Cultural differences

It is not an exaggeration to say that people come from almost every part of the world to visit the early Christian late Roman Cemetery of Pécs. This place is often a witness to intercultural encounters and sometimes to misunderstandings resulting from cultural differences. I attended an intercultural communication course at the university and it makes me easier to recognize situations which can easily become troublesome.

          For instance I remember when a young guy came to visit and he barely spoke any language besides Chinese. At first I tried to explain the prices of different kinds of entrance tickets in English. He did not understand me. My second try could be to sign the numbers on my fingers but it came to my mind that Chinese have a very complex system (different from our) to do that. Instead I wrote down the amounts on a sheet of paper and showed it to him. He nodded gratefully. 

         On another occasion there was an Indian man in the group I guided in the visitor centre. For the first time it was strange that he was listening to me with his eyes closed. And then came a thought into my mind. I remembered that monocronic people concentrate on one thing at a time and they often close their eyes to exclude visuals that can distract attention. Another explanation can be, of course, that I was boring. But I hope it was the first.

         There were some cases when I was not careful enough. For instance I was in trouble when a Russian guy showed his student card to me and I just could not recognize it because of the Cyrillic letters. Another cautionary thing is evaluation. My collegue created a questionnaire for visitors to measure their satisfaction. They had to sign their opinion on a scale from 1 to 5. For us it was obvious that number 5 marks the best. But there are countries where it works the opposite way which made the final assessment a bit difficult.