The Shock About the Culture Shock

New immigrants to the US face what's known to many as the culture shock. This has been the case for so long. These days the shock is not too strong as it used to be, especially in our very small world where most immigrants know what America is like before even stepping in the US Embassy to obtain a visa.

The only true culture shock I faced when I first traveled to the US was how kind and humble Americans were especially when I expected hem to be very arrogant.... I wonder what gave me that first impression?? .... and polite. Very polite, much more than us Jordanians. That was shocking to me. Otherwise, I wasn't too shocked from anything else I saw or experienced.
It's a different story as I travel inside the US.

In California, and I saw a vehicle "Running on Vegetable Oil" .... vegetable oil! And then a gas station for "compressed natural gas" whatever that is. I was in South Dakota and went to their Walmart and was really shocked to see no Latinos or African Americans there . I was shocked when I traveled to Chicago and had people completely ignore me when I'd ask them about directions, as if I was transparent. I had to block someone's way to the train so she'd stop to tell me where the hell Wabash street was (and boy was she frightened to death when I did that)...and the toll roads, where you have to pay little cash to continue driving on what's supposed to be the good highway. How about Kentucky, where I couldn't really understand the English half the people were speaking while none of them could understand the English I was speaking.

Also the fact that Americans are not one thing was a bit shocking. In some places in the country all people dress alike, think alike, have the same habits day and night. Their houses, schools, children, farms, cars and the names written in their voting booths are all the same. However in other places you'll find a trans-sexual well-moustached person with gigantic breasts covered with tattoos from head to toe, a Rabi, an old prostitute and a middle-age conservative mother sitting next to each other in the train. They may even work in the same place.

The shock about the culture shock is that once you think you've been through the classical culture shock, you're faced with many other ones as travel inside this big country and learn more about it, which makes you often think of it as several smaller countries with so many smaller nations who miraculously not only managed to live together but have taken pride in this diversity and used it effectively to bring their country together instead of ripping it apart.