I wasn't quite sure how to put a slide in here, so I just made a picture of one aspect of the culture of the USA compared to Germany. Last October, we had a German exchange student staying in our house. She was really nice and polite to us, and when we went shopping, I found a little bit of a difference in our cultures, relating to time. Being from the United States, I know that we have a very rushed and punctual way about being on time. For people from Germany, this is not the case necessarily. I found that people from Germany are more relaxed and don't worry as much about the time.
In my opinion, culture is the social environment in your country, town or neighborhood which you are surrounded by and are nurtured into by the people whom are older than yourself. It can be very easy to stereotype someone's culture, but very hard to describe the truth to one's culture. For example, it is very easy to say (and I can say this because I am American) that American people are mostly overweight and rich. This is not true for the majority of the US population. It's easy to use this stereotype to describe Americans because it's what people think of them and it's how they are viewed by people in other countries. People just assume that Americans are this way but we are not. Now, it's harder to describe the true culture of the American people because we have many other cultures in our country and you have to experience the culture yourself in order to understand it.
In the power point, I feel that the slide pertaining to transportation is incorrect about westerners. It says that westerners use bikes nowadays. In America, we constantly use cars because everything is really spread out and it takes too long to bike over to where we need to go. Also on the leisure time slide it says that all westerners do for leisure time is to sit and watch TV. Even as a generalization that is not true. We do a variety of things, like reading, hanging out with friends, bowling, etc. We don't just sit like couch potatoes watching TV.
If I were to describe the culture in the United States, I would say that many of the people live in suburban areas, but not all. Some live on farms, in the city, etc. Though Americans are very similar in how they treat each other. Most people that I have passed hold doors for the people behind them. Though not all people in the US are the most polite, especially on the roads. We as American people are more so conservative and don't really want to share extremely personal details with others, but we do like to tell others about the aspects of our life that we think will make us seem "cooler" by the people we are talking to at the time. Of course, all that I have said before isn't necessarily true for everyone in the United States. There is always an exception.
When I was in Spain, it was a very different culture than ours in the United States. At first, I wasn't sure how to react to the locals when they tried to talk to me. So, I thought about how I treated people in the US and I treated them like I would treat in the United States. I was polite and courteous. Of course, this is how, from what I could observe, they treated other locals in the area. This helped me a lot since we interacted with the locals a lot during the trip in restaurants and when we went to buy things in shops. There is a major limitation to using our memory for knowing something. I forget a lot of things, so I don't remember a lot of things correctly and sometimes not at all. Other times, I remember different versions of the same event than my friends. Memory is a good resource, but you should always have other information from other sources in order to know something better.
We can use our imagination to appreciate other cultures, because we can imagine ourselves in those cultures and think about how cool it would be to be able to partake in their traditions and other aspects of the culture.
