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NonCultureShock
MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | Categories- The cognitive dissonnance of being in a environment uncanningly similar to your home community while in the midst of a foreign community where you had expected to be CultureShock?ed.
While this usually happens either because you had made unfair assumptions about the foreign community, like assuming all Internet salons are as, um, impolite as SlashDot, it may also be that neither your home nor the place you are visiting has a soul.
GlobalCity?
Most of the world's global economy cities are now essentially the same. As NoLogo discusses, the world's global youth have the same generic uniform of blue jeans and clever tee-shirts, no matter where you happen to go. The same clothing brands, fast food brands, hotel room layouts, and the nearly ubiquitous Starbucks (which, if absent, is supplanted by a nearly equivalent local knock off)--not to mention the usual business services like copy shops, cell phone carriers, and Internet drops--make up this subspecies of urban culture.
If you only travel on business, you may conclude that the entire world's urban environments have turned into cookie cutter equivalents of each other. However, the truly ancient great cities of the world maintain ArchitecturalLayer?s accumulated from centuries of turbulent and coloured history. As these urban elders are reluctant or slow to lay down and put on something more comfortable for the global business class, global business often seeks younger and more impressionable satellite cities or the newly-born suburbia around the international airports.
It's a strange truth but prices in the cities of the global economy are mostly constant, give or take a factor that depends on local land, labour, and oil prices. Unlike, to compare, the typically dramatically higher (in the North and West) or lower (in the East and South) cost of locally produced goods. It's an even stranger truth that people in these cities are generally quite a lot more attractive.
For examples, one need only look at Mumbai and Bangalore. While Mumbai itself has grown all new and shiny since Indira Gandhi left office, it remains still Mumbai, a crossroad of India. Bangalore, however, notable prior to the DotCom boom for being a laid back retirement community of the elite during the Raj, is currently saturated with global brands that form a sort of perimeter that serve to keep out the local Karnataka culture while no doubt making life comfortable for those visiting on business.
Ok, I'm being cynical. I arrived in Bangalore expecting something amazing, and it is true that it is remarkably shiny and bright and new and quelle Moderne, but whenever I wander off the street and into somewhere I swear I could be in some quarter of Toronto, minus the incessant honking of the rickshaws. Mumbai, on the other hand, was a lot of fun, because it so obviously is a city with its own identity and cultural contribution. -- SunirShah