One time I faced “culture shock” was when I was seven years old and came to the United States from a country known as the United Arab Emirates, o United Arab Emirates Before coming to the United States, I grew up in the Muslim-majority emirate of Sharjah, near the world-famous emirate and city of Dubai. In my neighborhood, many people were from South Asia or the Emirates. This means that growing up, everything I saw and heard came from a person from the Middle East or South Asia. At seven years old I was well aware that there were different types of languages ​​and religions because many of my neighbors were Muslim and my family's origin was Hindu. My family spoke Bengali, while my neighbors spoke Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, Tamil. However, that was the extent of my knowledge of the world firsthand. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay As a child I really loved cartoons, so I would watch TV. And so I watched a lot of cartoon shows like Dora the Explorer and The Magic School Bus. I followed him very carefully and often interrupted my father while he was watching cricket to follow Dora with "hola", "uno, dos, thres" and "rojo" or "azul". Yet, I had never heard those phrases spoken out loud by anyone else. In fact, I had never seen a Hispanic person before in my life. And so I sincerely believed that the language Dora spoke, Spanish, was an invented language! With The Magic School Bus, I enjoyed many of the lessons from the teacher, Mrs. Frizzle. But the reason I couldn't stop looking at the characters was because they looked so different from people I'd seen before in real life! I understood that there was variation in skin color since my father is on the darker side and my mother is very pale, but I hadn't met people with very different facial features. I had never seen an African person before in my life, or a Caucasian person with red hair, or an East Asian person. When I first arrived at John F. Kennedy Airport, I was immediately overwhelmed just by observing the environment around me. I noticed that there were hundreds of people frantically running to various locations. Additionally, I noticed that this was the most diverse crowd I had ever witnessed in my seven-year life. I saw white people, Hispanic people, black people, East Asian people. There were people from all over the world, which was uncommon to see in Sharjah in 2008 and still extremely foreign today in my parents' home country of Bangladesh. During the three hours my family and I were stuck at the airport, I couldn't stop asking my mother questions about the people passing by: "Why does this person have big hair?", "Why does this lady have eyes so blue?" , "How can that family be so dark?" These are just some of the questions I asked. I was in awe and fear at the same time of my new surroundings. That year I was admitted to the first grade. I refused to talk to anyone because everyone seemed extremely divergent. Even though I knew fluent English, I was so afraid to open up. I didn't look like the other kids, I didn't talk exactly like them, I didn't dress exactly like them, so I figured I didn't even think exactly like them. I have perceived many differences from the moment I arrived in this country. For example, I've noticed that you can't just go around saying good morning to everyone. Another example is that in Sharjah I went to a private school, so I had to depend on my own.