Culture Share: USA (NY) - A Walk to the Subway in Brooklyn, NY, USA

This post is part of The Writer's International Culture Share, in which writers discuss their personal experience with world cultures: Nicole Lisa discusses her home of Brooklyn, New York.


A Walk to the Subway in Brooklyn, NY, USA

by Nicole Lisa


The New York City of television and movies is cleaned up or dirtied down or filmed somewhere else entirely, and doesn't much look or feel like the city I know and live in. Walking to the subway—something I do almost every day—reminds me of all the things I love about living here.

Brooklyn, one of the boroughs of New York City, is known for its culturally diverse neighborhoods, like Chinatown in Sunset Park, or Italian Bensonhurst. But in some areas, diversity happens on a micro scale—by block, building or even inside each building.

Before I leave my apartment building, I say good bye to my husband in Spanish (actually “ciao,” borrowed from Italian by some South Americans), hear the video game sounds of Russian television programming at full blast and pass brass or plastic mezuzahs on doorframes (small rectangular cases with a Jewish prayer inside).

During the week, on my 15-minute walk to the subway I dodge groups of teenagers chattering loudly in English, get distracted by a mom urging her son to walk faster in Mexican Spanish (“Orále, hijo”) and glance at a group of men sitting on their heels against the stucco wall of a deli, speaking quietly in Tibetan.

On the weekend, on this same walk, when the sidewalks are full of women, I might be one of the few with her head not covered. Hasidic Jews, dressed in black with their elbows and knees covered by long sleeves and long skirts, cover their hair, either with perfectly styled wigs or snoods that gather their hair at the nape of their necks. They tow large families of kids identically clad in home-made clothes. South Asian women, some Muslim, some not, wear bright butterfly-colored salwar kameez (a tunic and loose trousers) that cover most everything, or saris, that may leave arms bare, but cover knees and chests. Their heads are draped casually with a dupatta (a long scarf), more carefully with a pinned hajib, or even more carefully with a black niqab (a head covering with a veil). Fewer children accompany them, maybe only one or two, dressed in a mix of Western and Asian clothing. On summer days, I often wonder what the women think of me, with my uncovered head and knees and tank top.

Off the main commercial street, the buildings change from small free-standing homes mixed with large brick apartment buildings to mansions built at the turn of the Nineteenth Century. They’re really in a motley of styles, from an English cottage covered in roses, to actual Victorian mansions with wide porches and colorful gingerbread moldings...

to a Swiss chalet–Japanese temple hybrid in green and orange.


Flocks of chickens strut in a few driveways and eye passersby suspiciously. Chickens are popular again in Brooklyn, and people raise them in their backyards or in community gardens. Twenty years ago, mostly recent immigrants, or transplants from rural areas, kept chickens. Now many people who’ve never seen a farm keep them (and bees, since the city just reversed the ordinance making beehives illegal).

In other parts of Brooklyn, the row houses seen on TV are the norm: two- or three-story buildings with facades of brown or white stone, connected all down the block by shared walls, with high stoops leading to the entrance on the parlor floor—the main living area of the house if it's a one-family, or one of several apartments if it’s been divided up. Nineteenth Century cast iron fences with pineapple or urn-like finials enclose the front yards and under-stairs entrances to the ground floors—nowadays the coveted garden apartment with access to the backyard. The iron has to be repainted every five years or so to prevent thick orange rust. And there are specialists who replace the stone facades if they’ve become too damaged by pollution or lack of upkeep.

On Sundays, there’s a greenmarket in front of the library on my way to the subway. Farmers from New York State and nearby New Jersey and Pennsylvania set up tents and sell their bread, dairy, produce, sometimes fish, beef or chicken, and local honey directly to customers. On a fall day, you’d see baguettes and pumpkin pies, pears and apples, winter squash, carrots and potatoes, fresh yogurt and milk (sometimes the illegal unpasteurized kind), and hot apple cider and cider doughnuts. The doughnuts come with or without granulated sugar sprinkled on top. Past the greenmarket is the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) pick-up spot. If you join a CSA, you buy a share, or subscription, of produce for the growing season, and each week you pick up a box of whatever the farmer is growing and lug it home on foot.

