I was really just talking about the dominant culture of a place, since once you include immigrant communities you do get a lot more variety but that’s outside the vast majority of people’s life experience in that country (there is a tendedency to self-segregate, to hide from the locals behaviours which would be seen by them as weird and to adapt the outside visible facets of that culture to the local environment - such as how Chinese food outside China isn’t actually like in China or even the same in different countries) plus that kind of cultural breadth applies just the same in all reasonably wealthy nation that attract immigrants from all over.
(Mind you, it’s really nice you appreciate the cultural variety that comes that way, just beware you’re only seeing a reduced, locally-adjusted, set of it unless you actually know well - to the level of having been to their place and met their family - somebody from that cultural background).
Cultural differences are a lot more than those surface things, they’re about stuff like expected behaviours (say, how people in Britain naturally form queues and are massivelly averse to giving criticism or how dutch people tend to arrange themselves in a circle when in a small get together at somebody’s home and are direct to the point of sounding insulting to the previously mentioned Britons), shared sports preferences, business and political culture (adversarial, compromise, confrontation avoidance), even things like what TV shows one grew up with.
In my experience moving to another country, we have a ton of expectations we are totally unaware off when it comes to contact to others (even stupid stuff like how people behave whilst walking on the sidewalk and somebody else comes) and which we are totally unware that they are unwritten conventions because everybody around us is operating under the same conventions.
Mind you, as a turist one doesn’t really notice the vast majority of those things when visiting a country.
I was really just talking about the dominant culture of a place, since once you include immigrant communities you do get a lot more variety but that’s outside the vast majority of people’s life experience in that country (there is a tendedency to self-segregate, to hide from the locals behaviours which would be seen by them as weird and to adapt the outside visible facets of that culture to the local environment - such as how Chinese food outside China isn’t actually like in China or even the same in different countries) plus that kind of cultural breadth applies just the same in all reasonably wealthy nation that attract immigrants from all over.
(Mind you, it’s really nice you appreciate the cultural variety that comes that way, just beware you’re only seeing a reduced, locally-adjusted, set of it unless you actually know well - to the level of having been to their place and met their family - somebody from that cultural background).
Cultural differences are a lot more than those surface things, they’re about stuff like expected behaviours (say, how people in Britain naturally form queues and are massivelly averse to giving criticism or how dutch people tend to arrange themselves in a circle when in a small get together at somebody’s home and are direct to the point of sounding insulting to the previously mentioned Britons), shared sports preferences, business and political culture (adversarial, compromise, confrontation avoidance), even things like what TV shows one grew up with.
In my experience moving to another country, we have a ton of expectations we are totally unaware off when it comes to contact to others (even stupid stuff like how people behave whilst walking on the sidewalk and somebody else comes) and which we are totally unware that they are unwritten conventions because everybody around us is operating under the same conventions.
Mind you, as a turist one doesn’t really notice the vast majority of those things when visiting a country.