Learning about different theories of intercultural communication and models of culture in the past couple of classes broaden my horizons on better understanding how the word “culture” is and how much is there still to learn and understand about it. I guess this class is helping me a lot in realizing that there are so many angles and perspectives from which we can look at culture. I came in on the stage of “top of the iceberg”, moving slowly towards the deeper part and now stepping back to see a bigger picture.

There are concepts that we all acknowledge, such as time, for example, however, each culture makes the habits around it so unique and diverse. I never questioned that time would be such a significant and interesting aspect to look at among different countries. This allows us to group countries like we looked at last class at Hall’s model of time. There is monochronic time, when you focus on one thing at a time, values privacy, task-oriented, time management, low context; and polychronic time when you are doing several things at a time, relationships are important, people oriented, associated with the high context. I realized that being influenced by so many cultures in my life, I am somewhere in between of those two, which is totally fine. Regarding the notion of time in each country and on the discussion we had in class, it was interesting to see how my culture differs from the US one, but coming here I had to adapt and come on time for certain meetings since punctuality is very important here. This made me think of Bennett’s article and the stages that we go through to adapt to a new environment, instead of assimilating.