I have been in Cali, Colombia, for three months now. During these three months I’ve learned quite a few things about locals in Cali and about the Colombian culture in general. Here are ten such curiosities which have caught my attention and have once again proved that cultural differences still do exist! (Gladly!)

Have you ever wondered where your roots are, where your ancestors come from? I sure have. Why? Because A) our family history from my father’s side is quite blurry, B) strangers in Finland often tend to speak to me in English, saying I don’t look like a Finn (whatever that means…) and C) I feel so at home in Latin countries, I wonder if there’s any historic explanation to it (my dad loves to tell the story of a French organ grinder’s blood running in his veins). So, guess what? I’ve decided to do a DNA test!

I’ve been on this continent for 16 months now and during this time, I’ve often struggled with being a Finnish woman in Latin America. There are things that time after time annoy me big time and there are things I’ll probably never learn to understand or accept, having grown up in Northern Europe – the cradle of democracy and gender equality.

Traveling is wonderful. When you travel you experience unique things, meet amazing people, see outstanding places. Everyone has their own reasons for traveling and everyone’s reasons are just as valuable as the other’s. Although my personal reasons are getting to know foreign cultures, languages and people, I don’t deliberately avoid other travellers on the road. Yet, there’s something about some of these encounters that really gets me every time: the competitive traveller syndrome.

When cycling, you get asked a lot of questions. In fact, every long-distance cyclist would probably want to bang the askers in the head from time to time. Not because of the people or the questions themselves, but just because as time goes by, you answer the same questions over and over again (sometimes 5-10 times daily). And the longer your trip, the more times you do so (on a year-long trip, you’ll probably do it at least 365 times). So, to spare us (and your head from getting hurt), here’s what not to ask a long-distance cyclist. And if you’re dying to know the answers, here they are as well!

When speaking about intercultural communication, it’s often repeated by scholars in the field that it’s impossible to examine other cultures and their relations, without first taking a closer look at your own inherited culture and its influence on how we perceive the world. We are part of our culture and thus tend to act and expect others to act in a way that we have learned as “normal”.

You know those brief moments in a different culture where you go: “say whaaaat?!”. The small little details which just make you wonder…Take sweet avocado for example. Brazilians and Paraguayans (and probably many other Latin Americans) mash avocado up and mix it together with milk, lime and sugar. So imagine the looks on my hosts’ faces, when I cut my avocado into cubes and put it into a salad with salt. In the discipline of intercultural communication, this would be called a critical incident.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what could be interesting for people to read who are not here with me. I keep meeting people every single day, but how to share all this? How to turn this experience into something more universal? These questions that have been running through my head over and over ever since I started my trip. But then I met Cesar. A professional blogger from Asunción, Paraguay, whose one and only advice to me about blogging was: write what you care about.