#4: Evaluating Intercultural Behaviour

I have never thought about evaluate my cultural life and how this can help me to improve my intercultural communication. However I think this is a very good opportunity to analyze myself in the sense that I need to question myself if I have the enough knowledge about my actions, ideas and perception of my culture and of the other cultures.

I need to start writing that I am Mexican, but right now I asking myself what I know about  Mexico?, How other cultures impact in myself? What are the festivities that I celebrate? I can say that I had the opportunity to travel around Mexico, this gives me the advantage to know a little more of my country and depends of your location in Mexico you have a different subculture (traditions, customs and food). Nevertheless I think we are adopting some things of the American culture.  For example, in Mexico we celebrate the 1st and the 2nd of November like the day of dead (“Día de muertos”), in this celebration we go to the cemeteries to clean the tombs of our deaths and put some flowers in the tomb, but also we make an altar to remember the person who is dead, so we put some of the personal stuff, the favorite food and drinks of the dead. However we are forgetting this tradition because in U.S.A. celebrate the Halloween and this festivity is the 31st of October, so many people in Mexico celebrate the Halloween but they forget to celebrate the day of dead.

In this sense I consider myself one of the persons trying to keep the most typical traditions and customs of my country. I need to clarify that the majority of the people in Mexico are Catholics, so almost of our traditions are related with the religion. Here are some of the festivities I still celebrating (if you want you want Google it): King’s Ring (Rosca de reyes), Candlemas Day (Día de la Calendaria), Easter week (Semana Santa), The independence day, “Posadas” and Christmas.

Although I believe that we live in a multi-ethnic world so there is nothing wrong if you want to celebrate other festivities or if you want to try something new about another culture, but you need to be have the enough information about what do you want to try and what do you want to share. I remember a few years ago when one of my friend of Ecuador went to Mexico, we arrived at 3 p.m. to Queretaro (the city where I live), she was very hungry, so we decided to go to eat some typical Mexican food, every name of the food was new for her so she asked me which one are the best, I don’t remember exactly what I suggested to her, but she asked me if the food was spicy and I said "No, don't worry " … I had committed a big mistake, in that time I did not know there were places where there was no spicy food, and Ecuador is one of this places. My friend started to eat and after the first mouthful, she started to scream that the food was so spicy after that, she started crying, in my mind I thought, Oh my God what did I do?. After a few minutes my friend explained me that in Ecuador there are no chilies, so the food is not spicy at all. Believe that after this experience all the time that one foreign person asks me if the food is spicy in Mexico, all the time I answered with these questions: Do you have any chili in your country? Have you tried some other type of spicy food? Therefore it is very important to never assume that the daily activities that we do are the same in another country. In addition this experience helped me to be more curious about other cultures.

So, if I'm going to meet people from other cultures I try to investigate about the habits they have and something about their country, to try to avoid making mistakes or misunderstandings, although I know that it is impossible to have all the information about a culture and sometimes the information that we find are incorrect or are not complete. For example this last summer I went to Krakow to study one month there, so I search how to say hello in Polish and I found that the word is cześć, the first day of my classes I arrived to my classroom and there was my teacher and I said: cześć and he replied me with the same word. However after the class the teacher in charge of the exchange program, told us that is not common to use this word to greet teachers, because they take it as a sign of disrespect because the word does not show the respect that you have to your teachers. So with this experience I learned that it costs nothing to ask about what you do not know.

Finally I think that every day we can learn something new about our culture and the other cultures, but the important thing is that we need to be a little open mind and appreciate and recognize what makes us different from others. Similarly I believe that we must continue to learn from these experiences to enrich our person culturally and continue develop skills that help us to communicate with different cultures in one future.