The Tip of the Reverse Culture Shock Iceberg
I never noticed how dependent the US is on the concept of customer service until I came back from China.
Take my first two days back in the US, for example. My first night, my friend and I went out to dinner at a place that served all-American food. (The sandwiches were delicious. I think part of the reason why I loved mine so much was because there was so much cheese on it!) While we were there, neither of us had to shout “服务员！” to get our waitress’ attention. All we had to do was make eye contact and… bam! She would appear at our table. Hell, sometimes she would come over and ask us how we were doing without being prompted to come over. It was like magic. Not to mention totally unheard of in China.
My second day in the US, my friend and I went to lunch at the Cheesecake Factory. The portion sizes! I’ve always thought the Cheesecake Factory served massive portions, but after a year of eating smaller portion sizes I was completely wowed by the hugeness of my chicken piccata. (I was very hungry though, so I managed to eat a lot more of my food than I thought I would. That’s something, I guess.) This waitress, like the one from the night before, kept coming to our table and asking us how we were, how the food was, etc. At one point I was getting rather annoyed with her attentiveness; I just wanted to be left with my friend and my food in peace! I’ve grown so unaccustomed to any form of attention or care from wait staff while dining out that it was alien to have this helicopter waitress hovering over me. I was also quite sad to part with the money required for a 20% tip when it came time to pay the bill; I’d forgotten about tipping.
Another weird thing is toilets. For one, squatters are pretty much non-existent in the US. I’m neither here nor there on this, as I can take or leave a squat toilet. But what I can’t get over is how there are toilet paper dispensers in each stall! Not only that, BUT THERE IS ACTUALLY TOILET PAPER IN THE DISPENSER! Most toilets in China don’t even have a dispenser for toilet paper. That might seem strange, but when there’s never going to be toilet paper in said toilet dispenser, it seems a bit useless to have the dispenser.
…never in my life would I have imagined I’d devote an entire paragraph to the topic of toilet paper in a blog entry.
Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.