Last Year's Interview

This most sophisticated chic friend of mine has decided to have a blog on custures or multicultures, she just sent me an email on it:

" I would like very much to involve you in a project I am working on with the University of Lugano and University of Geneva called "Culture-Multicultures". The final aim of this project (supervised by Professors and the Dean of the Communication Department) is to publish a blog, and further on a book with interviews, essays and visuals on this theme."

This is what I got back to her:

1. What do you think are the best and worst features of your own culture?

The best features of the Romanian culture are adaptability, spirituality and the fact that you can laugh about yourself; warm and generous people.

The worst features are the laissez-faire, go-with-the-flow, wanting to be something you’re not, not doing things because the one next you also doesn’t do it, never recycle.

But these are all stereotypes and I don’t believe in them anyhow.

2. Which were the biggest communication challenges experienced in another culture?

Personally I didn’t experience any big challenge. I think Romanians are either speaking the language of a country or using common sense to find their way around.

I would say I did face a small communication challenge: having to be too polite with friends. In other cultures being some one’s friend means treating them with great respect and consideration and constantly asking about their opinions, feelings etc. – especially for Dutch, I think. For Romanians, friends are more like my-other-me and you can grab them, hug them, impose on them, argue with them and reason with them. They will do the same with you.

3. Which were the cultural stereotypes you had to face in another culture that you disagreed with? (based on your experience)

- “Go-Dutch”, Dutch are all open-minded, “a nation of rosy-cheeked farmers who live in windmills, wear clogs, have a garden full of tulips and sit on piles of yellow cheese”

- Germans wear Lederhosen, drink beer and eat sausage

- Americans are fat

- Arabian men wear beards, are womanizers and have subservient and repressed women who wear burka

- French are chaotic, do not like to work – prefer to strike, don’t speak English, they are rude to tourists and snobs

- Swiss sit in the mountains, ‘yodel’ and milk their cows, except people in Zurich who are bankers hoarding gold and helping out corrupt politicians and gangsters, they are obsessed with cleanliness and punctuality

- Italians are passionate, pizza/pasta freaks, smooth talking, fashion-addicted Casanovas, they are mafia or gang members.

And the list can go on.. there may be some truth in stereotyping to start with, but the world keeps on evolving. I don’t believe in stereotypes. I don’t believe in any stereotype at all. People are so different and so complex that you just cannot categorize and label a nation as such.

4. Which barriers of inter-cultural communication did you need to break and how did you do it?

Time has a strange volatility from one culture to the other. When Dutch or Swiss say 12:30, you need to be there at 12:30. When Romanians say 12:30, you’re expected there after 12:30, maybe by 12:45. The Latinos tend to come later than expected. One of my best friends is from Congo; she’d come around 13:30 – 14:00. So what I’ve learned to do is “translate” my needs into my friends’ perception of time. If I want all my friends to be there at 12:30, I say to the Dutch person 12:30. I say to the Romanian and Italian 12:15 and to the Congolese 11:30 and so on.

5. What did you learn from other people cultural configuration and integrated in your own?

I’ve learned to see on daily basis so many different people and to enjoy diversity. Amsterdam is the city with the most diversity in the world, gathering more nations than New York in a small place. Being tolerant, genuinely interested in the other and appreciating other people’s cultures is what I’m enjoying to integrate in my own world.