Culture Gap

We have a visitor in the office for three days this week.   At its core, I view this as a slight annoyance, since I actually have to dress respectably for three days this week.  Woe is me.  This is doubly annoying due to the fact that I bought several new t-shirts from Old Navy over the weekend, and now I can't even wear them this week.  /whine

On the bright side, however, this visitor is a fellow co-worker who works for our company, from an office in Belgium.  She came from an acquisition of ours called Porthus.  This is her first time in the United States, and we took her out to lunch yesterday at a restaurant called Primanti Brothers.  If you don't live in Pittsburgh, you're not going to know what this place is.  But rest assured, it is just about the most American place we could have taken her, and that was exactly the whole point of its choosing.  The expressions on her face were quite priceless.  It started when we ordered drinks.  Obviously we weren't going to drink alcohol, since it's a work lunch, so I had a Dr. Pepper.  She really didn't know what she was doing, so she simply ordered the same thing I did.  Needless to say, she was quite surprised by how "sweet" the drink was.  "It's like candy..." was the description she gave.

Let's more on to the food.  As I stated, Primanti Brothers is quite American, but also unique.  It's a sandwich shop at heart, and the gimmick they have is that their sandwiches come with coleslaw and fries on the sandwich, along with whatever meat and cheeses you happen to choose.  Quite unhealthy, of course, and thus quite American.  Surprisingly, she found her sandwich to be quite good.  I really was surprised by that, because Europeans simply don't eat like we do.

It's quite interesting to watch this lady interact with us and react to our culture.  I can imagine that when I made my trip to Copenhagen a couple of years ago, the people there were just as amused by my reactions to their culture as I am right now.