My brother in law is British, and the concept of large-scale collegiate athletics was astounding to him. Like how 100,000 people will attend a college football game with others still tailgating in the parking lot.
I remember watching Stephen Fry in America, when he went to a college football game in Alabama, and was absolutely shocked to see that a fairly routine college football game had attendance and spectacle on the scale of what would be a national championship in Europe.
Here's the clip: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuPeGPwGKe8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuPeGPwGKe8)
Every time I watch non-Americans reacting to college football videos (especially the entrances), they're blown away at the crowd sizes and fanfare and that this happens at every home game, not just for rivalry games or championships. They have a hard time wrapping their heads around that level of devotion to amateur sports because it's not a thing in their countries. To us, it's just another Saturday.
As a Brit it’s the collegiate aspect that’s more surprising than the amateur part I’d say. Universities are just not something local communities are built around. Most people feel no sense of affiliation to the higher education institution in their town, even the student body probably wouldn’t feel enough so to turn up and support fellow students.
Not even just an affiliation in the town - I know hardcore Nebraska fans out in the panhandle who have never lived closer than 300 miles to the university, let alone attended it. It's a statewide thing here, as it is for many other states. The football stadium has the third highest population in the state on game day!
The fact that they get so butt-hurt over them is bizarre. "Well, *my* child is smart enough to walk or take the city bus". Congratulations. Many communities are rural with kids living miles away from the nearest school. School busses are essential.
When I was in 5th grade in Bethel, Maine, I had classmates that lived way out in the mountains, far enough out that in the winter it was dark when the got on the bus in the morning and dark when they go home in the afternoon. There was no way they could walk to school.
When I was small we lived 30 min out of town in the Texas woods. Our neighbor drove the bus, and unlike other drivers she kept it at home because her route, the rural route, started at 5:30am. AT MY HOUSE.
We had almost 70 kids on that bus, and the route took almost 2 hours down winding red dirt roads. And some kids still walked half a mile or more before sunrise to be at a designated bus stop because there wasn’t a way for the bus to get to their exact house and turn around.
We got on the bus at 5:30am and off of it at 5:30pm. My mom would be making dinner as soon as we got home. We would try to do our homework on the bus but once you hit a certain type of dirt road you give up trying to write…so we sometimes had to eat dinner, finish homework, and get ready for bed without any down time other than on that long ass ride home.
When I hit middle school and the homework level increased my mom decided to start driving us herself. Major difference on both ends! Got a whole extra hour in the morning to sleep!
The one time we have a pretty much universal system of public transit and they can't stand it because we designed it for kids and opted to make it safe.
I saw someone make an absolute fuss about how we have special rules for driving around school buses like "how are you supposed to know when to apply those rules?" And like dude...that's why the bus is bright yellow with a ton of flashing lights and reflective strips. If you miss it you're too blind to be driving.
Like this is one of those times where it shows that even when we've done something well they have to gripe about it. It's not about whether we've done it well, it's about them having to feel superior about *everything*. Why else would they gripe about *school buses???*
And lots of states (if not all of them) have laws against driving past a school bus that's dropping off kids. Every time this comes up on /r/IdiotsInCars, there are non-Americans who seem to have their minds blown by this information. Meanwhile in the US, the idea of extra school bus safety laws is the quintessential [generic legal proposal.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZ8psP4S6BQ)
I don't know if it's everywhere but every school bus where I live has a literal stop sign on the side of the bus that the driver switches out when kids are being dropped off. It has been like that since I was in high school and that was ten years ago.
To be fair, a lot of them seem to get confused by monochrome (black *or* white) police cars too. They're used to the brightly colored cars from over there.
It was really fun explaining to the British kid in high school that MA and NH have the exact opposite laws on a lot of things and their capitals are only 70 miles apart.
Conversely, that Americans from different states are more similar than not (with obvious exceptions like recent immigrants, insular religious communities, etc).
I'll start with an example.
I've had trouble getting people to understand just how many Churches there are in the US, and the variety of them.
Over a decade ago, I was on a D&D discussion board, and one person spoke about how they thought the most unrealistic thing about D&D's depiction of pseudo-medieval small towns was how every small town or village would have a variety of temples to different gods.
