Everything was different here, from the shapes of the houses to the educational system and even the people around me. I was seven years old when my family moved from Punjab, India to California, United States of America. I had grown up in the countryside with farms, a completely different educational system in which I was being trained to excel in subjects such as mathematics, learn four different languages, and being able to write only in cursive. I felt like an stranger in my new country and could not help but to compare my new surrounding environment to what I used to. Surely everyone around me were not walking around constantly making comparisons and having to form two different perspectives to their environment. For the natives, life was …show more content…
Recalling my personal experience of moving from India to starting a new way of life in USA helped me realize that I, too, did not immediately began sharing the same opinions and having the same views on certain topics as the natives. As an outsider, I was neither familiar with the rich history of this country and nor was I familiar with its culture. Being familiar with a country’s history and culture is cruitual knowledge that permits a foreigner to respect their new environment. The historical and cultural knowledge does not need to be relayed to one in a language of that particular country, one simply needs to be aware of it. Had I known more about my new country at the age of seven and its culture, I believe that it would’ve been easier for me to adapt to my new environment and share the same perspective on many things as the natives did. Unfortunately, this knowledge slowly came to me throughout my academic career throughout the K-12 educational system. As I became more knowledge about this country, I slowly began to view things in the same light as the natives did, I was able to relate to my peers and express the same emotions as