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DanArmak comments on Being Foreign and Being Sane - LessWrong
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It sounds like most of these experiences could be had by interacting with foreigners in your own country, too. Of course immersion helps.
You could get quite a bit of the way there, yeah. Interestingly, it's possible to have the inverse experience: lots of foreigners living here make almost no effort to interact with locals, learn the language, or experience the culture in any significant way.
I doubt there's anything quite like full-on immersion in a culture you know nothing about, though.
There's a clear difference between interacting with foreigners in your own country, and being a foreigner in another country, which is basically that when you're a foreigner, it's your beliefs/customs/mannerism that are being questioned. If everybody faces the back of the elevator, you're going to start pondering why in the U.S. you face the front of the elevator, whereas those facing the back wouldn't stop and think about why a foreigner might be facing the opposite direction.
Also, obviously, the immersion factor is there. Speaking to foreigners in your own country is not nearly as new/scary an environment as being in a completely foreign country.
Is there really a why to the direction of facing? Or is it just that both states are stable, but which one is chosen is due to uninteresting historical contingency?
Facing the front of the elevator seems to be the better choice - you can press buttons, watch the floor numbers tick up, and exit the elevator more quickly.
Facing backwards also sort of cuts out human interaction in cases where, say, somebody new enters the elevator.
The buttons are (typically) on the front of the elevator. If they were on the back, you would have to move further to press them, and it would be harder to press them in an elevator that already had some people in it. Given buttons-at-the-front design, in order for everyone to face the back of the elevator, they would have to press the button for their floor, and then turn around, and then, when their floor is reached, turn around again.