Originally Posted by
dontpushme
This is nothing personal and if I hit a little close to home, I'd love to hear your thoughts on why I'm justifiably wrong to feel the way I do.
I just moved to the UK in September 2013, and at the moment, I'm finding the culture shock a bit more than what I experienced when I moved to the US. I don't really know whether what I've seen so far are of the English culture, or local culture, or whatever. Forgive me for ranting, but I've been holding this all in for months, and I have been alone in this country with no one who understands where I'm coming from. I'd appreciate your input on a few topics.
1. Sanitation/hygiene (or the severe lack thereof)
Why do you use spit to 'clean' a smudge off skin or objects? No hand-washing, no regard for the millions of bacteria in each person's mouth, no regard for the millions of bacteria on the shoe that was just rubbed with spit.
Why don't people wash hands after using the toilet or before touching food, or after touching raw meat?
Why do people push crumbs or spilled food from the table directly on to the floor, disregarding how sticky the floor will get?
Why do people put shopping bags directly on the ground, then put them directly on the kitchen counters where you also directly prepare sandwiches and salads? I actually ended up in an ambulance and spending the night at the hospital because of the filthy food I've had to eat (couldn't refuse the sandwich without looking rude). I guess violently expelling everything in my GI tract was better than my baby getting deformed or even dying because of the nasty contaminated food. I've never been that sick before, despite coming from a farm (with no running water) in Bicol.
2. Speaking of hygiene, please don't "shift gears"
Why, oh why, do men constantly rearrange their junk??? It's disgusting and rude, and highly offensive. I can't believe the number of people I see doing this in public! Even my sister complained about this. Her office in Manila recently had an English visitor. Everyone treated the man warmly and he went out drinking with my sister's team, composed mainly of men, a few times. They let him pour everyone's shots, and shared their bar snacks with him. To everyone's extreme disgust, the last drinking night before he left, he reached into his pants, rearranged himself, and then sniffed his hand. My sister immediately commandeered the ice bucket so he wouldn't touch the tongs again, someone else took over the bottle of whatever alcohol they were drinking, and there were horrified looks exchanged all around the oblivious visitor. After a minute or so, the one gay person in the group managed to ask the guy to please go to the toilet next time he wanted to rearrange himself as it just wasn't acceptable in the Philippines to do it in public. The man had the gall to joke that sometimes men just needed to rearrange because they were sweaty and itchy.
The next day, at the airport, my sister just waved goodbye instead of shaking his hand.
Unfortunately for all the men in her team, they couldn't escape his handshake. As soon as the man had walked away and was out of earshot, every last one of them doused everything he had touched in rubbing alcohol. That is how revolting we Filipinos find crotch-grabbing. I know that even if the guy had rearranged himself through his clothes, everyone would still have found it disgusting because it was done in public.
When I was in High School, all the boys in my year avoided this one boy because he constantly rearranged himself.
No one ever high-fived him or shook his hand. This boy was a campus heartthrob, owing to his athletic skills, but the boys couldn't stand him and called him kamboy, short for kambiyo boy, whenever the girls were out of earshot (kambiyo means to shift gears). The girls in my year still don't know about this (it's been 15 years since we graduated), and I only know because I was one of the boys and witnessed everything myself. I can honestly say that "shifting gears" is one UK practice I will never stop being grossed out by. They're called private parts for a reason.
2. Waste and a "disposable" attitude, and what is it with the aversion to old things?
I'm sure you all know that Filipinos cook enough to have leftovers. We do this so that if someone drops by unexpectedly, we have enough food to share, and so that we can have leftovers the next day. From what I've seen here in the UK, anything that isn't eaten the first time around is thrown away. When my husband and I lived with my in-laws, it was a constant struggle to keep my food from being thrown away because "it's been on the counter for two hours". Bread was thrown away because someone accidentally microwaved it for more than 20 seconds. Any food that was getting close to its Best By date was thrown away, regardless of its actual condition. Even Spanish chorizo was thrown away because of the Best By date despite the fact that the damn sausage had been cured without refrigeration for much longer than the one week I had it in the fridge.
The waste I've seen doesn't stop at food. I had to fight tooth and nail to get my in-laws' 12-year-old leather sofas because my mother-in-law flatly refused to give them to me and insisted that they were going straight to the tip. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the sofas that leather cleaner and conditioner, and a needle wouldn't fix. Her excuse for mocking my desperate pleadings was that the sofas were old and she would never in a million years give me anything old. This still doesn't make sense as she goes to car boot sales every week and buys us junk that we neither want nor need but that she foists on us anyway. In any case, I've had to give up on her beautiful dining set that she really did take straight to the tip just because it was old. Fortunately for me and the sofas, my father-in-law spoke up for me and said I could have them. He doesn't need to know how many times I cried over the potential loss of good leather (my dad used to tan lambskin and sheepskin from our livestock, and my family has always had a thing for leather).
3. Bragging about "we invented the English language" while not being able to speak or spell the language
My in-laws, mostly the ones in the older generations, enjoy teasing me about my "American pronunciation". I usually have to hold my tongue and let them have their fun because as a Filipina, I'd feel terrible talking back to my elders. However, it really grates on me that the people who pick on me the most seem to have terrible diction, no clue about grammar, and worse pronunciation than even FOB Filipinos. It takes me one to two seconds to understand when people say things like "lickle" (little), "me moom" (my Mum), "'e were at the market" (He was at the market), "we was outdoors" (We were outdoors), "'e learned me me numbers" (He taught me my numbers), and "give it me" (Give it to me), to name a few. As annoying as the lack of proper grammar is, it's even worse when I get laughed at for not understanding people the first time.
