I’ve only been abroad one time, and there were little gecko/lizard things everywhere, climbing up walls and scurrying across roads, and nobody cared. I was constantly fascinated but to the locals they’re just kinda there.
Bonus question to anyone who visited the UK - was there anything that fascinated you but I’d be taking for granted?
Pic unrelated.
Apfelschorle
I grew up in Portsmouth, England. Some my friends would come to school from the Isle of Wight on the hovercraft service. We all thought the hovercraft was pretty cool, but I only recently found out that it’s the only commercially operated hovercraft in the whole world.
There used to be one across the channel but it was discontinued some time ago. I took it once. It was cramped and noisy, but fast.
Is it still operating? For some reason I thought it stopped quite a while ago. Or maybe that’s the one that used to cross the channel.
Yes it is! Costs £20 if i remember correctly
Yeah, still running like normal: https://www.hovertravel.co.uk/.
I grew up in Gosport and enjoy the looks I get when describing that we needed to get a ferry across the harbour if we wanted to go to a club like Walkabout. I hear the overnight ferry stopped running so you’re screwed trying to get home late now.
I was in pompy 2 years ago and yes i found the hovercrafts cool. I didnt know that fact! Thanks! I wonder if my boyfriend from pompy knows that fact too.
Fratton is quite scary though ngl
Having young men and some women ride public transport in full military get up including their military gun.
I’ve often overheard tourists talking about them with respect or feeling alarmed something crazy is going on. The funniest one, was an older American tourist asking them for directions and talking very, very, very respectfull to them. The scene was just to comical seeing a bunch of boomers being so respectfull towards 18 years olds.
Meanwhile for us here it’s the most normal thing in the world to see a bunch of recruits going home from training or going to their base by train. If anyone feels anything towards them, it’s pity. Because most of them are just there because they have to and not because they want to.
This:
Photo was taken on the pin here, facing in the same direction as the camera. It is very pretty here.
(Note: I cannot afford the two commas it takes to live here, I live in the Portland metro area.)
Let’s be honest, that was a humble brag adding a picture of a State Park.
Winter. I guess it’s different when you only put up with the endless darkness, cold and snow a week once in your life.
I’m originally from Florida and I moved to Minnesota as an adult. It blew my mind when I realized it was colder outside than it was in my freezer. I was in college my first few winters up here and the first good snowfall a group of freshmen from more tropical climates (mostly southern China) wandered outside in awe to play in the snow and even after my first winter I usually joined them because I know when winter stops being magical it starts being miserable and I’d like to put off the misery until February or so.
It blew my mind when I realized it was colder outside than it was in my freezer.
That pivotal moment when you drive home from the grocery store on a frigid evening and realize, “It’s so cold, I don’t have to rush to put away the frozen stuff. In fact, I could just leave it in the car overnight if I really wanted to!”
I don’t think I’ve ever been tired of winter, and I’ve lived in Ohio most of my life. That said I’ve never lived somewhere that gets enough snow that it starts crushing the things from the weight of it.
Summer? I’m sick of summer halfway through Spring.
Perth just had is coldest maximum temperature in 50 years: 11.4°C
Also:
OP, I want you to know that you are not alone, I am also a Brit who loves seeing all the wee reptiles scooting about when he visits places that have them. We barely have any here and they’re fun tiny little dinosaurs!
The right to roam was something I found really charming and fascinating when I visited Scotland. We took a tour to see some standing stones and other ancient monuments, and I was shocked to find out that several of our destinations were in people’s sheep pastures.
Our guide was really strict about our not littering (duh) or feeding the sheep (which I never would have dreamed of doing). He said that in some of the more popular places, the farmers have lost livestock to idiot tourists feeding them whatever junk food they have on hand.
Thank you for adventuring responsibly! I’m glad you had a good time here
(Mostly) very good public transit in big cities and even in some smaller areas.
I personally still love to see the mountains. I grew up in a place scraped flat by glaciers in the US and seeing the mountains on a couple of sides of me every day here in Japan still feels really neat and inspiring, even a decade in.
I grew up near Oceana Naval Air Base. Only tourists look up when they hear jet noise.
I used to work in a building that had a room dedicated to testing weapons and ammunition at the end of the hall opposite my office … They tested by live firing. When I started there, it got a good startle out of me the first time or two, then I subsequently chuckled at all the new hires being similarly caught off guard.
Sadly, one guy who came through was a veteran with PTSD. Even the plumbing banging in the walls put him on alert. Actual live firing weapons were (understandably) too much to bear and they didn’t do it on a schedule so we couldn’t just not be there when it happened. (None of the above is meant to make light of the situation; I genuinely felt sorry for the guy and tried to figure out a way to help the whole time he was there.)
There’s a happy ending, though! He was only exposed to that experience 2-3 times (it wasn’t frequent) before he found another job more suited to his needs - one that offered a pension, no less.
The lack of a speed limit on our highways. Some people come here just to drive on a boring frigging highway.
Bonus question to anyone who visited the UK - was there anything that fascinated you but I’d be taking for granted?
