Teaching culture in the L2 classroom

Teaching culture is a good way for students to learn about the language they are studying.  It allows them to make connections and comparisons with their own language and culture.  I think teaching culture is a very important part of teaching L2, but I think that it is difficult in lower level classes.  I think it is easy to teach some parts of culture to beginning L2 learners, such as food, holidays, and sports (with popular teams being a natural continuation).  However, I think teaching culture also means including dialect differences, register changes, current events, and history, all of which could be difficult for beginner L2 learners.  This means that in the lower level L2 classroom, culture should be something that is not very concrete yet, but rather something fluid that is always changing.  A good example is something I have experienced in the classroom.  When our textbook covered Colombia, it limited the culture portion of the chapter to the various geographical regions, cultural diversity within the population, and some key, legal, exports.  This means that the students learned a few general facts about Colombia, but did not learn about the dangerous politics, violent current events, or bloody history of that country.  This is a good example of my point because these things could be a lot to handle for a new L2 learner who would need not only to process these things, but to understand the language behind them to truly grasp the culture they were being taught. 
As stated in the book, teaching "facts" about a culture's current events, politics, and even history is difficult because these things can change dramatically depending on the situation in that particular country.  Current events, which are an important part of learning about a new culture, are also difficult to teach because to be current, they need to be happening as they are being taught.  This becomes difficult for beginner L2 learners especially because they may need to learn a lot of new vocab just to keep up with the stories, making it harder for them to entirely understand the events and the cultures they are tied to. 
Another problem stated in the book is that it is difficult to dispel stereotypes when teaching culture because, unless the curriculum calls for it, there may not be enough time to go in depth about everything that is taught, leading to the creation of stereotypes, which can be very detrimental to L2 learners.  The book says that this "information-only" approach "provides no means of accounting for cultural variation," which is essential for culture learning in L2 students. 
Another problem with teaching culture in the classroom is that some students may become too focused on the culture they have studied, and become ignorant to other parts of culture or other cultures entirely.  A student who has learned a lot about Mexican culture and little about Argentinian culture could find themselves at a huge disadvantage if they ever found themselves in Argentina.  Those two countries, although often lumped together as "Latin American" in some contexts, are very different in culture as well as in language itself. 
So, i think that although it is important to learn about the cultures of the new language, I think that it is also important to know that the difficulties that come along with teaching culture are substantial.  Teaching culture to beginner L2 learners should be very different than teaching culture to advanced L2 learners.