A Chronicle of Culture Shock in India

Last Updated on July 29, 2025

For most of us, a little bit of culture shock while traveling India is inevitable. Here’s what I experienced, as well as tips for coping with culture shock in India and around the world.

“Nothing prepares you for India.” An older Canadian woman cautioned us as we chatted with her amongst the temples of Bagan, Myanmar. We heard this same response from most people when we told them we were heading to India for several months.

My partner and I had been traveling Asia for half a year already, and we felt confident about transitioning to travel in India, because we felt we were well equipped for culture shock.

So when my own parents told me that “India was a different playing field,” I took their comment with a grain of salt. The night before our flight to Kolkata my partner and I both admitted to each other that we were nervous for what was to come.

The culture shock in India in the beginning was hard. India challenged us like no other travel experience had, and that’s part of why we fell in love with the region. But we also fell in love with India’s diverse culture, people, landscapes and more.

In our first 30 days in India we travelled by bus, train, and auto-rickshaw over 3000 kilometers. We had had flawless days and difficult days. We had incredible food. We saw difficult scenes, we saw beautiful scenes.

What follows is a diary of our first thirty days in India. The things we saw and experienced which impacted us the most, and how culture shock in India felt. Of course, what we saw is not all of India.

While the memories I share here are honest, it’s important to note that India is an incredibly vast and diverse country. My partner and I saw only a small snippet of what India is.

Our experience was shaped by where within India we went, the budget we traveled on, and the people we met.

Our first few days in Kolkata, India.

We landed in Kolkata, India, and were overwhelmed by the smells, noise, traffic, colours and sheer amount of people in the pulsing city. This sense of pure overwhelming by the culture, people and city around us was the first inkling of culture shock we would feel. Everything around us was new and different and unlike anything we’d experienced before.

We soon discovered the challenges of booking a train ticket in India. Here’s the thing. In India it isn’t commonplace for foreigners to book their train tickets online. Instead, you’ve got to book in a designated office. After two hours in what we thought was the correct office, we learned that it wasn’t.

We were sent to another office, where we spent five hours waiting to see an agent. Total waiting time? 7 hours. The actual booking process? It took 5 minutes.

Despite hours of waiting, we had fun. We chatted with other people waiting in the office, and we took turns exploring the street food stands just outside.

We watched locals bathe in the Hooghly River, while others picked through the garbage that floated by. Kolkata is one of India’s most impoverished cities. Adjusting to seeing poverty on the daily was difficult. There had been poverty in South East Asia as well, but it is masked by backpacker trails and tourist towns. In Kolkata, it isn’t hidden.

We traveled on to Varanasi, India.

Our first overnight train trip in India was a breeze. We slept soundly in our berths, and woke up in Varanasi. As the train pulled into the station, the family across from us started exclaiming things as they pulled out their bags.

We asked around trying to figure out what everyone was animatedly talking about. Overnight, it turns out, rats had chewed through peoples bags. Luckily, none got into our things!

Are you ready to travel India? Read Your Guide to Visiting India for the First Time!

The Hindu approach to death in Varanasi, India is very different from the Western approach. People travel to Varanasi specifically to die there, because devout Hindus believe that cremation in holy Varanasi allows them to achieve moksha?liberation from reincarnation. If you die in Varanasi, you’ll go directly to nirvana.

We held back our own tears as we heard a man wail for his baba, whose body was burning on the ghats. It was hard to adjust to the constant sounds, smells, and visions of death around the city. We realized that just because death in Varanasi is a celebration, doesn’t mean that people don’t mourn their loved ones.

One evening a man asked us for a photo, and within seconds an entire extended Indian family asked for individual photos. It was a 20 minute affair and involved alot of hand shaking. We learned quickly that this would happen often.

Sometimes when a person would stop us, we would know what they were about to ask. My partner loved to surprise the person by asking them for a photo before they could ask us. It always results in collective laughter.

Several days in Agra, India.

As our train entered Agra early in the morning, an Indian family ushered us to their window for our first view of the Taj Mahal. We could see it’s glistening white domes in the distance, bright from the light of the sunrise. It was absolutely magnificent. The following day we woke to see the Taj Mahal at dawn. I will never forget how the first rays of sun light so beautifully reflect off the white marble.

Later, as we wandered Agra town, we smiled and waved as hoards’ of children yelled helllooooo! From the rooftops.

