I would like to read people's real life experiences with cultural differences and misunderstandings, possibly beyond American/Japanese because there are a zillion books about this pair. For instance, Israeli-English, Spanish-Indian, Chinese-Scandinavian, and so on.
I am interested in "situations" both in everyday life (shopping, meeting people, family life...) and business life (negotiations, partnerships, written statements, management,...).
I can start with one example- Italy-Sweden - eating grapes is done differently. In Sweden grapes are eaten from the center of the table where everyone picks one grape at the time. This is very unpolite in Italy, where each person takes a full bunch then eats the single grapes from his/her own dish. Viceversa, the Italian way is considered very rude in Sweden. I understand the reason for this difference is that grapes are a scarse resource in Sweden where they are considered precious and it is polite to share a small quantity among everyone. On the opposite, grapes are abundant in Italy (the word Italy comes from "the land of grapes" in ancient Greek) and it is unpolite to pick a single grape from anyone else's bunch.
