I was in an anthropology class the other day with my favourite professor (who is American). She was trying to get us to think about how our homes say a lot about our culture. I won't bore you with the details, but she got to saying that in Canada, we have mudrooms at the back door of newer houses for us to take our shoes off when we come in. And in Canada, we use the "foyer"/front entrance as a place to take off our shoes before we enter the house. So I asked her, "what do you mean, IN CANADA? what do Americans do?". She replied, "We don't take our shoes off at the front door!".
Most of us in the class kind of started laughing, it seemed so strange. She was immediately bombarded with questions: Doesn't your house get dirty? Do you have to clean more often? Do you just wear shoes all the time, then? When do you take your shoes off? Do you wear your shoes on the furniture? Where do you store your shoes?
She laughed back at us, obviously. It's so funny to find those little differences between cultures we consider to be quite similar. The guy sitting beside me said, "I remember times as a kid that I already had my shoes on and I forgot my keys in the house: I would crawl on my hands and knees to get my keys because my mom would go nuts if I wore my shoes on her carpet!" and it's so true, I've done it too!
So American ladies, does it seem funny to you that we can't enter a house with our shoes on?
What about the Canadians? Is this funny/totally bizarre to you?
5 wonderful comments:
Haha - I totally relate to the crawling-on-your-knees story. Now that I'm an adult in my own home, I obviously wouldn't do that, but if I need to go into my house with my shoes on, I always tiptoe. As if somehow that will keep things SO much cleaner... :)
My ball players from Texas never took their shoes off unless they were wet or muddy. They probably wondered why I always took my shoes off, but they never asked. I did have to clean the floors more when they were here.
As you get older, you get less fussy about these things. I often wear my shoes into the house now. But, Tara, I can totally relate to the tiptoe walk.
Yeah.. kind of funny to think about it. I'll keep my shoes on in the house, but I take them off in my bedroom so I can put them away. It's not like I walk around my house 24/7 wearing shoes. I find it odd to take your shoes off in the foyer because I have so many different pairs of shoes I wear that I'd just have a pile of shoes at the door! And to think of Matt's shoes on top of that -- yuck. Too many shoes by the door. We put them in the closet, lol
Sarah, that is a good point. We generally have a closet right at the front door to store our shoes, which may be more of a Canadian thing? Also, my prof suggested that it might be an adaptation to the climate: we don't want to track snow in for the 6 months of the year that it's on the ground!
Uk here. Most people seem to remove their shoes at the door over here. It's something I grew up with and I absolutely insist on shoes coming off at the door in my own house with my own family. We have an entrance hall with an adjacent closet. So our shoes go in there. We keep our slippers in there, so shoes off slippers on. At present it's very wet and cold here, and we haven't had any really warm weather since the summer of 2006..
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