First Shopping Experience

While everybody else will write about their experience when they first left the States to go elsewhere like Germany, in my case is the other way around. I will talk about when I left my home town for the first time to go to the States, my first journey ever to the west, a western Country.

I was born and grew up in Northern Morocco, in a small town, colonized by Spain for a long time, my people are conservative a mix between culture and mild religious belief. I said mild because we never knew any kind of extremism. Everybody knows everybody, everybody trusts everybody and everybody respects everybody. Our close relationship with Spain opened Europe for us, we were in constant contact with their culture, their TV shows their way of living,

My first shopping experience ever was to a local Walmart, it was, in my eyes a gigantic shop, before getting to Walmart, I must say: everything I saw so far was huge, the roads, the houses even the cars were different and bigger. Back at Walmart, I didn’t know from where to start, I wanted to see everything, to read every label on every product, it was like a huge library, I remember it’s like entering a library for the first time –because I loved reading- I wanted to read every book in there not to get out until I had finished them all maybe tomorrow they wouldn’t be there…. I ended up fighting the desire to stay in the Walmart the whole day so I grabbed the essentials and went to pay, the cashier was a good person with a smiley face, but I couldn’t say anything or do anything, I kept a poker face the whole time. I didn’t know how to act, even if I knew some English I felt dumb every time someone asked me something in English, I answered with a confused smile or I turn to my husband asking him: what did they say? It took me a long time to erase my other language from my brain and focus only on English. I began understanding their way of talking but took me a longer time to get enough confidence to speak English with a native. Shopping in the States is expensive, paying bills is complicated, they keep sending you bills even if you have paid them, if you

So little by little I began to relax my face features, I began smiling to people around me. I must say I missed the warmth of people, their hospitality and their concern. When someone comes for the first time to a neighborhood, everybody welcomes them, helping them, inviting them to their house, best friends from the first day, on the other hand in the States, people don’t care, I spend more than a year in my neighborhood and I didn’t know any of my neighbors and no one ever said hi to me, a pretty big culture shock that caused me to go into a depression, for someone as lonely as I were in the States, it was very difficult for me to learn to meet and socialize no friends or family around me, so I bought a cat. I must say it was a big help for me during my stay and then my kid was born. I was adapting to the life in the States little by little, I started to adjust to my surrounding but still no social life no friends or acquaintances, but I didn’t care that much we were planning to go to Germany, I’ll be closer to