Your experience of culture shock in Portugal

Hi,

Living in a foreign country implies to discover its culture, to learn and master the cultural codes.

How did you deal with that? Share with us your culture shock stories where you experienced a funny or awkward moment in Portugal.

What is your advice regarding the don'ts and what would you recommend to avoid any mistake?

Thank you in advance for sharing your stories,

Christine

What you suggest to me

Hello fraz Ahmad,

welcome on board  :)

The above topic has been launched by Expat.com Team on mostly every forum so as to gather informations to help expats or future expats.

If you want to contribute to this thread, please do not hesitate to post your views on the subject.

All the best,
Bhavna

Culture: When you visit or decide to relocate in another country than yours, you are a foreigner for ever. Even in the USA, still a colony, non US citizen are Aliens!
You can live in any country happyly without paying attention to local culture, just like I did. However, places like the americas have interesting music and for the South, interesting folklore to see.
Asia also is not to be forgotten. Europe is for me less attractive, also with lack of enthousiasm.
For me there is no culture chock as other culture should not be compared to your own. It should be viewed as interesting or not, and certainly not making evaluations that would be improductive anyway. To conclude, all culture are vintage, nothing new or pertaining to the existing generation.

I find that the Portuguese don't walk up the escalator. I love observing subtle differences in all the countries I visit.

I am from Turkey. Skipping all the obvious religious/conservative differences, I will jump directly to my personal experience that required a bit getting used to:

- Use of Olive Oil: I am used to cook with vegetable oils and butter, here there is an amazing Olive Oil reality. It is in almost everything and much healthier ofcourse.

- Amount of coffee people drink: This is a serious coffee country. Portuguese people love their coffee and they are quite picky with it. Average Portuguese person seem to drink about 2-3 shots of very strong coffee (yeah they drink like shots) every day.

- All-night festivals that are family friendly: There are lots of festivals in every city, most of them lasts all night. The interesting part is, most of them are family-friendly, you can see elder people (plus 70, 80 years old), people with small children etc. outside 5 in the morning at festival nights. It is quite normal.

- Eggs & red meat everywhere: Portuguese people seem to enjoy putting egg in the plates you expect the least (like, fish dishes, chicken soups etc), also a big portion of cuisine is based on red meat.