The things we do here don’t always translate very well to other cultures. Especially hellos and goodbyes.
My daughter participated in a student exchange program this summer. She traveled to Belgium and stayed for a month with a family that also has a 16-year-old daughter, Melanie. They then came here and stayed a month together at my house.
When Belgians say “hello” they lightly touch cheeks and sort of make a kissing sound. If you know the person well, you touch one cheek, then the other. When you say “goodbye” and you know the person really, really well and you’re really, really sad to be saying goodbye, then you may do the kiss thing three or four times.
Unfortunately, my daughter had not been well coached in this custom. When she first got off the plane, one of the family members made a move to say “hello”, and she thought she was about to get a hug. So she wrapped her arms around him to return the hug.
He thought he was being mugged instead of hugged. He didn’t know what to make of this weird girl who didn’t know how to say “hello”.
She later explained that Americans hug a lot. We hug hello, we hug goodbye, we hug just to hug. So, when we picked them up at the airport, Melanie knew what to do … and hugged each of us as we welcomed her to Texas.
When we left the airport, we met up at a house where the family also had an exchange student. I didn’t know this family at all. We made introductions, and Melanie went right up and gave the man of the house a big ol’ bear hug. Oops.
We realized then that we forgot to tell her we don’t always hug to say “hello”. If we don’t know someone well, we shake hands. So, we coached Melanie about shaking hands.
For the next several days she met numerous people and she would always look to us for a cue as to whether she should shake hands or hug.
Then my daughter started taking her out to do teenage stuff with friends. Melanie would meet someone and immediately stick her hand out in greeting.
The teenagers looked at her hand as if it were an alien. Why is this hand here? What does she expect me to do? It would be so uncool to shake her hand.
We realized that teenagers never shake hands when meeting each other. It’s very subtle, but if you study teenage boys closely, you can see that they nod their heads slightly when they meet someone. Other than that, they usually just poke their hands deep into their pockets and look at their feet.
Teenage girls say, “Hi!” then turn back around and continue the conversation they were having with somebody else.
If they are meeting someone for the second time, they say, almost without exception, “Wassup?!”
So, we taught Melanie how to say “Nuthin’ much. Just chillin’ here.” It took us awhile to convince her to drop the “g’s” at the ends of the word. It just didn’t sound right when she said, “Nothing much. Just chilling here.”
Some of the guy teenagers found out about Belgian hellos, and when they saw Melanie, they would run up and say, “I want a Belgian hello, not an American one.” So, she would kiss them on the cheek. It wasn’t long before there was a line of guys waiting to tell her hello.
“That’s awesome,” I heard one of them tell another.
Melanie left to go back home yesterday. It was an international event … there was a lot of kissing AND hugging going on.
And now we’re just chillin’.