Finally, I reach the subway. The whole system is old, dug or raised, and cobbled together over more than 100 years and it looks it: metal wheels squeal against metal tracks, the I-beams are exposed and often unpainted, nascent stalactites and stalagmites grow where mineral-heavy water drips through ceilings and walls year after year, and the big brown rats are bold enough to scamper across the platform while you stand there late at night. It’s dirty in a way that surprises Americans from other parts of the country and visitors from all over the world, but it takes us where we need to go (mostly), and makes New York City unique in the US, a place where a car is a liability, not a necessity.

My stop is outside, looking more like a suburban train station than a tourist's idea of the New York City subway. Sub means below or under, and my stop is below street level in a cut out, but it’s not under anything. Once, we had an out-of-town visitor decide he was lost when he got there. He returned to our apartment rather than risk getting on a strange train going who knows where. To make it more confusing, New Yorkers use “subway” and “train” kind of interchangeably. Subway is the system, but train is what you get on. Which isn’t that much of a problem, but we don’t always distinguish in speech between the subway (a purely intra-city system) and the trains on one of the five rail systems that will take you out of the city.

The suburban train feel is accentuated by the station house. In Manhattan, many subway entrances are simply stairs descending to toll stiles. But many, especially in the other boroughs, have actual station houses. This one, built in 1907 for the street-level, then-privately owned Brighton line (named for the beach/neighborhood of the same name at the last stop) hangs suspended above the tracks.

The other subway option in the neighborhood is this one’s opposite in every way; it’s an elevated train that runs three stories above the street on a wooden platform that feels like it’s been there since the original station opened in 1919 (although I don’t know if that’s true) and yet feels temporary too. The whole structure sways when trains pull in or grind away, and the whole world moves—a mini, localized earthquake. If you look down on the tracks, you can see bits of street, vertiginously. And if you drop your cell phone, fuhgeddaboutit (forget about it), as we really do say in Brooklyn. Maybe just not as often as in the movies.



Nicole Lisa is a Brooklynite by adoption. She writes YA and fantasy and is currently struggling with how to conduct research for her work in progress. She loves to geek out on language discussions, eat and travel. She has lived in Mexico, Nicaragua and several different states in the US and speaks Spanish and first generation Spanglish at home with her Chilean-born husband. She can be found at her blog Reading, Writing and the ‘Rhythmatic of Life and on twitter.

Culture Share: USA - The US through UK Eyes: What's in a Name? And Other Language Differences

This post is part of The Writer's International Culture Share, in which writers discuss their personal experience with world cultures: Laura Pepper Wu discusses her culture shock upon arriving in the USA.

The US through UK Eyes: What’s In a Name? And Other Language Differences.

by Laura Pepper Wu

I think the reason that I experienced so much culture shock on my arrival to the US was that I was totally, 100%, unprepared for it. I had lived in Asia for almost 4 years prior, so moving to the US seemed like it was going to be a breeze. I was expecting no language problems, a similar culture, and I felt that since I had seen so many US movies and TV shows that nothing could surprise me. How wrong I was!

The big, obvious differences were the easiest to grasp and get used to. Within a couple of weeks I no longer gasped at the size of the food portions or the oversized cars that rule the road in California. It took me a little longer to grasp the opening hours of the shops, to feel comfortable driving on the right hand side of the road, to remember that I could turn right on a red light, but perhaps only a month or two. It was the small, subtle differences that really got me. The ones that I couldn't even put my finger on until a visiting friend pointed them out, or until they would suddenly dawn on me months into my stay here. This is what I would like to talk about today.