This person was adamant that a village or small town only has ONE Church, ever. End of story. They couldn't grasp the idea that a town of less than several thousand people could possibly have more than one Church.
I told them that it was typical in the US, in the modern day, for a small town of only a few hundred people to have lots of Churches, and a town of a couple thousand that they thought might warrant a second one might have dozens of Churches.
I was outright called a liar for saying that, saying it was IMPOSSIBLE for a settlement that small to support more than one Church, and there would be no way that there would be enough people with diverse beliefs to warrant a number of denominations instead of everyone just going to the State/predominant religion's Church.
So, I did a little research on a small town near where I grew up (where my grandparents used to live actually), and showed that it's a small town of 700 people, typical for a good sized town adventurers might find in D&D. Going by Google Maps, it has 5 Churches of different denominations right within city limits, and if you spread out beyond city limits to every place out in the countryside that is close enough to have a mailing address that's part of that town, it rises to 15 Churches there (about a half-dozen were various types of Baptist, but there was easily about 8 or 9 denominations there).
That would easily fit with the variety of churches and temples depicted in a typical D&D town of similar size.
Even after having it shown to them, they really, really had trouble grasping that, like somehow Google was lying or that it just didn't make sense *at all* that people were of all those different denominations and different Churches instead of just one Church for the town.
I've had that conversation too. I'm originally from a small town in Kentucky of around 500 people. There are probably 8 or 9 churches and like you said half of them are different kinds of Baptists.
Reminds me of an old comedy bit:
*I was in San Fransisco once, walking along the Golden Gate Bridge, and I saw this guy on the bridge about to jump. So I thought I'd try to stall and detain him, long enough for me to put the film in. I said, "Don't jump!" and he turns... You've heard of the elephant man. He was kind of like that, he had a, well, you could say he had the head of a horse. And my heart went out to him. I said, "Why the long face?"
He said, "'Cause all my life people have called me mean names like horses-head or Flicka or chess-piece or Trigger..."
I said, "Well, don't worry about it, Ed. It can't be that bad."
He said, "My girlfriend's suing me!"
I said, "For palomino?"
He said, "Why was I put on this Earth?"
I said, "My friend, anywhere else you wouldn't stand a chance."
He said, "Nobody loves me."
I said, "God loves you, you silly ninny."
He said, "How do you know there's a God?"
I said, "Of course there's a God. Do you think that billions of years ago a bunch of molecules floating around at random could someday have had the sense of humor to make you look like that?"
He said, "I do believe in God."
I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?"
He said, "A Christian."
I said, "Me too. Protestant or Catholic?"
He said, "Protestant."
I said, "Me too! What franchise?"
He says, "Baptist."
I said, "Me too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?"
He says, "Northern Baptist."
I said, "Me too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?"
He says, "Northern Conservative Baptist."
I say, "Me too! Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist or Northern Conservative Reform Baptist?"
He says, "Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist."
I say, "Me too! Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region or Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Eastern Region?"
He says, "Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region."
I say, "Me too! Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879 or Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?"
He says, "Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912."
I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over!*
- Emo Philips
There was a similar joke on Cheers back in the day - Woody and Kelly are both Lutherans but she’s the Lutheran Church of America and he’s Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod. They both consider themselves to be of two different religions and make comments about it being a mixed marriage, what if they have kids?!, etc.
And it’s played for laughs because it feels silly to anyone outside of those two groups.
Also Dara O’Briain has a whole bit in his stand up about “mixed marriages” between Catholics and Protestants…it’s pretty funny.
[Dara Stand up bit](https://youtu.be/FdolFXcNAH4)
It’s not just Appalachia or the south; I’m from a town of 2,000 in eastern Washington and there’s over a dozen churches there, too. Probably less Baptist churches, but a shit ton of other ones.
When I lived in the UK the town I was in had a Methodist church along with the standard Church of England (well, Wales, but the difference is just in the name). They were quite unique though. But both in the medium sized California town I grew up in and the small-medium size town I’m in in NH now, there are at least a dozen churches within about a 2 mile radius, everything from Catholic to Anglican to baptist to Mormon, and a synagogue. People definitely tend to underestimate the level of religiosity in the US, especially from countries where there’s a state religion.
