Travelling or moving to another country could be a huge surprise to almost everyone as some people may need to spend sometimes adapting to the new environment and culture.
In my culture, when people greet each other, if they are the same age, they would just say “Hi” or “Hello” (Sour Sdey: Khmer Word). If they are in different ages, the younger one needs to greet the old one first by saying Hello (Jomreap Sour: Khmer word) with a Wai gesture.
Greeting in Hungary is different from my home country. Hungarian usually do European greeting such as handshakes with eye contact, and cheek kissing. They consider eye contact during greeting is very crucial, if you avoid eye contact, they will think you have something to hide them or you are being evasive. Hungarian men need to wait for women to initiate the handshake first before they can do it. Moreover, between close friends, they greet each other with cheek kissing.
Even the statue of Hungarian and Soviet greeting each other also showed that they used handshaking as the symbol of friendship.
I would say it could be a huge surprise for me as Cambodian people are very restricted from close contact with strangers. It may somehow feel a bit uncomfortable when it comes to kissing and handshaking. Even with close friends, we never do any cheek kissing at all.
To minimise culture shock when travelling abroad, it is best to do some research before travelling, so that you can at least get some familiar information that you could be prepared for. Furthermore, the only thing you can do to eliminate the confusion is to learn and try to adapt to the new environment. It may take some time, but it will totally work in some days.
STAY OPTIMISTIC AS ALWAYS
Budapest, the Marvellous city 