One of my first experiences after arriving abroad was a funny but prevalent moment of cultural confrontation. Freshly off the plane, trying to settle in at my new London flat one of the first things that I needed to do was grocery shop. Obviously, I know that grocery shopping in a new country would not be identical to grocery shopping at home but what I hadn’t expected to be different is the shopping carts. I was sleep deprived and had just finished around 48 hours of travel to finally get to London, so I was definitely on a short fuse. My roommate and I were in desperate need of just enough groceries to get us through our first 24 hours, so we took an Uber to the closest big grocery store. We got out of the Uber with high spirits ready to get some real food so we could cook ourselves a meal that was more filling than the coffee and airplane food that we had been running on for the last day. Little did we know our very first moments at the grocery store would be some of the worst cultural confrontation we would experience in the early days of our time abroad. We go to get a shopping cart (or trolley in England) and they are all locked together with chains. Confused about how we are going to get a cart out we decide it is not worth trying to figure out on our own, so we spectate as locals release the carts from the others and go on their way. The verdict is, we need a coin to release the lock, but to our dismay, we did not have any coins yet as we had literally just arrived. Feeling desperate we go to the customer service counter and plead that we just need one coin to get a shopping cart because we are fresh off the plane from America, thankfully the nice man at the counter did not hesitate to hand us over a 20p coin. Thanks to the man at customer service, we had no problem getting a cart and finally getting groceries.
