When I came across these “culture shock” videos on YouTube, …

,,,I quickly realized that actually all that shocked me about some of these videos was the language used to promote them:

• Culture shock: Screech! It’s very hot in central Africa.
• Culture shock: Screech! It’s very cold in Antarctica!
• Culture shock: Screech! Our hotel in South-West-Somewhere didn’t have my favourite diet yogurt in the buffet, my whole vacation was ruined!

In such a video, I also had to learn that in some country in Asia, it would be unseemly to pick your nose! Oh my! As far as I know, it is also unseemly in European countries to walk across the street picking your nose, or to ask the people, waiting at the bus stop, what time it is with two or three fingers up your nose. With your fingers in your own nose! Not to imagine how unseemly it would be to stick 3 fingers up someone else’s nose – assuming they all had room in there. Well, it always depends on the nose of the other person!

However, it would be worth a culture-shock-video, dear culture-shock-video-maker, if you were to lonely witness a landing of an extra-terrestrial spaceship. Standing all alone in the nowhere and you would be conscious that you must react now somehow. However, already the landing flap of this spaceship opens, some smoke rises, a billowing species approaches, two, three tentacles reach for you and slowly driving up into your nostrils.

Perhaps surprised, you think to yourself that it would be something like a welcoming ritual and stretch out your own fingers, hoping to find something like a nose on the creature opposite. Until the realization penetrates you boiling hot in that moment, it could also not be the nose, which offers itself here! Over and Out! Forget, quickly forget! Too much fantasy is imprudently sometimes!