The Intercultural New way of Living

Now a day, people around the world are so connected to each other. The technology we use that influences our lives makes it impossible for people to keep apart from other nations and cultures. We are so much dependent on each other and if one wants to be part of the International life that is becoming so important whether in education or business, have no choice but embrace the new way of shared living!
The United Kingdom offers a very good example on International shared living. In one street you might find four, five and sometimes more different ethnical groups living together. Many example cases are very successful and people manage to accept other cultures and  traditions without any (or at least obvious) problems, embracing the colourful International life that they are and have become part of.

However, the question that interests me is how much people get to know or are interested in knowing about other’s cultural habits? Do we try and find out more about our neighbours faith, practice and way of living? Or do we go by smiling, nodding at each other, meanwhile forming our own unfounded thoughts and ideas about a certain ethnical group based on rumours, bad examples of certain people and TV reports, ignoring the obvious that we are so individual in our thinking and opinions regardless of what ethnical group we belong to !

In my personal opinion embracing and taking a positive step forward towards International life and participating in an active role in our International community is very important now a day, and not only for profit sake but for achieving harmonic way of living.

Hatred, false assumptions and ignorance is the worst enemy for any community that grows mistrust between its community members.
Knowledge and understanding offers enlightment to people who seek it!

Having people skills is not about using it only with your friends, family and collegues anymore, with people who share same values, traditions and if I may add WAY OF THINKING!!!

We need to train to develop those skills into taking all people in. People from diffrent cultures, relegion, race, continents etc.
The key to succeed is understanding the other's culture (s) firslty, secondly accept (respect) and thirdly use it to our advantage.

Now I'm not saying it's going to be easy and quick to acheive, but I believe it is worth the try.

Therefore, I decided to dedicate a few posts taking each time a certain country explaining a bit about its social, cultural, business etiquette and any other relevant information.

I’m hoping that travellers, International students, businessmen/women and any individual ready to embrace their International life will benefit from the information, and as always I will be happy for any comments or suggestions.