The teasing has lessened since I decided to correct people's assumptions when they told me "aluminium" was the correct way to say the word and "aluminum" was the stupid American way. (Aluminum was the name the scientist who discovered the element gave it, but other people later decided to change the name to aluminium because aluminum didn't match the popular nomenclature trend of giving elements names that ended in -ium.) I guess it also helped that I've been passive-aggressively commenting to my in-laws about the terrible English of strangers I encounter while out and about.
4. Lack of knowledge regarding health
Twice during my pregnancy, my mother-in-law insisted that I sleep in the same bed as my sick husband. He only had a cold, but a simple cold in the Philippines is very different from a cold in the UK. Ours don't include coughs, headaches, nausea, or achy joints. When my father-in-law suggested my husband sleep on the sofa and I told my mother-in-law that a cold would make my asthma worse, she went all "over my dead body" on everyone, and told me that viruses were just one of the things families shared. I was pregnant and had just moved over, so I had no antibodies yet for the specific strains of cold viruses my husband had. Seriously, who in their right mind forces a pregnant woman to get sick?? Maybe it's just because my family is chockful of doctors, medical workers, and scientists, but I have always known that you do not play with the health of a pregnant woman. The second time she made me sleep in the same bed as my sick husband, I actually was sick for two weeks, and I almost whipped out my credit card and bought a plane ticket home. I was this close to leaving my husband because it felt like he didn't even know his responsibility to protect his wife and child from harmful lunatics. I had already been suffering from mild asthma since I moved because I wasn't used to all the carpeting, and the nasty-ass English cold (and everything that came with it) just ensured that my breathing was even more laboured. Has the UK really not learned from the numerous outbreaks and epidemics throughout the centuries that when one person is sick, you're supposed to try to keep him from infecting others?
5. "That's women's work", aka How to raise men to cling to women's apron strings
In the Philippines, our women take very good care of the men. However, this does not excuse men from learning how to cook, clean, sew, and do general housework. Some men do get teased for being "under the saya", which literally translates to "under the skirt" but figuratively means "under the woman's thumb". This jest has nothing to do with the man knowing how to do housework, but everything to do with who wears the pants in the family. Now, I have just had a conversation with my husband's Nana, who confirmed my observation that boys here are not expected to help out around the house. This leads to men having absolutely no housekeeping skills. I asked Nana what happens if a bachelor loses a shirt button or needs to have a hem fixed. She just replied that he'd get his mother or some other woman to do it for him. She gave me the same answer when I asked about laundry, ironing, cooking , cleaning, and all the other things that Filipino men are expected to learn. This really strikes me as a very backward way of thinking. Why do you, the First-Worlders, have such sexist upbringings? In my family, my brother is the best sewer and the best ironer. His stitches are small and even, and when he irons, the creases are as crisp as any military uniform's. No one ever questions his masculinity just because he's also a very good cook or because when he cleans something, he always leaves it spotless. Over here though, my husband is crap at anything in the household, and isn't afraid to admit it. He can't even hold a kitchen knife properly, and when I ask him to slice something, he either uses a chopping motion (which just squashes the veg) or saws at it (which tears the meat apart). Really, why do you raise adult boys (not men) who can't do anything for themselves and who are destined to run to a woman for every little thing? Do you like being so dependent on your mothers for everything?
6. Treating adult children as if they were minors
Back home, if a person were at uni and still had their mother come to school to handle the enrollment or clearance paperwork, or any kind of mundane uni task, he would be teased for being a big baby who couldn't handle his own affairs. Heck, from the age of 13, I was dropped off at the school with a blank check for my tuition and told to handle my enrollment myself. None of my friends ever had their mother doing it all for them either. In contrast, my husband's auntie is currently in Newcastle and she's brought a printer and a scanner with her so she can handle all the paperwork because her 21-year-old daughter is about to finish school. Is this because of a lack of trust? Is this because you really do raise all your kids to be reliant on their mothers? Where's the self-reliance they should have learned by now?
Aside from doing every little thing for your kids, why are the older generation so pushy? I'm 31 years old, have been earning and budgeting my own money since I was 7, and was raised to be self-reliant in and out of the house. I know my own opinions and I know what it takes to run a household efficiently.
Unfortunately, all my older generation female in-laws seem to think I'm 6 and have no mind. I constantly have to field unsolicited advice, and I'm really starting to hate all the pushiness. My husband and I have been living in our own home since March, and at least three days in a week, I have to endure my in-laws trying to force me to arrange my house their way or do tasks their (inefficient) way. It's just the women though. I have had absolutely no trouble from the men. They seem to be resigned to letting the women have their way all the time. What is it with the women in your country treating everyone like children, and why don't the men ever speak up??
Okay, my rant's over. I still don't get the UK. I'm not adjusting as well as I'd like to. My family back home is livid that I'm "being poisoned" and am being treated like a child. I really want to know whether all these things are a UK thing, or that I just have weird in-laws, or that these are a Northwest England thing.
Can anyone shed some light on some of the cultural differences I've just mentioned? I'm really missing home because all I can see about the people here are that they are unsanitary, cross-contaminating, wasteful, pushy, and their ideas about health are stuck in the Dark Ages. Still can't believe I'm the Third-Worlder and I'm the only one who seems to see the problem.
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