In high school my school always had a big group of foreign exchanged students. Mostly the exchange students would be from either France, Germany and Sweden. My favorite thing about having these kids from other countries and cultures at our school helped me learn about the differences between our cultures. I loved learning about each and everyone of them! They also thought our accents were incredibly funny which made sense because before they came to Texas they all thought that everyone in Texas rode horses to school and wore cowboy boots. That was always entertaining! Learning to communicate cross- culturally is an extremely important thing to do so you know what your talking about when talking to someone of a different culture than you and so you don't offend anyone in the process.
While in my Cross-Cultural Psychology class we watched "The Gods Must be Crazy". The film begins in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. It is a film that describes and give you a lot of insight on a culture way different from my own. It starts off with man from the tribe called the Bushman who happens to come across an empty coke bottle while he was on a hunting expedition. The coke bottle is something that he had never seen or come in contact with before. When he brought it back to his tribe, everyone started fighting over it cause they found so many uses for the coke bottle such as a fire starter, cooking utensil and even a musical instrument. The tribe got so infatuated with the coke bottle that Bushman decided that there was only one option, which was to take it to the end of the earth and give it back to the gods! The movie gives you a lot of insight on Bushman tribe and culture that I never knew about before. They are a very collectivistic culture that is very involved with family. They live a very different kind of life style than western countries do. This movie gave a great example of a clashing of cultures! It was very interesting to learn about a culture so different than mine.
