American customs I like/dislike:
The US, as many other countries -if not all- has a lot of different customs that foreigners find whether horrible or amazing. Personally, I still run sometimes into certain customs that leave me really surprised.
First of all, when I found that, according to the US government, there's not official language there I was quite surprised because I had always thought that it was English. However, in the US, there are spoken almost every language in the world such as Chinese, Spanish, German or French (besides English). Another custom that amazes me is the one about the Groundhog Day because a lot of citizens actually believe what the animal prognosticates, but I don't know how it feels for the groundhog to wake up from hibernating in the middle of a parade with that much noise, I think it may be stressful for the poor animal and that's why I do not agree with this tradition. Finally, the last one is about US citizens referring to their country as America when America is a continent where the US is. That caused me confusion because when I saw the title I was questioning myself if American customs referred to the ones around the whole continent or the ones only in the US. Actually, I have heard opinions of people living in South America (as a continent) talking about how selfish is to reduce such a big continent to a country. In my opinion, I do not agree with US citizens talking about themselves as Americans and the other ones are just "Canadians" or "Latinamericans", I do not find it fair.
In short, I think that this country has positive and negative customs that have been part of their culture for centuries. Notwithstanding, people and their traditions have to evolve according to the times we're living because if they hadn't evolved, slavery would still be part of our culture and the same would happen with other monstrous practices.
No comments:
Post a Comment