A time I experienced cultural confrontation was when I was traveling to the town center of Rome at night with a few of my roommates to go shopping. We decided to take the bus because it was a really far walk. It took us a while to find out how the buses operated, but we finally realized we had to take the 8 bus to get to our location. The bus ride was going fine for the first few minutes, but the driver kept letting more people onto the bus. It became really overcrowded and hot as we were all standing up and there was no space to move anywhere because everyone on the bus were so close to each other that we were touching. It got to the point where people were smushed up against the doors and people were becoming very frustrated, because it would only make the situation worse and cause us more stress which should be avoided. There was a group of people that were looking at me and my friends and started pushing us out of the way without saying excuse me and yelling at us in Italian which we thought was very rude, but we kept calm and tried not to get easily frustrated right away. This incident caught us off guard and took us by surprise because we didn’t expect any of these events to happen to us during our trip. Although this was an unfortunate thing that happened to us, it was a learning lesson and showed us a different side of Rome. This made me realize that Italy is not America and this country operates differently from what I’m used to. For future reference we now know to take the bus during the day when there are less people on the buses and avoid taking them at night as much as possible.