We both felt ill. Eleven days into our vegetarian diet of spicy curries, the change in food was taking a bit of a toll. I made the mistake of chugging water to combat the spiciness, until a local man in a restaurant saw me doing this, and, laughing, handed me some lassi. Apparently lassi and other dairy products are the best way to neutralize spicy foods!

Planning a trip to India? Read my guide to visiting Hampi, Karnataka and Jaisalmer, Rajasthan.

As we walked down a narrow street, we made a quick turn to avoid some street dogs, who were fighting over some scraps of food. We had noticed lots of street dogs, and lots of garbage in the streets, in the cities we’d visited so far. Here’s the thing, though. As westerners we live at the top of the global pyramid of consumption.

We consume far more in a year than the average Indian. In India, the average amount of trash discarded per day is one pound. The average American discards 4 times that.

We had our lunch in a small cafe called Sheroes Hangout. It is run by women who have survived acid attacks, attacks typically committed by husbands or men that they know, in an attempt to assert control and power over women. It was difficult to see the evidence of such attacks on these women’s faces. Their willingness to take up public space despite being rejected by society is inspiring. Their stories should be heard.

We arrived in Jaipur, Rajasthan.

The stifling heat and noise of Jaipur exhausted us. So after a short walk through the pink city, we returned to the silence of our hotel room. We learned quickly in India that a hotel room becomes your oasis. It is important to rest. We hung around the hotel chatting with the staff, and watching movies on our phones.

We visited 6 ATMs before we found one that worked. Some of them were broken, some had super long lines, and some were just completely out of cash. In India there is roughly one ATM per 6,500 people. India also has around 21% of the world’s unbanked people.

We trekked up a small mountain to a monkey temple, and watched as the monkeys dove into a pool and swam. They played in the water and took turns diving into the different pools. Who knew monkeys like to swim? Apparently they like it because its a great way to cool down. Here’s a video!

Spending Diwali in Pushkar.

We arrived in Pushkar, the holiest city in India, for Diwali, the Festival of Lights. In the evening we watched as thousands of candles were placed around the ghats of the town’s holy lake.

The twinkling of thousands of candles was absolutely magical. The Festival of Lights is now celebrated all over the world, through firework displays, street parades and the lighting of candles.

And off to Jaisalmer, Rajasthan we went.

We learned that in Rajasthan marijuana is legal, and they like to put it in a yogurt drink called lassi. They call it bhang lassi. The great Anthony Bourdain called it that “crazy weed drink of India” in an episode of his show, No Reservations.

Well, the shop that Bourdain visited still exists, and they proudly proclaim that they are the shop that Bourdain has bhang lassi at. We stopped by, and a man tried to sell us on it, claiming it would give us “full power for 24 hour, no toilet, no shower!” We weren’t sure we wanted to find out what that means, but we had fun laughing with the shopkeepers.

In the evenings the air would cool a little bit, and we would wander out on to the streets of the Jaisalmer fort to explore. Our favourite thing to do quickly became petting cows.

In India, more than 5.2 million stray cows roam sidewalks in major cities, block traffic in small villages and, well, destroy fields. Cows are considered sacred in Hinduism, which is practiced by nearly 80 percent of India’s more than 1 billion people. In many states, the slaughter of cows in prohibited. And so, they roam free.

In my city upbringing, I never really encountered cows, or farm animals for that matter. In India, I fell in love with cows. They are gentle, kind animals that wander and sleep in the streets and alleys.

The fort of Jaisalmer was a definite haven for cows, because there weren’t many vehicles in the fort. So in the evenings, we would wander around saying hi to all the cows. Much of the time, they love being pet. Some cows would follow us down alleys, nudging us for another pat.

We stayed several nights inside one of the only continuously inhabited ancient forts in the world. In the middle of the desert, it was 40 degrees, and power outages happened several times a day.

We spent many evenings sweating in our room hoping for the fan to come back on. Finally we caved and climbed onto the roof where we could sleep on the cold stone. We soon noticed that lots of other people were sleeping on rooftops too!

We rode camels out into the Thar Desert where we cooked dinner over a fire. We slept with blankets on a sand dune. All of it was romantic except for sleeping on a sand dune …black beetles crawled all over us and we woke up with sand in all our crevices.

As we ate breakfast, we asked our guide where the camels had gone overnight. “We have to go find them” he said. It turns out they set the camels loose over night! So we spent our morning tracking the camels down.

A bus ride to Jodhpur, Rajasthan.

