Want a Real Cross-Cultural Challenge? Try Explaining Groundhog Day in Spanish…
Article contributed by Natalie Southwick.
One of the bits of conventional wisdom about spending a significant period of time abroad is that it forces you to confront your own cultural assumptions and internalized norms.
Whether you’re studying, working, or part of a top-secret classified government mission you can’t tell us about, living in another country forces you to think critically about your individual and cultural identity, the society in which you were raised and your personal moral compass.
Sometimes this process takes the form of challenging your own sense of what’s “normal” or “right”. Sometimes it makes you realize just how weird your own culture is, like that time I tried to tell a bunch of slightly tipsy Latin Americans why gringos devote one day each year to caring intensely about the movements of a chubby creature named Phil.
This process has been a constant for me during the time I’ve spent abroad. Studying for a semester in Buenos Aires taught me that there’s nothing wrong with starting dinner at 11 pm and rolling up to the club at 3 in the morning, that all the cool kids carry a thermos around with them and that, for a significant part of the world, Christmas is a summer holiday. It also forced me to confront the ugliness of pervasive machismo, think critically about unhealthy societal beauty norms and see firsthand some of the racism and discrimination that exists among countries and communities in Latin America.
Throughout three and a half years in Colombia, I worked to find a common ground between my cold, unfeeling New England gringa ways and the loud, enthusiastic, affectionate society around me. I got used to staring at people (or being stared at) in public, started kissing everyone hello and goodbye and wouldn’t dream of letting someone into my home without offering them coffee.
As the resident gringa in certain social spaces, I also got tasked with explaining things like the U.S. electoral system, the cost of North American universities and my generation’s crushing debt, basic U.S. geography, why it only seems like everyone in the country owns six guns and why gringos drink coffee out of such massive cups.
And then there’s the time I tried to explain Groundhog Day. Which went about as well as you might expect.
You people do what?!
It’s hard to realize just how weird a certain practice or tradition is when everyone else around you also accepts it at face value. Just the way you might not realize that you pronounce “mirror” differently or button your shirt the wrong way until your roommate makes fun of you for it, you rarely view your own cultural norms as bizarre until you try to explain them rationally to someone who knows nothing about them.
This goes both ways, of course. I thought that the Colombian habit of pointing at things with your lips was hilariously weird until, two years after moving there, I found myself doing it unconsciously — but by that point it seemed totally normal, since everyone else was doing it (now I’m the one who looks like a weirdo in front of my friends in the U.S.).
Still, there’s something personal about describing a time-honored family or regional tradition and having someone look at you like you have three heads. And it’s hard to think of a better way to embody that three-headed-monster than by describing the total weirdness that is Groundhog Day.
“There’s this one special groundhog…”
Imagine, if you will, trying to explain to a room of a half-dozen people that, every year, the entire country checks the news on a specific day to see if a small rodent has emerged from a hole in the ground and glimpsed its shadow.
First, you have to explain what a groundhog is, which is hard when they don’t exist in the country where you are. You have to compare it to a large gerbil, or another kind of rodent — cute, not scary like rats, but a rodent nonetheless.
Then, you continue, there’s this one special groundhog. He has a name, and it’s Phil, and he lives somewhere in Pennsylvania (you may at this point also have to explain more or less where Pennsylvania is. “South of New York” usually works well). No, it’s not actually the same groundhog all the time — they have short life spans, so you have to replace them at some point. Phil is more of a title than a name, really.
So every year, on February 2, the whole country waits breathlessly for the professional reporters who intentionally go to the abode of this small ground-rodent to tell us if he saw his shadow and, thus, how to plan for the next six weeks of our lives. Did I mention that people on the other side of our very large country actually care about this?
I have rarely in my life felt as foolish as I did while explaining this strangest of U.S. holidays to my extremely skeptical Colombian friends. Thank goodness for the two other gringos in the room at the time — I think the fact that they confirmed everything I said is the only reason my friends don’t think I’m completely insane.
Learning from large rodents
Although this is a particularly extreme case of cultural disconnect, it helps illustrate how living abroad can change your perspective on many aspects and practices of your home country and culture as you’re forced to justify them on a fairly consistent basis.
It’s important to pay attention to your own versions of Groundhog Day as you adapt and adjust to the culture of your host country, because it can be so easy to paint things with a broad brush and think that anything unfamiliar or different is weird and wrong.
Sometimes this arises out of a serious clash between your own personal set of values and morals and those of your host country. If the dominant culture where you are thinks homosexuality is immoral, for example, you’re perfectly justified in objecting to that perspective if it goes against your personal sense of what’s just or right.
On the other hand, just because you’ve never used plastic gloves while eating chicken wings, it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the wrong way to do it (four years later, this endearing Colombian practice is still 100% hilarious to me).
Adjusting to life in another culture is in no small part about finding a balance between your values and the ones that surround you, weighing cultural relativism against the things that you, personally, know to be right and true. It’s understandable that practices that are drastically different from the ones you’re used to might seem strange or even uncomfortable, but keep in mind that there’s a reason the local people have those practices, and for them, they are comfortable.
And before you burst out laughing at any especially out-there local tradition, just imagine trying to explain Groundhog Day to the person sitting next to you.
