hey everyone welcome back to my channel if you're new here
my name is sarah and i study german and italian mainly at university
and i've just started my year abroad i am currently living in
italy for this semester and then next semester i'm living in germany
since coming here not just because of cov** but because
obviously i'm in a new country i've experienced a lot of change
in these past two and a half weeks since i've come
so this is what i wanted to talk to you guys about today
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little disclaimer this is just for a bit of fun it's just some differences
and challenges maybe culture shocks a bit that
i've been trying to get used to please take this video with a pinch of salt
this isn't meant to be offensive to anyone i know that most of you guys know
that already but without any further ado let's get into it okay so the first
thing i wanted to talk to you guys about is paying for things so in the uk you
can now go to most places and pay by card i usually pay with my
phone because i've got apple wallet and if not you can pay by contactless
or at least with chip and pin but here this is less common i am gonna
say because i do live in quite a small city
at the moment it's not a big city like milan florence rome genoa although i am
moving to florence in two and a half months time now i live in
quite a small city and from what i've observed about half
of the payments which i make i can do my card
no problem but it's by no means all of them whereas in the uk it's actually
quite rare nowadays from what i've observed at
least having to pay for something with
physical cash one thing which i was quite shocked
about was that i had to pay for my rent
with cash i know that it is legit like how i um
pay my rent i don't think you would ever do that in the uk
so yeah maybe in the uk a lot of smaller places would still
only accept cash and obviously like if you're going to the ice cream van
i don't know then you would not pay with card i don't think
in most cases but any bigger purchases like
rent you would definitely pay digitally it's just a completely different custom
i think the next thing is hot beverages
this is quite a cliche i guess that brits whenever they go to
mainland europe always find difficulty in finding a cup of tea
i've experienced that myself because people just don't drink tea
here in the same way as we do in the uk although
i don't think that they do anywhere else in the world to be honest that i guess
is quite a sort of superficial difference but
digging deeper more differences are that it's not that normal to have lattes or
cappuccinos that's what you would call them in the uk anyway
after sort of 10 11 in the morning it's kind of no one really has that
it's not sort of the norm as far as i can tell i have talked to a
couple of italians that i know personally about
this and it's just not really done so yeah
you might get strange looks if you order like a cappuccino
in like the afternoon say normally if it's not that early in the morning
people usually have espressos from what i can tell anyway
also on the beverages front it is so difficult to get iced coffee
like if you are outside of a big city like
i don't know my my closest big city is genoa you can probably get an iced
coffee there but like in the town where i'm in or small city
iced coffees just really aren't a thing there is this
thing called cafe crema you can get which i really really like i mean it's
probably not very good for you because it's just absolutely full of like
cream coffee and sugar all blended together
and made cold but it's absolutely lovely to have on a hot day but sometimes i
just have such a craving for like caffeine and ice or something really
really cold in the middle of the day when it's so so so so boiling
and i just can't find that so i miss the iced coffees that you can just get
basically any high street in the uk so yeah that's another thing which i've
been trying to get used to this next one is a bit tmi but
i wanted to talk about this because i'd never seen this before i had
gone to italy last year and that is toilets without a
seat not just like toilets with a pan and
then like not that but toilets which like you have
to stand on and then it there's just like a
small hole which like everything goes in with literally nothing sort of elevated
above the hole if you know what i mean i don't
know if i'm saying this right but i'll try and get a picture up as a woman
i'm not comfortable with using this i might have to get comfortable with it at
some point but at the moment i'm just not it's a new
experience eh i've noticed this in germany as well
smoking actual tobacco cigarettes is a lot more common
here whilst in the uk e-cigarettes are becoming a lot more
common you get so many like whole shops just dedicated to
e-cigarette vapes that's not really a thing as much in
italy i don't think it's also a lot easier to buy tobacco in my opinion so
i don't smoke and i never want to smoke but
i was running an errand for someone and i bought tobacco for them
at um tabaccheria like tobacconist and i literally told them what i wanted to
get i handed over the money and i just took it no questions asked whereas
in the uk i think if you look under 25 get id'd or carded just to get
some tobacco to smoke so i found that quite strange i think
they are just so much more laid back on continental europe though because in
germany i remember trying to buy a glass of wine when i was 17 and there were no
questions asked because the drinking age was 16.
even though i look very young some people say that i still look like
14. i don't know how old i look i'm not wearing much makeup at all i'm literally
just wearing a bit of mascara so i don't know how old i look this is
what i actually look like i guess um let me know how old do you think i
look but yeah um i would definitely be
getting id's in the uk if i was still to buy
alcohol or tobacco like most of my friends would be so
yeah and i'm 21 by the way okay so also there is quite a lack of
secondhand shops here like in some of the bigger places
i have noticed that there are a couple at least
yeah in italy there aren't really charity shops
that's not really a thing so yeah there must be some but i just
haven't found any yet and i don't think that i will find any in
the tiny place i'm in at the moment or like quite small place
but you know like on a typical high street in the uk you would have
in terms of charity shops you would normally have like an oxfam a cancer
research maybe a british heart foundation
but there just aren't any charity shops in italy which
i do find slightly a bit of a shock because as you guys probably might know
if you know me well or you've been watching this channel for
a while you will know that i don't really like buying new clothes
i love second-hand clothes but i don't like buying new clothes like i have a
lot of problems with them ethically and stuff
and i think that because i do normally have access to buying
second-hand clothes i try and just buy second-hand clothes as much as i can
so i find that in italy this aspect is quite difficult for me
um and i've also found that because the weather is so hot it's just been
so much hotter than i was expecting it to be i mean i know that sounds really
silly but i of course i knew that it would be 30
degrees but whilst in the uk it's only like 30
degrees for like two maybe three days and then it's a thunderstorm and it's
just 20 degrees for another month initially it's just continually like
that so i just i have to do a lot of washing so that i
have clothes constantly suitable for this kind of hot
weather so yeah i think that i really hope that
in the future charity shops will catch on this to
leave at the moment they're not really a thing
and now a train is coming so i'm going to stop for a bit
yeah i live right by a railway line so i get this quite a lot so yeah those
were my i think it was five cultural differences
or culture shocks that i've experienced so far in italy
there will probably be more so i might make a part two of this
but for now after two and a half weeks of living in italy and
i was also an au pair for three weeks last year i've spent
overall over a month in italy now in all the time i've been here so
i have noticed quite a few differences and i hope you guys have enjoyed
hearing about them from what i have observed
and from what i'm trying to understand of italy another little disclaimer this
is just from yeah my perception don't know if it's
the case everywhere i know that a lot of them are
sort of already quite well known but i've tried to sort of
find the ones which are less so let me know what you guys think have you
found any culture shocks from going to a different country from where you are
or a different region or whatever i'd love to know
that so feel free to comment of course not all of these things
are bad things a lot of them are literally just differences which
could be even better if you get used to them if you know what i mean
and there are a lot of things which actually i think that italy does a lot
better so i think i'm going to make a video on
that soon as well because they are different ones to these so yeah
thanks so much for watching please give this a thumbs up if you enjoyed it
subscribe to my channel and i will see you in another video very soon, bye!
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