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Culture clashes are impossible to avoid, particularly when you are an American.
- A year ago I left New York to
travel around the world as Business Insider's international correspondent. Over that time I visited over 20 countries. - I spent the last three months of the trip in Africa, visiting Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania.
- While each country had its own distinct culture and customs, I experienced many culture clashes while visiting Africa.
- Two of the biggest culture clashes I experienced were getting accustomed to not using my left hand to eat in Nigeria and underestimating the extent to which traffic impacts the pace of life in Lagos and Cairo.
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Culture clashes are impossible to avoid, particularly when you are an American.
For better or worse (but most likely worse), we have a tendency to think of our way of doing things as the "right" way. When you start traveling, you realize that the American, or Western, way of doing things is just as strange to people from other cultures as theirs may seem to us.
While you are likely to have some cultural mix-ups as an American visiting European countries, it's nothing compared to Africa, where things seem to work completely differently than they do in the US.
Of course, Africa is not a monolith. The continent is larger than North America and is comprised of over 3,000 ethnic groups speaking over 1,500 languages residing in 54 countries. Regions and countries are sometimes so different that they are as different from each other as America is from them.
For example, many North African countries use the Arabic word "inshallah" constantly, whereas the word is unheard of in many sub-Saharan countries. A common ingredient in food in southern Nigeria is locust beans, which isn't used in the north of the country or most other countries' cuisines.
I spent the last three months of my travels in Africa, specifically in Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania. During that time, I experienced countless culture clashes, culture shocks, miscommunications, and misunderstandings.
Here are just a few.