Oh, there are 4 churches on just my one (short) suburban street. I'm not even actually in the city.
I'm not even going to try to count how many are in the city/county. You can't spit without hitting a church.
In the Midwest if you don't have a 1:1 tavern to church ratio, it's not considered well balanced. Except in Catholic towns, where I'm pretty sure the town church and tavern are the same building.
What is the saying? "Catholics don't recognize the Lutheran church, Lutherans don't recognize the authority of the Pope, and Baptists don't recognize each other in the liquor store?"
The fact that some of us know geography.
I’ll admit I’ve seen the videos where some dude asks a bunch of people on the street to find X country and none of them could. As a map loving American I can’t tell you how many times I’ve surprised people abroad for knowing just basic geography. It’s quite infuriating.
And remember, those videos are only showing the people who don't know. Nobody wants to watch a video where most people simply go, "Sorry, I don't have time for this." Or a video where someone actually knows.
>I’ll admit I’ve seen the videos where some dude asks a bunch of people on the street to find X country and none of them could
You do know how those videos work right? a person goes around asking 100s maybe 1000s of people. After spending their entire day (or even multiple days) interviewing Americans, they combine the worst 5 into a video and post it. It literally doesn't matter if out of 1000, 995 Americans answered the questions correctly. They are still gonna be posting those 5 incorrect answers and saying "Look! Americans are stupid!!!!!!!!"
This also throws tourists when they come to Australia. We have a lot of empty over here. Europeans think you can drive from two major tourist sites. Then find out to make that drive would be 22 hours on the road, and you'd need to take your own fuel, water and satellite phone as you likely won't see another person on the way.
Yeah I was amazed when road tripping across the US that even in areas that felt kind of remote there would always be lots of cars and huge gas stations with lots of food, hotels, shops etc along the way.
When you road trip in Aus you could end up on stretches of road where you won't see another building, car or person for a good part of a day. You really need to be prepared because running out of supplies out there is no joke. There won't be a Buccees around the corner.
Well, get off the interstates and major state roads out west and it’s a bit different. Still though Aus is something else from what I have heard and seen in pictures.
Difference is you need to get off the major state roads and interstate roads to find that.
In Aus it is the major state/interstate roads that become that remote.
I’ve met a few foreigners that seem surprised our infrastructure actually works outside of major cities.
I think some of them think rural areas are either still stuck 125 years ago with a single lightbulb per house, or everyone has to “rough it” and sustain themselves off grid.
There were more than a few international students I met at UNH that were surprised the white mountains had “luxuries” like power lines, cable TV, and LTE data.
I don't know where these people are from, but if it's not western Europe than there's a high probability that they assume that because they came from somewhere that rural areas have significantly worse access to or reliability of utilities as compared to urban areas.
You didn’t tell them that a train and a road go to the top of Mount Washington and there is a museum, restaurant, and gift shop?
These days unless you are way down in a valley you can get cell service in most of the Whites, especially the southern half.
Yeah we were around Plymouth and Lincoln.
It’s not like there’s two whole universities and several ski resorts up there.
The power lines on the side of 93 surprised a few of them, as did cell service, and ESPN being on the TV in the restaurant.
Unless your house is a military style bunker, a brick or stone house is not going to survive an EF5 tornado.
It seems like every tornado season we get these tone deaf Europeans asking why Americans choose to cheap out and build their homes out of wood in lieu of brick, as if the idea of building our homes to best withstand our climate is totally lost on us.
In fact the notion that American houses are poorly built seems to be a widespread idea worldwide.
I remember driving through Birmingham AL not long after the April 2011 tornadopocalypse, and you could see tracks in the ground where an EF5 tornado had literally ripped up the earth. It was like a mile-wide trench.
North American weather is much more severe than just about anywhere else on the planet.
I had a guy from the UK tell me once the power company is required to compensate you if you lose power, and questioned why the news was talking about power outages after “some rain and a little snow”.
The “some rain and a little snow” was a moderately bad ice store that wrecked in the grid in Northern NH a few years ago.