When British people meet for the first time in any situation, be it at the park, at the pub or even at a party, we rarely, if ever, exchange names until it is absolutely necessary. You can talk to someone at the pub for hours until you ask for their name, usually when he or she is about to leave or you have to excuse yourself. Neighbors might say hello to each other every morning for years without ever knowing what to call each other. If you bump into someone on the street and talk for the first time it might be considered rather intrusive to ever ask for their name without having a good reason to know (for example exchanging phone numbers or to find out if you know people in common). And yet here in the US I am asked for my name on a daily basis. It's usually the first thing people ask when we meet; they extend their hand and say "Hi, I'm John" even before we have had a conversation.

The first time I was asked my name in Starbucks I was shocked that they were going to call out my name and everyone in the store would know who I was and what I had ordered. It just seemed so personal!

I also realized early on that it is important for Americans to be called by their full name and that shortening the name might be considered rude or disrespectful. For Brits it's the norm; David is always Dave, Benjamin is always Ben, Thomas is usually Tom. And the abbreviations don't stop there. We will often replace a name with honey, love, babe, chuck, duck, sweetie, mate - anything to avoid using the name which might be construed as aggressive or too direct. In my dealings with American friends I have found it to be quite the opposite. Emails and texts will often begin with Dear Laura, Hi Laura and so on, which I have slowly learned is not aggressive but is instead considered to be respectful. This took me a while to get used to - I have a string of nicknames that I am known by and nobody calls me Laura in England except for my mother (and only when she is angry!)

Moving on from names, but remaining on the topic of the use of language, another subtle culture difference that I notice is the usage of the words sorry and thank you. Observe a transaction with a Brit over the counter and the Brit might say thank you several times; once when handing over the item to the cashier, once when receiving change, once when receiving the item back, and perhaps once again just for good measure. Here in the US I noticed that one thank you is sufficient, if it is said at all. Sorry is again used sparingly compared to the Brits; we are more likely to apologize to others for every small inconvenience that we cause which I have been told appears as passive or weak to an American.

When we talk about the difference between American English and British English, the emphasis is often on vocabulary. We say porridge, you say oatmeal; we say cotton bud, you say q-tip and so on. But the differences extend much further than that, to grammar as well. Brits ask questions differently using a lot more of the present perfect tense: “Have you had a nice day?” versus “Did you have a nice day?”. “Have you been dieting?” versus “Are you on a diet?”. I’ve certainly sub-consciously used the present perfect less since moving to the US; many of my friends and family in California speak English as a second language and would certainly have difficulty understanding what I was saying if I spoke English how I did 5 years ago.

To anyone making the transatlantic move, or to those in business who might deal with clients or colleagues from “across the pond”, I think it’s important for us to realise that just because we speak a similar language, we are two different cultures with two very different ways of thinking and interacting. This is something that has surprised me and continues to surprise me everyday and is worth keeping in mind.

How about you: have you ever had culture shock in a land that you thought you should be familiar with?


Born and raised in England, Laura Pepper Wu set off to Japan for a post-college adventure 5 years ago and hasn't quite made it back yet! She and her husband now live in sunny California where she writes to her heart's content and runs the site http://LadiesWhoCritique.com: a community for writers of all levels to find the perfect critique partner.

Culture Share: USA - The Reno you didn't see

This post is part of The Writer's International Culture Share, in which writers discuss their personal experience with world cultures. Colin Fisk discusses Reno, Nevada in the wake of the 2011 WorldCon science fiction and fantasy convention.

After reading a lot of Twitter and blogs posts from WorldCon about Reno, I thought people might want to see a different side of the town than the absurdly tacky, smoke-filled casinos that were, for many people, their only images of Reno. Even those who left the convention for the morning “Walk with the Stars” didn’t see an area of town that would leave a favorable impression. I should clarify this was not the fault of the organizers, but given the walk was designed to get people out of the hotel/convention hall for a quick stroll and have them back in time for the first panels of the day, the options were limited and the route chosen was the only one which had any small amount of nature in it.