Double decker buses maybe. I found them pretty cool compared to the boring buses we usually have here.
We had bendy buses for a brief moment.
Now those wouldn’t actually be exciting to me as a German, that’s the type of bus I rode to school on. :)
i NORCAL they are basically on the most of the lines that travel the longest routes.
no speed limit is annoying as fuck. there is absolute chaos on the autobahn because of it. everyone drives at different speeds and dangerous manouvres (like tailgating, driving 200 kmh on a full road or in the rain) are common occurances. i hate driving in germany. we are an idiot nation when it comes to driving and cars in general
it actually creates a lot of traffic jams too. The differences in speed and the goal to drive even faster produce hard braking moments which have a chain reaction. Especially in rush hour, where it matters, we really don’t get anywhere faster.
We are stupid for not limiting speed
Yeah, I could do without it. When it’s really empty, it can be nice to go 180 for a bit, but more often than not, it causes the kind of problems you mentioned.
Imagine drivers 10x worse and that’s the USA.
So one fact that I like telling people in America and they dont fully understand: I have 2 speeding tickets in my life and both come from the autobahn
username checks out!
how did you get them?
Driving too fast
So only between cities is it without speed. Which I didnt know when I first got there. The next time I was just being dumb, showing off, and didnt notice
The worst part is when you get a ticket, especially at night, they essentially flash bang you to get a clear picture of your face. So not only are you speeding but now your blind for a couple seconds.
Driving 200 kmh is also incredibly wasteful
But it’s super fun
For the people who need the adrenaline rush we could reduce the driving speed on the Autobahn but add something dangerous to the car. Maybe add a random chance for the airbag to activate or tires to explode.
That would still be just as dangerous for other drivers…
A little less, less speed means less energy and more time for others to react
You’re failing to account for the fact that this would seemingly cause more crashes per distance driven…
Urban foxes are in every city. Foxes and coyotes. You just dont see them often.
Anecdotally I would say that London specifically, rather than the UK as a whole, has either an unusually high population of foxes or a unusually bold one. I’ve never seen so many out in the open as there
Coyotes are only a thing in the Americas, I’m pretty sure.
Forgive an old bushcrafter. I default to my known region.
Also, urban foxes. I saw foxes maybe three times in my life before going to London, where they’re basically seen as a nuisance.
I didn’t know they were common in London but I also saw a fox when I was there. It just went through people‘s yards and stopped in the middle of the street to look at us.
Bikes! I live in Copenhagen and they’re everywhere of course. I love seeing people at a big train station taking pics of cycle parking being overfull
Same, im in The Netherlands.
At a train station in Amsterdam, there were so many bikes parked you couldn’t count them. And it wasn’t a major hub. I just stared in wonder.
I moved to the midwest USA 15 years ago and I still can’t get over the trees screaming at me. It’s deafening but no one seems to care.
The trees are silent where I come from
I live in Cincinnati and I care. I find the cicadas incredibly annoying. Not only the noise, they also leave their shells all over the place and walking down the sidewalk creeps me out. crunch crunch crunch
Em, what?
oh, riiiiiight. Did you know someone who moved from CA complained to the town hall open mic night in my town about them? As in “what will we do about the noise?”
We have cicadas in Provence, but only when I moved to southern Japan did I understand the meaning of the adjective deafening. They must be a different species. I had to actually scream to my partner to be heard.
must be a different species
They are! Japanese cicadas are more shrill than the ones found in other parts of the world, and even the different subspecies within Japan have different frequencies they shrill at. I swear the cicadas in Okinawa were more ear piercing than the ones around Tokyo when we visited, but my family didn’t believe me :')
Sweet, appreciate the info
South East Queensland (going from when I first moved here from Tassie) - the weather, the wild parrots and other birdlife (curlew’s cries still freak me out in the middle of the night). Also, I love my resident gecko bros: they keep the insects down, and their chirping soothes me.
Bonus answer from when I was in the UK - squirrels.
I feel like you could set the clock to birds here sometimes - Wake up = all the little birds, lorikeets
Lunchtime= plovers, as people navigate around them
Arvo= cockies and corellas
Evening = not a bird, but fruit bats
Random time during the middle of the night= the blood curdling scream of the curlews.
There’s also a bird I hear every morning I call the ‘Austin Powers Bird’ that does a call that sounds exactly like this . Anyone know what bird does that?
I mostly recall the cry of the plover from the early evenings in Tassie.
The cacophony from a lorikeet’s tree at dusk is something else. There’s thousands of them, and the poop scars the landscape.
The tides at the Bay of Fundy. Highest tides in the world but you have to watch it for 12 hours. Tourist flock there and the locals don’t understand the appeal.
I peeked at a timelapse or two. Holy shit, 17 meters ? I’ve never heard of this. I remember from my holidays in Brittany learning that they have 6 meter tides, and here in Mayotte we have about 4 meters tops which already seems like a lot.
When I visited the US I was excited to see squirrels running around. We don’t have squirrels where I’m from. We took pictures.
It must have looked like we were excited to witness a cloud in the sky.
