Culture Shock

While volunteering at a music festival this summer in the mountains of New York, I was given the opportunity to meet a diverse group of amazing musicians, hippies, and an array of uncategorizable, fascinating people. One of these individuals, my supervisor for the less-than-glamorous Traffic & Safety Crew, took me under his wing that weekend and gave me some advice. He warned me, as many individuals did that weekend, to be careful and to prepare myself for culture shock, because I was a "country girl" moving to the "big city." I must admit that I disregarded this proposition as backward and foolish at the time. I may be from West Virginia, and I may enjoy camping at week-long acoustic music festivals, but that does not render me completely ignorant to the ways of the world and the "big city." Right?
Obviously I knew that living in West Philadelphia would be drastically different from my rural/suburban town in West Virginia. After all, at home I knew many people who never locked their doors and a flair for "high fashion" constituted a trip to American Eagle or maybe even some designer stores like Abercrombie & Fitch an hour away from home in Pittsburgh, PA. This is not to say that I come from an entirely backward hick town in the sticks of West Virginia. I do not intend to paint the wrong picture of my daily life, as I believe it to be fairly typical. However, I do want to stress the simplicity and down-to-earth nature of my hometown of Wheeling, WV (with the exception of the small yet powerful, nouveu riche despising, old money affluence of the elderly community with whom I rarely had to interact with outside of scholarship interviews).
Upon arriving to Penn, I was pleasantly suprised to find a group of wonderful people who have become my friends as well as my neighbors. The first time I called home a few days into New Student Orientation I raved to my parents about how shocked I was to discover that these people were not pretentious or overly-arrogant as I may have subconsciously feared. I believe I told them that by simply talking to these people it was indiscernable whether their families resided in the top 1 or bottom 10 percent of the nations economic ladder.
But then we decided to go shopping in Center City.
This isolated experience has truly been the one and only time that I have felt legitimately out of place here at Penn, but I felt slightly out of my element nonetheless. My friends were oogling over designers I had never heard of and spending money that I may never have on clothing I would never want. I took advantage of this situation, however, by attempting to gain a new perspective from it. When I was done rifling through the sales rack I asked my friends about the towns they came from where this was commonplace, places where, as my sister agreed when I told her this story on the phone, we thought had been grossly exaggerated or nonexistant. I don't mean to say that they were wrong in what they were doing. It is just something that is so far from anything that I have ever known that it caught me off guard and left me in a state of awe and confusion.
After the shopping excursion was over everything returned to normal, and we went right back to the more pleasant culture shock of intellectually stimulating conversation that I hope I never take for granted. However, that tiny glimpse into a world so different from my own brought me back to the warnings given by my supervisor back in July that I had so easily brushed aside. I realize now just how detached I have been from all of the beautiful (and not so beautiful) differences in cultures, ideas, and ways of life found in the world around me.
When I first arrived at Penn I had worried that I would not have anything of interest to contribute from my own perspective. So many people here come from so many fascinating places and have done so many intriguing things that I must admit to have initially hesitated when people first asked me where I was from. However, I am finding that my perspective is both different from what some of my peers have experienced as well as valid. I have discovered that people can learn from me as I hope to learn from them and experience this "big city" and all of its diversity for all that it is worth.