Culture Shock

Dublin is a big, cosmopolitan city. There are a lot of tourists, American and otherwise, all over the place. That combined with the lack of language barrier and the fact that as a long as I keep my mouth shut and don’t let my American accent fly no one will ever know I’m an outsider, makes for a surprising lack of culture shock. I’m sure once I visit smaller cities or go more to the west of Ireland I will discover places that are more distinctly Irish. Sort of like what I experienced in France: the further you get from Paris, the more stereotypically French the people seem to become.

However, the place I have been most culturally shocked is the grocery store. You walk through the aisles and very rarely find the brands you recognize. Or sometimes you find them, like Kellogg’s cereal, but the logos are all different. Or you see a bag of what is clearly Lay’s potato chips, but they’re called Walkers. This is actually a common occurrence. Pringles are Hurley’s, Johnny Rockets is Eddie Rockets… there are several more examples that escape me at the moment. You look in a vending machine and don’t recognize a single candy bar. Buying snacks and treats is sometimes a real gamble. Except you can rely on Kit-Kats. They love wafers dipped in chocolate here. Cadbury is the big treat seller, while in the States the brand only makes an appearance around Easter.

The grocery stores are arranged in such an unrecognizable way that I have to walk down every single aisle to find what I want. There is only one brand of milk available, and the eggs (which aren’t refrigerated) come in packs of 6, 10, and 18. And the vegetables are ENORMOUS! I found a cucumber twice the size of what it should have been, a turnip the size of a melon, and plastic packs of large, full-sized carrots as opposed to baby carrots.

The 1-3 litre soda bottles are shaped like normal, small soda bottles. Normal, small Fantas are everywhere, but in a completely different shaped bottle. You can buy printers, TVs, paper-shredders, bras, and select school supplies in the grocery store, but you can’t find any cookware. Buying cough medicine and lozenges the other day was such an ordeal- there was no brand of medicine on the shelf that I had ever seen before.

All this may not seem like such a big deal, but when you’re wet and cold and stagger into the store looking for an Oreo fix, and then spend forever finding the sweets aisle, then can’t even find Oreos because of the plethora of unfamiliar cookies and candy, it becomes a big deal.