when another culture feels like a parallel universe.
- josiah.
- Jun 25
- 3 min read
I had always thought I understood different cultures, having learned about them in school and seen glimpses online. But in London, things felt off in a way I couldn’t quite name. Everything looked familiar but didn’t quite work the way I expected.
visiting england.
The first time I left the U.S., I landed in London, England. I already knew they drove on the left side of the road. I’d read about it, seen it in the media, and heard corny jokes about it from time to time growing up. But the moment I left the airport, hopping into a shuttle and watching cars whip by in the opposite direction of what my body was wired to expect, something shifted. It didn’t feel wrong. Just unreal. Like I had flown to a different planet.
knowing is different from feeling.
We’re taught to “know” other cultures. We study them in school. We see glimpses on TikTok, or random Snapchat stories where strangers spam their local area just like people do in yours. But there’s a difference between knowing and feeling. Between reading that people eat dinner later in France or Spain and actually sitting down for your first meal at 9 p.m.
You don’t realize how much your own culture has shaped your reflexes until you’re somewhere new, and they no longer apply in the way you expect.
a parallel universe.
Traveling through Israel a couple of years ago, some areas reminded me of a cleaner California. The highways were smooth and well-kept. The scenery, with its lush hills and distant mountains, felt like parts of Southern California I’d driven through before. For a moment, I couldn’t believe I was over 7,000 miles away.
It’s not wrong. It’s just not yours.
online, it all feels the same.
On social media, we all look like we’re living the same life. We use the same emojis. We react to the same global news. We laugh at the same clips. It makes the world feel smaller, but it also flattens it.
You can forget that someone halfway across the world might see a totally different meaning in the same post. Or that a trend that feels universal online never even reaches someone’s real life.
It’s the same kind of feeling you sometimes see in artists on world tours, especially those performing in stadiums. They knew they had international fans. But standing in front of tens of thousands, hearing their lyrics shouted back in another language? That’s surreal.
You can see it in their faces. That moment when they realize the art they created at home, in a studio, or maybe even in their bedroom somehow traveled across oceans. We see the success online. But that feeling of being there, of standing in front of that crowd, is something most of us won’t fully know unless we’re in it.
slowing down, paying attention.
I began to wonder how often the reverse might be true. Just as I found parts of England or Israel strangely familiar, people in other parts of the world might similarly see the U.S. as familiar, filtered through movies, music, and the internet. A place they haven’t been but already feel like they know.
I’ve met people who talked about New York as if it belonged to another reality or imagined California as some non-stop dreamland of beaches and movie stars. Even people who feel like they know Los Angeles just from memorizing the map of Los Santos in Grand Theft Auto 5. And while some of those things exist, it’s not the whole picture. Just like no place can fully define another, the America that gets exported isn’t always the one we live in.
Experiencing a culture that feels like a parallel universe shifts how you understand your own. I think that’s why traveling, or even just listening, is essential. Not because it makes you smarter but because it changes how you move through the world. It helps you pay closer attention. It makes you more curious. It reminds you that your “normal” is just one version of normal.
We’re not all living in the same story. And we’re definitely not playing by the same rules.
Maybe these places aren’t so far away after all. Sometimes, what feels foreign at first can hold pieces of home.
I'm a Canadian and my wife and I raised our children in a Muslim community in the Middle East. After my daughter married, her Arab husband got a job in California. I sat her down one day to talk about cultural adjustments and the emotional stages she might go through. But she said, "I've travel all over the world, and I'm Canadian. There won't be any problem." Well, she hit the wall hard and really struggled for two years. It is the emotions that get you, the disorientation on the emotional level that kicks in a couple months down the road.