A world away in CyprusMy name is Human and I have chosen to write about the five years spent adapting to and understanding the culture I encountered while living in the village of Cyprus Ypsonas, Cyprus. After growing up on Long Island for most of my life, I was accustomed to the culture and social norms of the United States. All my life I had thought that society was the same everywhere and that the world was all similar in customs and culture. This idea was shattered shortly thereafter, when at the age of seven my family moved to Cyprus and my view of culture and society remained predominantly American. Before moving to Cyprus, I was adjusting well to my new journey in New York public school, where I absorbed the cultural norms of the society around me and began making efforts to blend in. As a child, I worked hard to conform to society and did my best to adopt the customs and culture of the world around me. In first grade, this seemed easy, as I was raised much like the people around me, but everything changed a few months later. After school summer break, my family and I took off from John F. Kennedy Airport where I set out on my trip to Europe, where I would face the biggest change of my young life and where I could fully realize my cultural ideals . moved forever. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The culture I was immersed in shaped who I was, and at that time the nutritional culture of suburban New York consisted of eating "all-American foods"', like hot dogs, hamburgers, and stakes, on the couch, alone, with a fork, spoon or knife. In Cyprus it was quite common for locals to eat in a different social dimension. The social dimension, i.e. how one eats in relation to who is at the table and why, was completely different in Ypsonas, Cyprus. Being used to eating alone while watching TV, I was shocked when I discovered that every evening everyone from all branches of the family ate together at the table. Even the temporal dimensions, otherwise known as when we ate and for how long, were different from what I was used to. The locals ate exactly at six every evening and spent more than an hour eating alone. The whole family met at the same time every night and ate like it was a party, every single night. To my surprise, everyone at the table was relatively slim and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Body size, also known as body image in Cypriot culture, was much more fitness oriented than in the United States. This meant that people would put more effort into keeping their bodies healthy and fit, which differed from what I was used to in the United States. Mechanical solidarity, a term for societies with limited social diversity, a common language, a common ethnicity and common religions, initially seemed to describe Cyprus. This description seemed real to me for a long time, and was only disproved when I was old enough to explore the country. Around the age of ten I was able to go out more and explore the area around me, which led me to discover that Ypsonas was more like organic solidarity. This meant that the society was diverse and had high levels of privacy, with no common language, many ethnicities, and no common religion. This meant there were hundreds of languages ​​and dialects to learn, with a diverse population to discover. Like the United States, Cyprus had solidarity.