what is that you usually do or see in your country or area but is weird to do in other area you have traveled or vice versa?? like it is unusual to wear footwear indoors in asia.
UK
Proper fish and chips. I’ve seen American fish and chips and it’s nowhere close
I’ve had fish and chips in both the U.K. and the U.S. No offense to the Brits, but it’s better in the U.S., because they use this thing called “seasoning.” The only thing I prefer about the U.K. version is the paper cone the chips come in.
Crippling medical debt and outrageous student loans.
In Canada, people do not run from the rain… if they are out and about and it starts raining, they just ignore it, they don’t walk faster, rarely improvise coverage, etc
In Venezuela, my country of origin, people run from the rain like it’s lava falling from the sky
Not much point in running from it, you’re already getting wet if you’re caught out in it 🤷♀️. I’ll run if I hear thunder though, don’t want to get electrocuted.
The Brits don’t either. So probably cultural heritage.
When I visited London (around the year 2000), I noticed that every man walking in the streets either wore a hat or carried an umbrella.
Huh, thought everyone ran from the rain. I usually have a hat if I’m outside so the rain doesn’t annoy me.
It really depends on what rain is like in your location in my limited experience. In the pacific northwest rain is usually a drizzle, it’s fine, you don’t run. In the american Midwest, you get a feel for the air pressure, listen for thunder, and look at the sky, then you make a comment about your prediction and keep going if you predict a drizzle but start running if it seems like a downpour.
Canadian here, from the wet coast. I’ve run in the rain before, but it needs to be monsoon level before that’s necessary. Anything less is just meh.
I actively go out when it’s raining. Refreshing af
that’s a new level of crazy!!!
just kidding, I remember doing that as a kid… fond memories
Wearing tracksuits in Ireland as regular day clothing. They are not nearly as common now as they were before, but many young people still wear them because they’re comfortable and cheap. I remember German foreign exchange students asking the teacher why do Irish people always go to gym because of the tracksuits.
Queuing apparently. Which I really don’t understand wtf everyone else is doing to wait their turn. Well I guess except Japan.
Bagged milk
Lots of countries have bagged milk
TIL
East Germany used to have them but they disappeared during the nineties and good riddance as well!
Also calling soda “pop”, although I think parts of the US do this too
the upper-midwestern u.s. lost their bagged milk when kwiktrip quit selling it that way a few years back.
Bonjour, mon aime.
Monoculture. I live in Canada, and it’s pretty rare for a person, and especially a group, to have only one culture they draw from to firm their habits and identity. Even immigrants have their home and whatever mishmash of a culture their work ends up with. Its somewhat easy to tell travelers apart from residents by them having a discernible accent. If I can tell your accent is Irish, and not just some combination of Irish, British and Ukrainian, then your not here permanently.
I had a prof in college from Canada, whose parents were German and Korean, and you could hear both accents at the same time. I never encountered such a thing. Also funny that he didn’t have a single bit of Canadian accent.
And honestly that’s what I love about Canada and why we are the best country in the world. We’re a mosaic rather than a melting pot. Each culture that comes here contributes something to the Canadian Zeitgeist that gets disseminated to everyone else, like spicing up an otherwise boring W.A.S.P existence.
When my family moved here from Portugal, they managed an apartment building in order to have a place to live while my father worked construction and my mother was a housekeeper. (Yeah…yeah…I know…it doesn’t get any more Portuguese than that)
Anyway, I was just a toddler and the family was immediately befriended by the older Ukrainian lady next door and we soon became a part of her extended family for everything from christmas to birthdays, etc. My first memories are of toddling down the hall in my pjamas first thing in the morning to “Auntie Anne’s” apartment. She was more my grandmother than my biological grandmothers who lived in Portugal at the time.
Through them, we learned kaiser. My mother learned how to make peirogies, cabbage rolls, etc…
We are without a doubt the most Ukrainian Portuguese family to have ever existed and I love it.
