Culture Shock... kind of

Having spent almost all of my life in the Midwest I never really realized how "white" we are in the north. At work Caucasian is still the majority but it's not overwhelmingly so. I work with a couple of guys who are from India. I was surprised to talk to one of them and have him mention maybe moving back home in the future. My naivety always led me to believe that India was a third world country that you move away from to escape and never go back to. I knew the country is developing quite a bit on the technology side though. Many of the IT consultants are from India. Also I work with a guy my age who's from Venezuela and also lived two years in Italy but left because after being there two years they wanted him to join the army. It's a requirement to do this if your under a certain age (I think 29 yrs old was the age you have to meet to not have to join the army after two years of citizenship). I also work with another guy who is totally americanized (I guess you could say... doesn't have an accent) but has spent a lot of time in his home country. I think it was Hong Kong. I can't remember if that was it now....?

The different perspectives are interesting. Learning about cricket from the guys from India; learning about the price of gas in Venezuela (I'ts almost free and people own multiple vehicles because of it.... Hugo Chavez owns all the Oil). Also learning what a native Venezuelan thinks of Chavez (doesn't think highly of him to put it mildly).

These are some of the more extreme examples of some of the people I work with. The other change, for me, is that most of the people I work with have moved from some other part of the country: Salt Lake City, Santa Cruz, North Carolina, Los Angeles, Florida, Atlanta, Seattle and so on.

But as homogeneous as the places I've grown up are I wouldn't say that it's all that different of a working environment because the one strong thread of commonality is that we're all on the same page in regards to work so we don't really notice the differences that much except for the occasion where we have to repeat ourselves because we've used a colloquialism that someone from another part of the country has never heard of before or heard pronounce a certain way. (apparently a "front stoop" is more of a regional term).

One of the advantages of working with all this diversity is finding out about some of the places you might want to visit and some of the differences that you don't learn by watching T.V. or visiting.