Being in a foreign country, miles from home is not always easy nor do we always highlight the whole story of what looks like glorious travels. I have been trying to make the most of my time abroad which has included traveling to a new area or country outside of Rome every weekend. With this, comes experiencing many different cultures and new things in different places that are difficult to follow from an outsider. One moment that sticks out in particular was on the train this weekend traveling to Milan. It was the longest train we had been on, about five hours. Subconsciously my roommate and I tend to rest our feet on the empty seat in front of us, knowing our shoes are not dirty, and no one is going to be sitting in that chair for the duration of our long trip. In America I never had any issues with putting feet on the seat. But when we did this on our train to Milan it resulted in an elderly mean raising his voice at us lecturing for ten minutes in Italian. We were caught so off guard and confused by why this man was clearly so angry at us when we did not think we were doing anything wrong. The man did not work on the train and was being rude even though we had no idea what he was saying. When we were finally able to get a word out to say no Italian and we had no idea what he was saying he stormed off. After the fact, we talked with the kind Italian woman who also spoke English sitting next to us. She informed us that it is very offensive to Italians to put feet on other chairs. If she did not tell us about this we would have had no idea what we did in the situation. She explained they view street shoes to not touch anything besides the outside ground. This is why Italians will have you remove your shoes at the door at their house, or at the gym you have to bring a separate pair of shoes to wear while working out. It was very easy in this situation to get frustrated with a complete stranger raising his voice at us. But, after the kind Italian explained to us what we were doing and why the man was so upset we were able to better understand a difference in the culture that Americans would not get as upset as they do. After this we were complaining about wanting to go back to America because we did not understand why anyone wouldn’t want to make themselves more comfortable for a five hour train ride especially on a seat that people just sit on. To let it go we tried to talk to the Italian lady and explain to her where we were coming from and move on. It is frustrating but we just had to talk to each other and accept the fact that we are in there culture and are just going to have to adjust and respect that or be prepared to be yelled at. Part of it we were able to find humorous because this small of a thing did not seem like a big deal to us and this man had also just wasted a lot of breath on us when we had no idea what he was saying.
