was working on Saturday morning, she’d get a call from someone who saw me.”
6.“In the city, school wasn’t closed for the first day of hunting season. Also, the only people who drive pickups did so for work, not as a personal vehicle.”
7.“Having to pay for water. I grew up with well water, which tasted amazing and we didn’t have to pay for (aside from the electricity to pump it out of course).”
8.“How everyone in the country has a gun and knows how to use it and it’s considered normal, but if you own a gun in the city you’re considered questionable or a criminal.”
9.“The biggest culture shock was the food. In a rural area, you might have a pizza shop, some fast food, maybe a Mexican or Chinese place, and some mom-and-pop shops.”
10.“The lack of churches or religion. I had family up north, so I thought it would maybe be kinda like the South where it’s populated with churches; I just expected it to be more diverse religions rather than just Christianity. I was surprised to see only like two main big churches…at least they were very beautiful.”
11.“Being in a city and having even the smallest accent is annoying. City people are so bewildered by it and tend to make fun of us to our face through using our accent.”
— reagan_elizzz13
12.“It depends on your definition of rural, I guess, but I deeply, deeply miss nature. And there’s no park or city area or garden that replaces being out in the country and feeling surrounded by ‘natural’ nature, not manicured and planned green spaces.”
13.“The biggest shock is diversity; rural areas are so homogenous in just about every way.”
14.“It’s more like the culture shock wasreturningto the small town on holidays and visits, and there was absolutely NOTHING to do. Could not wait to get back to civilized life! No amount of money would force me to move back!”
15.“I was 16, it was 2006, and my family and I had moved from Julian, CA to Los Angeles. Of course that was a big change, but the one thing I particularly noticed was that nobody there ever said anything like ‘hello’ or ‘good morning’ or even a small comment on the weather. They would just walk down the street, waiting for the day to end.”
16.“No contact with horses!”
17.“How assertive and short people in the city were when speaking. Not a lot of pleasantries and easing into conversation, just right to the point with confidence. My parents and I were taken off guard, thinking people didn’t like us or that they were mean. It took a while to realize it’s just cultural in Manhattan, not personal.”
18.“I moved from a town of about 50,000 to a city of multiple millions for my first job in my career. Being stuck on a 10-lane freeway, with four of the five lanes stopped and the fifth crawling, at 6:15 a.m., was a shock.”
19.“My biggest cultural shock? There were so many people! And I had the freedom to do what I wanted!”
20.“I grew up in rural Wisconsin in a town of less than 500 people. When I moved to Minneapolis for college one thing that really shocked me was how easy it was to get food!”
21.“The SMOG! It was horrendous. Yes, it was years ago, but, in order to get a job I had to move to the city from a sleepy little beach town. Just driving over the mountains you could see the brown haze sitting over everything. Yuck. Breathing was a definite problem.”
22.“How noisy it is.”
23.“Eye contact. In the town I grew up in, everyone made eye contact with everyone else. It was considered polite to do so, and the people who didn’t were considered ‘iffy’ or unwell. In the big city, it’s just the opposite!”
24.“I grew up in rural Appalachia, but have lived in a few big cities over the years.”
25.And finally: “I grew up in the mountains of Puerto Rico where the stars were painting the sky, the trees rustled against the wind, and nature sang soothing music. It was absolutely beautiful, silent, and a treasure. I now live in the city of Chicago, where it’s loud and I haven’t seen stars in a long time.”
Who knows — your comment could be include in an upcoming BuzzFeed article .
Who knows — your comment could be included in an upcoming BuzzFeed article.