I grew up in rural US, squirrels everywhere. Still fascinated by them! Moved to the southwest, was sad there weren’t trees and squirrels out here. Then saw my first (closely followed by like a dozen more out in the area) ground squirrel! Some touristy areas they will line up all cute doing tricks for scraps of food. They’ve learned our oohs and aahs generate treats.
Chipmunks did it for me. They look and act so much like cartoon critters I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
I love chipmunks! Such a big squeak from such a tiny body, plus I love their pointy tails :)
When I visited Canada from the US, my extended family and I drove in separate cars, thereby arriving at separate times spread out over a few hours.
Every group of us took basically the same picture when we arrived because we’d previously only seen brown squirrels and there was a solid, dark black one running around in the back yard.
My parents’ neighborhood is ALL black squirrels. I thought they were rare until they moved (only 30 minutes from where I group up) so I was quite surprised to see dozens in their yard
It’s funny what people notice. I have a friend who grew up in the American Southwest, and her wildlife culture shock when she moved away from there came from wild rabbits.
The Southwest is populated by jackrabbits, so after they encountered an eastern cottontail, they were genuinely concerned some malady had befallen it to cause it to have such small ears. She thought maybe someone was torturing the local wildlife and cutting off its ears.
Mirroring what others have said - at a nearby university that has (had? sigh) a large foreign student population, some folks actively feed the squirrels. For several weeks at the beginning of the school year, you could very easily spot new students by who was out taking photos and getting mobbed by these squirrels that are way, way too comfortable getting close to humans.
I’d guess people from monkey countries feel the same way about them impressing us. They’re in similar niches and everything.
I was a bit excited that the US squirrels are gray and large, we have smaller red ones in Germany.
American squirrels can be aggressive. I was eating an apple one day and I kid you not, a squirrel jumped at me and took it from my hand.
If you really want to see huge squirrels check out a US college campus. They’re so fat!
Noted
A squirrel in a public park near me climbed up on me to get to the peanuts I was holding, no fear. It was also absurdly obese.
I got a squirrel took my apple away from my hand!
Jesus how strong was that squirrel
It was also absurdly obese.
Hey, just like many of our people! Yay, America!
Those poor lil things… I feel sad for them. :(
We have grey squirrels in the UK, although they’re not native. They’re responsible for the decline in native red squirrels, you rarely see them now unless you go to particular areas.
Not only UK. As far as I know the same problem is spreading around all of mainland Europe. US squirrels have a better immune system and a more varied diet, they are also more aggressive and territorial. They are slowly replacing indigenous red squirrels.
Dammit. :( Us humans are so talented at selfishly fucking over indigenous populations.
and the german ones are really skittish too.
Those i saw on the canadian campus just lay next to the side walk, chilling. Fat and grey
We have different colored squirrels in some regions.
https://wildlifeinformer.com/types-of-squirrels/
You’ll need and extra SD card next time you visit.
Ah, very cool. Maybe I’ll visit again once the current presidency ends. If that’s ever going to be the case.
I wonder where you visited! Grey squirrels are rare where I’m from in the US, 90% brown in midwest
I love this and was about to post something similar because my family met a family from Australia at Disney World and the little girl was SO excited about the squirrels. It was adorable.
I live in the Midwest, so squirrels are just always there.
Used to work at Disney World. Can confirm the squirrel amazement. (And I worked at Animal Kingdom, the squirrels occasionally got more attention than the actual zoo animals. Although the local ibises hanging out with the spoonbills were still cool.)
I love when people see deer here in North America. You’d think they’re seeing a unicorn, when it’s just some plain ol’ mule deer.
Forest rats.
I always lived in states where deer hunting was a pretty common pastime. The first time I went to a zoo in South America, I cracked up when we got to the display of white-tailed deer.
I understand Australians have a similar reaction to zoo kangaroos
I’ve seen deer just wander through my yard in town
We also get turkeys.
Ah, yes. Those fuckers regularly stopped traffic when I lived in Michigan. Not for tourist reasons of course, they’re just big and travel in packs. And take their sweet time crossing the road.
Totally me in the US! Deers in Europe are stuff for natural parks!
Oh wow. I saw a squirrel once in Catalonia. Wonderful sight.
I saw my first chipmunk last week and I totally screamed oh shit there’s Alvin! in my heart.
Don’t let your inner child die!
I still remember my first chipmunk encounter. I heard the little guys before I saw them and wondered “who the f is out here playing laser tag in the woods? ”
No squirrels? You from Greenland? Antarctica?
Israel
My wife is from the Philippines. Squirrels are a thing you have to visit the zoo the see.
As far as the UK goes bumblebees are pretty great, also the pollen soup that is spring, hiking is also pretty awesome in the UK, lots of hiking trails that run between towns/pubs that just cut through farm etc.
What about the werewolves?
Stick to the road. Beware the moors.
I didn’t know Tasmania has bumblebees until I moved here. You don’t get them in the rest of the country. They’re such adorable insects.
There are bumblebees in Tasmania?!? Damn them, the closest we get in WA is Christmas beetles and we don’t seem to get too many of them any more … I miss those dopey bastards
