Reverse Culture Amusement after a Third of a Decade
I don’t like the word “culture shock”- it’s too dramatic. When you move from one culture to another there will be events which surprise you, in a positive or negative way, and some of the negative ways will be annoying, but it rarely amounts to a shock, at least in my experience. Usually, it’s culture amusement, or reverse culture amusement which I experienced.
I grew up in Austria and live in the Philippines. For the most part, I love it, it’s a country with easy-going people with good senses of humor, and I live in everyone else’s dream diving vacation spot. I don’t live there because I didn’t like the country I’m from (I observed guys with this kind of faulty motivation for switching country as well), and I always enjoy visiting back “home”. Now, the last time I had the chance to visit Austria was a few months before the great pandemic of the 2020s started, and hefty travel restrictions all over the world, including between the Philippines and Austria ensued. So I returned only after a third of a decade, all of which I spent in the Philippines, mostly in one island province of the country, on the beautiful volcanic island of Negros.
Three years feel qualitatively different from one or two years of absence. It was a curious pleasure to observe how the Philippine-tuned automatisms of my mind worked back in central Euroland. Hours after arriving at my parents’ house near Vienna I very well remembered on a declarative-memory-level that tap-water is drinking water in Austria; however the overtraining of the last three years not to even consider drinking what comes from a tap made me hesitate; I even, in a quiet, embarrassed voice, asked my dad if the public water from the public waterworks was still, in fact, drinkable. There are of course good reasons why the Philippine tap-water is not healthy, from the tropical heat to a weaker infrastructure in a poorer country, and I am neither making fun of these reasons nor complaining about them; Rather, I found it curious how my behavior was fine-tuned for the conditions found in the place where I usually live.
Another instance of Philippine motor program implemented in an alpine body, misapplied to the streets of Vienna was my attempt to jump out of the way of a car approaching a pedestrian crossing. The car of course stopped right away when the driver saw me heading across the street – something almost unhear of in the Philippines, where the lack of driving training, lack of traffic rule enforcement
These automatisms of mine were particularly entertaining to observe, because of the brief delay between my actions and the insight why I was taking these actions. But I also made a number of observations about my environment which struck me in how they demonstrated the difference between alpine and archipelagic ways.
At this point my Visayan is not completely fluid, but I can understand everyday conversations fairly well. In contrast, a lot of the conversations the folks sitting next to me in the Vienna subway had were completely incomprehensible to me, often held in Eastern European languages. It’s nice to see the city even more cosmopolitan than the way it was when I went to university two decades ago.
Rules and Guards
Very striking is the almost complete lack of armed security guards in Austria. Even banks would not feel the need to place a dude with a gun in front of their main entrance. Crass violent crime has gotten really rare in central Europe. In contrast, in the Philippines every pharmacy, pawn shop, hotel and supermarket employs one or several dudes with guns. This initially struck me as quite an extreme measure – I wasn’t used to seeing guns – when I moved to the Philippines. Now, I’m pleasantly surprised by the lack of guards in Austria; the pandemic had increased the “security” guard populations in the Philippines even more; far from providing security, the guards now have evolved into a petty police force who enforce ever-changing little rules where one must or must not stand and wait, or, everyone’s favorite, pull down one’s face mask so that the CCTV can see one’s face. In a conflict-adverse society these guards are often surprisingly impolite, and their whole existence feels like a small man’s revenge, finally being able to boss around the social class of their bosses. This whole level of petty policing is only superficially missing in Austria: The stereotypical Germanic Verboten is present in signs and in the minds of the population; the rules where to park and what grass not to step on don’t have to be enforced by armed personal, the people have been well trained to behave as told. Which kind of policing is worse?
Age Structure and Energy
It’s one thing to look at the statistics describing the age-pyramid of a country, it’s another to be immersed and observe the difference between old and young societies. I’m in my late 40s – in the Philippines this often makes me the oldest person in a lot of social situations. In Austria, I’m not infrequently the youngest. On yesterday’s trip to the bakery I was the only one without grey hair or a limp. All these middle-aged and older folks looked happy and cheerful, but it’s just natural to have more energy when 19 than when 59. And that difference shows up in the macro-vibe of the two countries.
In the three years since I hadn’t been back, not so much changed in Austria; the city center of Vienna looked surprisingly similar in 1905 as compared to now. Cebu City or Manila, in contrast, look different every time I travel there. This lack of growth is not equivalent to a lack of vibrancy, but the energy is much more concentrated to city centers in Austria. Every corner of every village is buzzing with people, cats, dogs, chickens, mopeds and karaoke machines; the center of Vienna feels very alive, with great street music and lots of people who look creative and ambitious; but a walk in a residential area on the outskirts of Vienna, though peaceful is much less stimulating. On a short 30 minute hike around the area where my parents live in the southern wine-growing outskirts of the city I ran into a total of 3 other humans. Not only was the road between the two wine-growing villages near-empty, but also almost eerily quiet, when coming from the ‘Pinas. In the middle of the day no dogs were barking, roosters sounding off, no one was singing or chainsawing!
There is such a difference in human density and intensity between my home country and my motherland. All of Austria, from the Swiss to the Hungarian border, is only home to a little bit more humans than half of Manila, and the island nation’s population has increased since 2013 by an amount of humans equivalent to the complete Austrian population. This rapid growth must be largely responsible for the higher energy, in good and bad, such as the more hectic traffic and the need to put dudes with guns everywhere versus the more stimulating, fun environment.
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