Oxford and Cultural Insensitivity

I’ve now been in Oxford for two days, and the culture shock is starting to subside.  The first day of my arrival, I was bombarded with English politeness and properness – something grossly disorienting after having been in Russia, where things are (in some ways) simple and straight forward.  People don’t smile unnecessarily, and you generally know what people honestly think…unburdened by (some/different/British) social mores and etiquette.

Judging Oxford immediately, and failing to take a good look at my own dang self, I discerned that the city was full of privileged yuppies.  Public school brats (who’d be private school brats in the USA) who never knew ‘pain’ or ‘troubles’.  Of course this is antithetical to my idea that life is difficult and challenging for everyone, only in different ways – but that everyone has their demons, cockroaches, and the like – basically I was, myself, being a stupid judgmental yuppie brat.  The fact that I was surrounded by oddly repressed heterosexual European and English men didn’t help – nor did their exhibitions of ‘masculinity’…moshing at the ‘club’ we went to, riding bikes in circles around random girls on the street, and listening to EMINEM with much pride and excitement…like it’s something cool.  The thought that they were just having ‘fun’ didn’t occur to me, or that different people can have ‘fun’ in different ways, and I determined immediately that this was how they were, all the time.  Full of bias and prejudice, and refusing to simply ‘experience’ this culture/these cultures without decision, I concluded that Oxford is the epitome of pretension and completely devoid of anyone interesting.

Today, only an hour ago, or so, I realized that my issues with leaving Russia (which I had  somehow stopped noticing) were manifesting themselves in this strange aggression to a foreign culture…that I was mentally willing to accept Russian Culture and American Culture, but that anything in between (socially, geographically, or politically) was completely unacceptable.  So – today we’re seeing things with a new light…that the city is full of young students, but that students are usually interested in exchanging ideas because ideas is what they DO all day.  They aren’t necessarily showing off, or trying to ‘win’…some are just sharing to share.  It’s a community of thought.

Some are here for sincere intellectual pursuits, some are here for the prestige, some are here for other reasons – but that the city, the university, and etc is diverse and varied – some barons and princes, of course,  but also some middle class folk who just happened to be blessed with above average intelligence and a bit of luck.

The city is not one that I fancy, still – though it’s one I’m already less at odds with.  It is old and historic, it has seen good and bad, cultural atrocities and civil injustices – but has also been and remains to be an academic, intellectual, and so progressive, center of world thought, thinking, and development.
 
I’d not come here as a student, myself, but I’m okay with those who do.

The absurd and disturbing thing really, though, was not the yuppies at Oxford or the clean city, but how culture shocked I really was, and how angry that shock made me…immediate acceptance or even neutral distancing wasn’t an option – I felt it necessary to judge judge judge from the get go.  Of course today I’M wearing white denim capris, a blue terry cloth polo, red Gucci shoes and blue Miu Miu sunglasses – with my iPod and my Dior purse – I’m not really in a place to bitch about the privileged yuppies, am I?