Sorry…got nostalgic there for a moment. Auntie Anne passed away decades ago and I still think about her sometimes.
Almost everyone has a sauna or at least access to one at or near their home.
Finland for those wondering.
Italy: always offering (and accepting) food or drinks while visiting. It’s impossible and/or incredibly rude to pass by a friend’s house without getting at least a coffee or a glass of water.
Netherlands: cold lunch. Traditionally, you’d have only one hot meal a day, and lunch would be sandwiches. I don’t mean to say that sandwiches don’t happen in other countries, but that hot lunches are basically unheard of in NL.
US: everyone has one or multiple cars. Walking to the grocery store means you are basically destitute. (That was quite the culture shock!)
As a clarification, that last one is definitely NOT true about all places in the US, it very much depends on which area you live in. In NYC few people own a car even if they’re quite well off. No one here drives to get their regular groceries.
I lived in NJ. When i randomly said i didn’t have a car, some colleagues gave me pitying looks. I heard NY is its own little microcosm, but it seemed in general US is very car centric, so much so that there were areas I literally couldn’t reach by foot.
It’s hard to generalize any aspect of life in the US because of how damn big it is. People in metropolitan areas can get by just fine without a personal vehicle but it’s much harder in the suburbs and all but impossible in rural communities unless you’re very self-sufficient. I live near a city (Seattle), sufficiently so that I can easily walk to a bus and connect with the regional transit system. If that was my only option I’d have to majorly restructure my life, but it could be done.
The Italian food thing is pretty common in many cultures, I’ve seen it in a few countries myself and it’s big deal here in Lebanon. My own parents used to be livid about me bringing friends over and not offering anything to eat when I was younger. It’s a part of my culture I’m a bit resistant to doing, I don’t know, it’s pretty intuitive if it’s time to eat or not, and if someone’s dropping by between meals I am totally fine not setting the whole ass table. Maybe a beer or coffee (the good stuff, it’s a nice thing to share) nowadays.
The Dutch food thing has zero resemblance to my culture but it is in line with something I’ve read before about western (at least the description I read was western) food habits. Going completely off the top of my head here. As far as I remember, historically you had one heavy meal and everything else was a smaller meal. I think I was looking up “dinner” vs “supper”. The impression was that the word “dinner” was originally for the big meal of the day, and that “supper” was for a light meal at the very end of the day. “Breakfast” is more of literally breaking a fast than it is a whole meal and lunch referred to a small mid-workday meal.
So I think the idea of temperature might be connected to the size or heaviness of the meal in your Dutch thing.
Or maybe my nerves are completely cooked after work and this is more word salad than word coherent comment.
Poutine.
Tabarnac oui!
I was in Canada and I wanted to poutine. I could hardly find any. Ask I had just gravy on fries
Where in Canada? That sounds like a 'berta thing lol. I can go to just about any random restaurant here and if they serve fries, chances are they have some sort of poutine option
Yeah, in Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes, you can get authentic poutine. It starts getting rare to find a good one the further west you go. Its a French-Canadian cuisine and thus Quebec-centric.
In BC the poutines are usually all wrong. Chicken gravy and shredded cheese instead of room-temp curd and a properly dark beef gravy.
When the place actually tries to make it an original take, its better. Like the Brown’s Social House Rocky Mountain Poutine, or that place that does it with tater tots. 😂
Poutine should be normal everywhere and I am devastated that it’s not.
Apparently Germany is one of the few (the only? Who knows) country to prefer carbonated water.
You have 2 neighbors where it’s basically a public good.
I saw a guy in a park in Milan at almost midnight filling up a few 5 liter bottles from the carbonated water station. He clearly lived across the street and just…needed to bathe in fizzy water right then? No idea. But it’s not just you all.