The sad truth is that the area between the Peppermill and the Atlantis/Convention Center is on the edge of the low income/gang territories. So for those convention goers, Reno definitely gave an impression that was less than favorable. And, should people have decided to venture downtown, they most likely did so down South Virginia which is a quirky combination of art stores, neat resale/antique shops, low rent hotels and a lot of smut: from sleazy lingerie shops to exotic dancer “gentleman’s” clubs complete with large LED signs which rival the Peppermill and Atlantis. And then there’s downtown. In the space of six blocks you can go through the beautiful Riverwalk with its art galleries and downtown water adventure park which is home to many events including an annual kayak race, stroll past one of the oldest churches in the west as well as another which still has a working pipe organ and come face to face with a lot of half-gutted casinos which were being refurbished into luxury condominiums when the economy went south as well as pawn shops and the flashing lights of gambling halls in “attract mode.”

Looking at Reno from these viewpoints it doesn’t seem to have a lot to offer.

I won’t go into the amazing laundry list of places to go and geological wonders the area has (for example, most people don’t know that the Truckee river, which flows through downtown, runs south to north, one of a few rivers in the world to do so), which were discussed at the aptly named Welcome to Reno panel which opened WorldCon on Wednesday. I’m not even going to discuss the artistic culture which ranges from the aforementioned Riverwalk, a plethora of pre-Burning Man events (the majority of the large temples are constructed in Reno), to the month-long celebration of art in July with the not so creative name of Artown (http://www.renoisartown.com/) as well as many Burning Man groups such as the Controlled Burn fire dancers who make their permanent residence here.

From my perspective, one of the attractions of Reno that many people who visit will most likely never experience is the melding of suburbia with nature.



I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for the better part of twenty-five years. During that time, the majority of my time was spent in suburban areas. On any given day, the fauna you were exposed to was limited to small birds with perhaps the occasional raccoon or opossum at night.

The area we live in in Reno was swampy farmland some fifteen years ago. Today, the majority of the swamp has been drained and large suburban tracts exist. However, in order to maintain adequate drainage, throughout these suburban areas there are ponds and the natural channels which fed the wetlands less than two decades before.

As a result, there exists small ecosystems within the cookie cutter housing tracts, all lined with walking paths which allow nature to maintain an odd balance within the intrusion of human housing growth.

In the open space behind our house (less than 100 yards to a major road so not as wide as to encourage a complete reclaiming by nature), there are a pair of mated Northern Harriers that have lived there for the five years we have. It’s a daily occurrence for the female of the pair to cruise through our backyard at dusk and often the male hunts through our yard several times during the daylight. The same area this year has been home to a pair of mated Red-tailed hawks. Though we live several miles from the hills, it’s not uncommon during the summer to hear coyotes trying to bait the local dogs out into the field behind our house.


My wife and I walk most days or evenings along this path; a loop totaling two and a half miles which takes us past a pond some two hundred yards from our front door and down alongside the drainage canals. As an amateur photographer, I’ve now cataloged seventeen or more different types of ducks in the pond, not to mention the Great Blue Herons and Egrets (both Snowy and Great,) and, much to our delight, a mated pair of Night Herons which had three offspring a year ago, two of which have stayed in the area as well.

Several times a year, the pond also hosts white pelicans. As I understand it, many years ago Pyramid Lake (home to some amazing Paiute petroglyphs on the nearby reservation) was an inland sea. As such, there are still pelicans which are native to the area, and while there has been a group of three that have been weekending on our pond for several months, usually our view of the pelicans come in the form of a vanguard of consisting of a few one afternoon, a flotilla upwards of sixty the following day and the next morning they take flight again toward their ultimate destination.