We waited for the bus on the side of a road. I was eating some butter cookies, my favourite snack in India. I grabbed little packets of these cookies from the snack stalls, and always boarded busses with a bunch of them.

Sitting on the curb, I suddenly felt a nudge. A cow! The cow snatched the cookie from my hands and turned away to eat it. Pretty soon I had a new best friend. All over India, we would see sneaky cows snatching snacks from shops, and then the shopkeeper would come running with a stick, yelling. Scenes like this always made me smile.

We took a 6 hour local bus ride to Jodhpur. The bus was crammed full with Indians standing in all the aisles. We drove through our first full-pledged dust storm, and when we got to our hotel room we showered off a thick layer of dust.

Jodhpur is one of the most polluted cities in the entire world, and I found myself needing to take my inhaler every once in a while to help with breathing.

We booked a hotel room for the two of us. When we checked in we were shown a room with a single bed and one pillow. When we brought this up with our host, explaining that it might be tough for us to both sleep in the tiny bed, our host insisted, “but it’s a double bed!”

Exploring Udaipur, India’s romantic city.

An elderly man in a shop in Udaipur took my hand and pulled me down to sit next to him. He wanted to share his grapes with me. He asked me questions in broken English. Before we left, he pointed to my partner and asked me – is he your husband? Soon, I told him. He smiled and told me “make sure he is good to you.”

We took an overnight non AC bus to Mumbai. The 17 hour trip was tough. All night long we were sweating, and the bumpy road meant we were bounced around. I had trouble breathing because of the dust wafting through the windows.

We did not sleep and I spent the morning crying until finally we were dropped on the side of a highway in Mumbai. In moments like this one it was obvious how privileged I am to have never experienced uncomfortable transportation.

After the first month in India, we went to the United Arab Emirates for a week to refresh before returning to India. After just a few days, we missed India, and when we returned, our outlook was so different.

We had adjusted to the culture shock – we’d figured things out. How to book a train or a bus, how to cope with the heat, what food to eat, how to communicate. And suddenly, everything was amazing.

While the rest of our time in India wasn’t always a breeze, we had countless incredible experiences that we will never forget. The dog named “Puppy” that our homestay had, who followed us all around the town of Hampi.

Swimming in the ocean on the beaches of Varkala and exploring the canals of Kerala. Hiking through tea plantations in the hills of Munnar and watching wild elephants grazing.

What is culture shock in India?

The feeling of disorientation experienced by someone who is suddenly subjected to an unfamiliar culture, way of life, or set of attitudes.

Culture shock is experienced differently amongst people, and to varying degrees. For some, it will show itself in tiredness, irritability, or the need to cry (that’s me!). In some cases, culture shock is just an intense missing of home.

Culture shock is often not experienced right away. It can take weeks, sometimes months, for the feelings to be felt. Whilst living in The Netherlands, I only began to feel it after about 3 months, when the subtle differences between Canada, my home country, and The Netherlands became more obvious to me.

In India, my culture shock kicked in in the first two weeks, but after about one month, I had adjusted. My experience of culture shock has been different according to country. In Japan, for example, I was certainly culture shocked, but it did not feel frustratingly difficult to overcome.

How do I cope with culture shock in India?

Culture shock is normal and often inevitable. That said, the way people experience it can vary. Here are some tactics that have helped me through bouts of culture shock:

• Keep your mental health in mind! You can read in this blog, 12 Tips For Managing Mental Health and Travel
• Talk with other travelers about your experiences. I find that talking out the differences that are frustrating or fascinating in a foreign country helps immensely.
• Chat with friends or family at home. If you haven’t got a travel partner or met other travelers, talking out your experiences with people at home can help!
• Take time to rest. Afternoon naps, rest days cooped up in your hotel room are needed and deserved!
• Write down your experiences. Travel journals are a popular method for remembering experiences on the road, but are also a great way to help cope with shock. Writing it out has a therapeutic function.
• Educate yourself about the local culture that you are experiencing. Information is power, and once you understand the history and logic behind local cultural norms, it is much easier to adjust to them.
• Bring along some favourite books and media. When I feel overwhelmed, it’s nice to settle down in my hotel room and tap into a familiar story. It’s an opportunity to retreat into something you know.

Are you ready to travel India!? Be sure to read Your Guide to Visiting India for the First Time

More from Pina Travels:

• An Overnight Jaisalmer Desert Tour
• Places to Visit in Hampi, India
• 12 Tips For Managing Mental Health and Travel
  
  

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