When people experience and talk about cultural alterity, they normally refer to polar scales, like “individual/collective orientation patterns” or “direct/indirect ways of speaking” etc. The project of the research group (Inter-)Cultural Communication in Interaction entitled Intercultural communication in extended contacts: linguistic and (self-) reflexive processes (2012–2016) intended to disclose how exchange students retrospectively co-construct and frame their experiences abroad on a verbal, vocal, and visual-corporal plane in evoked talk on encountered divergent cultural differences. The empirical data of the study stem from the corpus recorded by the research group's activities started off at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Brazil in 2012. The specific aim was to disclose the link between communicative and cognitive processes coming into play in the co-construction of cultural dimensions in interaction, particularly by the multimodal use of key metaphors and their underlying image schemas. For the theoretical background, conversation analysis and interactional linguistics with its focus on prosodic cues, as well as recent work on the multimodality of cognitive metaphor with its crucial contribution to gesture studies, function as a starting point for a more detailed microanalytic approach as a first step of assay. In a second step, results indicate studies in the field of intercultural pragmatics, as well as underlying polar cognitive cultural schemas, as debated in cultural linguistics. Schemas found in the sequences might be associated with cultural styles reflected in embodied communication practices: These are strength/looseness, the conceptualization of people/cultures as open or closed, which refers to the container schema, as well as rectilinear/deviating motions designed in relation to the source-path-goal schema.