The additional birds which inhabit the pond and drainage range from the American Avocet, to Sandpipers, Virginia Rail, Sora as well as Flickers, Tern and vibrantly colored Swallows. During the winter, the pond has plays host to the occasional Snow Goose as well as many Kestrels.


So, for every glowing slot machine that beckons you to leave your money behind, nature counters with the occasional black bear wandering down from the Lake Tahoe area. For each classic car that comes to town for Hot August Nights, many species of hawks fly above the town. During the ski season, four wheel drive SUV’s with California plates slip and slide through intersections as magpies look down contemptuously from lamp posts. And while the bald eagle balloon which makes its appearance every year at the Great Balloon Race is neat, it doesn’t compare to the actual Bald and Golden Eagles which float higher than their propane-heated counterparts.

Colin Fisk lives in Reno, Nevada.

A different value: Teeth

I'm going to spend some time in a periodontist's chair tomorrow, so tonight I'm thinking about teeth.

I look around at America today and I see that teeth are treated as a big deal. Especially white teeth. There are lots of smiles that have seen extensive orthodontics - including mine! Lots which have been whitened (not including mine). Teeth are a whole business which advertises at us constantly. The best brush, the best toothpaste, the best whitener, etc. etc. We are told to brush twice daily, floss daily, see the dentist every six months for a cleaning and checkup.

Not everyone thinks about teeth this way.

I remember when I was studying early hominids, I was fascinated to learn that up to a certain time period, cavities (they were referred to as caries in this context) didn't exist. Skulls dated after the beginning of that period are often found to have rotting teeth; skulls from the earlier period don't. Imagine it!

When I went to Japan, I was warned not to try to go to the dentist. One of my friends said memorably, "If you have a cavity, wait a year." What I discovered when I was there was an entirely different attitude toward dentistry. I saw little or no orthodontics. I saw lots and lots of people with missing teeth, partly missing teeth (ack!), very crooked teeth, etc. I tried to think about it in comparison with the attitude toward teeth in ancient Japan, where a young woman's teeth were seen as showy and after marriage women would blacken their teeth. In any case, one of my host moms went to see the dentist for tooth pain and reported when she came back that she'd been told if it continued, she could have the tooth pulled out. I shuddered.

I admit this was quite a stressor on me, and on my attempts to keep an open mind. It's interesting how much harder it is to be culturally sensitive when the effects of an alternate belief system may be directly applied to a part of one's body. Fortunately, I didn't encounter tooth trouble while I was there.

After I returned from Japan, I met a young woman who had moved to the US from Japan, and I learned something else. She preferred the Japanese way, and complained that she was always having to go to the dentist here, and that every time she went they seemed to find something wrong, so she wondered why she kept going at all. This surprised me a lot, but on one level it does make sense. It simply grows out of a very different way of thinking about the problem.

I think there are lots of possible attitudes to have about one's teeth, ranging from absolute not caring to hyperattentiveness to their health and appearance. In our own world you can find a large degree of variation, both in attitudes and in the base conditions that influence oral health. Different environmental factors like the available food and drink can have a huge influence on the amount of care that teeth need (I think immediately of Dances With Wolves). Not caring for one's teeth can't really be considered neglect if the natural foods you eat don't cause you to have trouble with them. It's only neglect if it results in bad oral health. The amount of care we Americans need to take of our teeth certainly has a lot to do with the amount of sugary food we eat. And of course in our own country oral health brings along with it a good number of related issues, like fluoridation of water, or heart disease's link to periodontal disease, or school registration for Kindergarteners.

People often neglect the question of teeth in their worldbuilding. It's simpler to create a fantasy world where you don't have to worry about tooth care - and not entirely implausible, in fact, if you think about it from the early hominids' point of view. It's certainly nicer not to have to worry about whether your potential love interest's mouth is a complete nightmare. Still, I always appreciate when some little attention is paid to such things, even so far as to give a small nod to why people's teeth look or feel the way they do.

It's something to think about.