Austrian here, and it’s the default at restaurants etc. as well. I hate it, it hurts my throat. Leitungswasser bitte, danke :)
Ugh i hated that about Germany. When you ask for a water they bring you a seltzer. If you want water you have to specifically ask for “still water”. Like what?! That’s crazy nonsense. Water is one of the most basic elements of life as we know it, you can’t make the word for water mean anything other than what it’s always meant. I mean obviously you can, but it seems insanely dumb
It’s literally called “Danish water” here in Denmark, though I don’t like it
Is it normal to feel dehydrated after drinking carbonated water? That’s why I avoid it, personally, but I wonder if I’m just fucked up.
No, it isn’t. At least not for anyone I know.
Is it just carbonated water (preferably naturally carbonated mineral water) or is it some kind of soda, with added sugars and whatnot?
Because the first one shouldn’t make you feel dehydrated, no. Just burpy, and soothed if you had a stomach ache.
I’m not sure I’ve ever had naturally carbonated mineral water before, but yeah, the stuff I’m talking about has no sugar or anything, it’s just water. I’m not sure why it does that to me!
I definitely feel less hydrated. A lot of carbonated waters haver a higher sodium level, so that might be part of it. Or it’s just the bitter taste of carbon dioxide.
When visiting France the carbonated water was ubiquitous. The company I work for have water fountains with the option of carbonated water in all of their French offices.
“klassik oder ohne?”
“mit scharf bitte, danke”
Mass shootings in the US. It’s become so common here that most if not all are desensitized.
What’s a mass shooting? This chart lines it out nicely I think. Bet you, like most of us, are defining the term according to the leftmost three stats.
What I find to be far more weird, we lose about the same number of people to vehicular death as we do gun violence (and guns are almost half suicides). Yet, we just accept that as normal. Couple of people get shot? Headline news, if they’re white. Entire family dies in a car wreck? Meh, you probably won’t hear about it unless there was an unusual angel to the story.
Cheating on your spouse with someone at the company julefrokost (christmas work thing).
Denmark 🫤
https://cphpost.dk/2016-12-07/news/a-shocking-affair-danes-lead-european-infidelity-charts/
How normal are we talking?
Like: “Happy New Year, dear. I cheated on you on Christmas with Sarah from Finance. How is your affair with Fyodor in Marketing going?”
“Oh, Fyodor is so last year. They fired him because he was too loyal to his husband. I went with Peter in Accounting. Here, he bought us cupcakes for our anniversary.”
Dane here, it’s quite normal, no idea why
I remember something similar happening in the US recently…
Being able to go basically anywhere by bike, foot, or public transport. And just our bike infrastructure in general. I honestly don’t know how I could live in most other countries because it seems like basically everything happens by car or foot. Being able to bike anywhere is so much nicer and gives a lot of freedom from an early age.
Strangely we Dutch people also seem to be quite alone in our view that helmets on normal bikes are not really necessary. They make bikes more prevalent imo, because you don’t have to drag a helmet along everywhere. You just park you bike and the only thing you have with you because of it is a key, no special clothes, helmets, etc. I think that’s also possible because of our bicycle infrastructure and culture.
Kids learn to bike from a young age, in traffic. You see very young kids just cycle on their smol little bike with a parent on the outside sort of shielding them from traffic. Safely on bike roads, but also just on shared roads with cars. In general kids are quite free to just play outside. I live close to a school and I see plenty of kids all across the neighborhood, just playing without parental supervision. It’s what we did back in the day too, without mobile phones or anything. We’d usually be home on time for dinner or our parents would find us somewhere in the neighborhood and tell us it was time to get home.
Dutch isn’t a country, therefore the utopia you describe doesn’t exist and is impossible to create.
We came from far but we’re working on it. Flanders is steadily moving to that utopia.
Any Vietnamese photos of people doing weird things
Look up cursed images Vietnam and you’ll find some good ones I swear
Sorry but here is a reddit post of some of them:
https://old.reddit.com/r/VietNam/comments/18q72y7/vietnams_cursed_images_113/
Not reddit:
https://saigoneer.com/saigon-culture/16779-the-discomforting-poetry-of-vietnamese-cursed-image
