Tim Boudreau's Blog

Culture shock

So in November I moved to California - back in the U.S. after years away. And I'm working in marketing now (no, I haven't given up programming! But NetBeans has desparately needed a real marketing team for years and now we actually have one!).

When you live away from your native land, you get used to things where you are - but it happens so slowly you don't notice it. So coming back is interesting - first, things have changed while you away, and second, you have changed while you were away - your definition of normal has subtlely shifted. Sometimes it's amusing, sometimes it's disturbing. Here's what's weird:

• I talk on elevators - Americans have a sort of taboo about talking to strangers on elevators - it's like we're all trapped in this small space, and slightly afraid of each other or something. NetBeans original office in Prague was in an airplane parts factory. Every morning I'd ride the elevator with a bunch of guys going to other offices. And I would get off the elevator on our floor, and there would be a chorus of "Na schledanou" (good bye) from the folks still on the elevator. I didn't know what to make of it, and I asked my ex-girlfriend about it. She said "Well, Tim, they're pointing out that you were rude and didn't say 'Dobrý den' [good day] when you got on!" Light dawns on marble head... Now breaking the habit is the challenge, so I don't weird out people on american elevators!
• So, how is everything? - The inevitable question when you've just taken a particularly large mouthful of food in a restaurant (is the timing part of the training?). My idea of service in a restaurant is if it takes less than half an hour to get the check, and if I actually get what I ordered (waitress brings soda water. Tim: "But I ordered a cola!" Waitress: "But I brought you soda water" [walks away]). The "So how is everything?" question just induces panic, and grunting affirmitively while chewing apparently isn't an effective response. Seriously, though: I went to the same pub on my corner for lunch 3 times a week for two years, when I was working on NetBeans book. One day, after about a year and a half, the old woman who ran the place asked me "Jak se mas?" (How are you?). That was an incredibly touching moment - I was accepted as a local - and in Czech culture, if you are asking that, you actually want to know the answer.
• The explosion of cards in my wallet - In Prague, I needed my drivers license, my metro pass my health card and bank card with me. My wallet is already exploding with Costco, Albertsons, Safeway, Hollywood Video, dental, medical, optical etc. cards. I need a new wallet to fit it all.
• Health care is not simple - I lived in a country with a system of socialized medicine, and excellent health care for five years. Choose your own doctor? Sure - there's only one plan, and every doctor's on it. Go to the doctor? Show them the card, done. Need medication? Show them the card, done. High taxes? Yeah. And you get what you pay for. Best public transportation in the world - believe me, I saved in not needing a car everything I paid in taxes and then some. I spent 2.5 hours in an "orientation" at Sun U.S. where 50 of us discussed all our myriad health care options, all of which, well, suck in one way or another. Let's just contemplate the cost to the economy of Sun (and every other company in this country) having to pay 50 people for two and a half hours to sit in a room and do Q&A or which way we want to get screwed. It doesn't have to be like this - I've lived the alternative, and while it's not perfect there either, it's a serious improvement. This mess is just silly.
• We have a primitive banking system - if I never see another paper cheque in my life it won't be too soon
• September 11 changed a lot of things - I'd flown back to Prague the day before. My coworker Mike came by my office and said "The U.S. is under terrorist attack." I asked him what he'd been smoking. Some other people ran down the hall. We made a coat-hanger antenna in the conference room TV and saw the second tower fall. It was late afternoon. You really wouldn't believe the outpouring of sympathy - I met up with some fellow Americans in Prague later. The Czech bartender was crying. Nobody could believe it. Everybody took it personally, not just Americans. The hardest thing was that you simply couldn't get through on the phone, not that day. Coming home, I find people have a different attitude to the rest of the world than when I left in 1999. More aware, which is good, but more scared, which I wish weren't the case.

Now, it's not all complaints - there are things which I've really missed:

• Good ethnic food - I was on a five year quest for a good burrito in Prague; typically there's an attitude that you pretty much wrap some random stuff in a tortilla and your done. Probably the most stunning example was the brussel sprout burrito.
• Dishwashers - oh, the luxury, oh the arguments that don't have to happen. I'm lovin' it!
• Clothes dryers - for the first time in five years, I do not have laundry hung to dry on a line suspended above my kitchen table! It's decadent!

So, it's good to be back, and it's weird to be back, and it'll be nice to be in one place long enough to feel like I live there (that won't happen until at least next month - in the next blog I'll talk about my upcoming NetBeans road-show - driving the long route from Massachusetts to California and demoing NetBeans everywhere I can between here and there!).

Comments

• "Ethnic" food in the US is among the worst in the world.
  Maybe the Czechs aren't big on Mexican, which happens to be the only halfway decent foreign food I've ever been able to find in the US outside China town but in most European countries there's an abundance of foreign restaurants and shops catering specifically to people wanting to prepare it.

  Even in the small town I live there's several excellent Italian, Chinese, Thai, and other restaurants as well as a shop selling genuine Surinam and Chinese ingredients (some of which are also available on your average supermarket shelf).
  Want African or Asian vegetables? No problem in many cities. Bakeries sell Turkish style bread next to the local varieties.
  

  Posted by: jwenting on January 10, 2005 at 02:04 AM

• I'm curious where you live in Europe. I remember my excitement the first time, in 2000, that I found celery. I was in the new Carrefour in Ostrava. I was thrilled - "Wow, I can make a salad!" This was exciting. There were two heads of celery in the grocery. A chinese woman was at the vegetable rack and had one. We communicated together in broken Czech - she asked me what it was called in Czech. I said I didn't know. She had taken it up to the guy who weighs and stamps your vegetables, and he had told her "You can't buy that. I don't know what it is." So I did my best brash American impression, and said to him "This an onion." He rang up both our heads of celery as onions and we went home happy.So, "ethnic" food in the U.S. may not always be so ethnic...but I'm pretty darned happy to go to a chinese restaurant and not get a variation on styrofoam in salt and starch sauce, and pretty pleased that my vegetable choices are not limited to pickled white cabbage or, if I'm feeling adventurous, pickled red cabbage, and if it's an expensive place, a pile of carrot shavings with my cabbage.Consider the possibility that you simply haven't plumbed the depths of bad "ethnic" food. There are many things I love about the Czech Republic - I chose to live there for five years - it was not for no reason! Food just doesn't happen to be one of the reasons.To be fair, Italian food in Prague is excellent - what you would expect to find only in a high-end Italian restaurant in the U.S. is the fare you can find in a run-of-the-mill pizzeria. And Haveli, the Indian restaurant at Hradčanská in Prague, far and away the best Indian restaurant I've eaten in anywhere, and I've been to many in many countries.

  Posted by: timboudreau on January 10, 2005 at 03:00 AM

• Welcome home Tim!

  I spent a week in Czech Republic, Prague specifically. It is such a beautiful city; I definitely plan to visit again. Having lived in Europe for extended periods of time; perhaps oddly, the thing I missed most was big US-style refrigerators.

  Best wishes in your new assignment. As a former IDE hater; I recently downloaded NetBeans, and it won me over immediately! It was so intuitive, it's like I had been using it for years! Ironically, just prior to that, I had downloaded Eclipse, and was convinced that IDE usability had actually become worse, over the years since I'd checked last.

  John

  Posted by: cajo on January 10, 2005 at 08:00 AM

• Netbeans has to work on that refactoring to get me back in the fold.

  From my experiences traveling there's nothing like customer service in the US. I had a english hotel cashier at one of nicest hotels in London try to scold us for asking for extra copies of OUR bill. Definitely miss the clothes shopping in Paris though.

  Posted by: smartinumcp on January 12, 2005 at 08:11 AM

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