Culture shock is a legit phenomenon. I remember vividly moving away for college and having to learn to live in a city where my favorite coffee chain had next to no presence, and it only made the place feel less like home. Relying on strange caffeine is no way to survive mid-terms, let me tell you.
The internet has the power to reduce culture shock just a bit, as you can easily learn about other cultures without having to step foot there. But it can’t really translate the experience of living in a new, foreign country.
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And as one Twitter user’s culture shock thread reminds us, regardless of where you’re coming from, you should probably take everything with a large grain of salt.
I don’t know much about Croatia but I never would have guessed that they use toothpaste from buckets instead of tubes.
But that’s just what Twitter user @dreampai1 suggested in a thread, expressing no small amount of shock that countries other than Croatia don’t have buckets of toothpaste in their bathrooms.
This prompted a flurry of questions from folks on Twitter, as you’d expect.
Or at least a flurry of Twitter users asking the same few questions, mainly “What the heck?” and “How do you get the toothpaste on your brush?”
As @dreampai1 explained, there’s a dedicated spoon for the toothpaste bucket, which she suggested is a more cost efficient system because you can put extra toothpaste back in the bucket, unlike with tubes.
Apparently, the toothpaste buckets come in several different sizes, from 0.5 kg (for traveling, naturally) up to 10 kg.
She suggested that she and her mother shared a two kilo bucket that lasted a couple of months, and she also explained that the family toothpaste bucket gets stored under the sink.
But then, where else would you stick two kilos of toothpaste, let alone 10?
Tubes did indeed seem like a foreign concept to her.
At least, in terms of holding toothpaste. After someone showed her a display of the typical North American toothpastes, @dreampai1 noted that in Croatia, many condiments like ketchup and mayonnaise come in tubes.
Gradually, people started to come around to the idea of buying toothpaste in buckets.
Kind of like old-world wisdom, there does seem to be an efficiency to it.
As one person pointed out, if toothpaste came in a bucket, you wouldn’t have to worry about that last bit that never seems to quite come out of the tube. So, there’s that.
But as much as in some ways toothpaste buckets might seem like a good idea, there’s just something a bit too weird about it, isn’t there?
And before long, other Croatians were chiming in, some wondering if it was maybe just a regional thing, because they had never seen toothpaste in anything but a tube.
And it’s not a claim that holds up under much scrutiny.
To her credit, @dreampai1 never fully fessed up to pulling a fast one on Twitter, but she did tip her hand just a bit to some of her fellow Croatians.
You have to admit, it’s some clever trolling, and well backed up, especially with that pic of the toothpaste spoon.
BUT! Even though it was all a prank, something pretty cool still happened.
See, maybe it was just intended for the laughs, but folks did start a small cultural exchange.
Toothpaste buckets might not be a real thing, but milk in bags sure is.
And although we probably all know that Canadians put milk in bags — well, parts of Canada, anyway — people from other nations like South Africa, Indonesia, and Colombia turned out to share that they, too, get their milk in bags.
Someone from Nigeria shared that while they get toothpaste in tubes, as usual, they can also buy it in tiny sachets, kind of like the ketchup packets you get going through drive-thru.
So, it wasn’t just a pretty epic troll job by @dreampai1. It was also a learning experience, both about other cultures, and about trusting too easily on Twitter.
Well done, @dreampai1. That was honestly hilarious.