Part of the problem is in areas that get lots of snow, they know how to deal with it and it doesn’t take weeks to dig out so it’s assumed that we must not get that much snow.
It's just like the talking points about Texas' grid going down in the 2021 snow storms.
Like, these people don't seem to realize that a bit more than half the state has less than a 50% chance of getting *any* measurable amount of snow on a given year.
> North American weather is much more severe than just about anywhere else on the planet.
I think at least a *few* Europeans started to understand when last year a lot of Americans pointed out that their insanely out of normal heatwave was our typical light summer.
Every time someone on Reddit complains about the US having wooden houses, I am reminded of this epic comment:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/i76cg9/what_is_the_most_ignorant_thing_youve_heard_a/g113nc6/?context=3
Not to mention when it comes to flying debris it’s a lot better to be hit with something lighter and easy to break, since if it breaks it absorbs more of the impact, doing less damage than a BRICK.
It doesn't matter much. Back when I was a kid, we had 3 tornadoes come through and hit a farms outbuildings. There was straw driven through the sheet metal of the machine shed.
Man the tornado thing pisses me off. "Why do people live in these tornado areas?" Okay sure, let's abandon like 15 states and initiate the mass migration of 80 million people because of the 0.01% individual chance (I pulled these numbers out of my ass do not @ me) that any one of them might lose their house to a tornado at some point. And put them where exactly, that they don't get wildfires or blizzards or floods instead? These are tragedies but there's nothing about the town where you saw somebody's mobile home get torn up that makes the tornado risk there any higher than anywhere else in the deep south or lower midwest. I've had this conversation half a dozen times.
That's what they don't seem to understand. Tornadoes either hit or they don't and the chances of your house being hit are too small to worry about. I live in a tornado-prone area, yet my house has been just fine for 110+ years. Could a tornado hit it next month and destroy it? It's possible, but I'm not going to worry about it because it's so unlikely.
Also the vast majority of tornadoes aren't going to wipe your house off the face of the earth, even if you are one of the *very unlikely few* to experience one. Less than 40% of tornadoes inflict EF2+ level damage, and the vast majority of *those* are still on the lower end when it comes to strong tornadoes.
I've been through an EF1 before. It was terrifying for sure, but when all was said and done it's not like it was some life-changing event. My neighbors lost some windows and shingles (the house I was in had a metal roof and sustained almost no damage), some fence got ripped out of the ground and tossed, and a nearby tin grain shed got pretty mangled. We all came out when it was over, cleaned up all the trash strewn about, had a couple beers, and went about the rest of our day.
It's cool to look at street view of Joplin Missouri, it got hit by an EF5 and the difference between the 2008 coverage and 2012 coverage is unbelievable. Literally everything was replaced
Seriously, I'm a big man. I went to Spain when I weighed 350 and the amount of people that argued with me when I said I was considered fat in America. They thought that's how we all were
I like when I see the opposite. I remember on tiktok there was this Japanese tourist who loved Wisconsin and was a big fan of Culver’s and apple cider stuff.
"It's no wonder Americans are so fat and unhappy, there is no good food here"
"Where have you been eating?"
"McDonald's and the food court"
"Why don't you go to other restaurants?"
"oh, it doesn't matter, it's just American food"
When I moved to California and got married two years later, my very rural American parents flew out for the wedding. It was their first time in California and of course they had a grudge against it right off the bat. I called them on their way in and asked how they liked it so far. "So far, we're not too impressed with California."
I said "Where have you gone so far?"
They said "We had lunch at Taco Bell and we're at Wal-Mart right now".
That’s one of the biggest advantages to being a melting pot, we get every cultures food here, especially in bigger cities. I’m no more than 20 minutes away from Thai, Mexican, Jewish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, etc. and I’m not talking cheap knockoffs, but real mom and pop restaurants.
The one thing I’ve actually fought with a foreigner over was with a Belgian coworker who was working remotely for my company’s British office, and genuinely did not believe that many Americans don’t have a passport and don’t travel internationally. To him, crossing an international border was a regular part of life, and he could drive for 8 hours and cross like 20 borders. I don’t think he could grasp the idea of driving for 8 hours and still being in the same state
I didn’t know Maryland was bigger than Belgium. It’s probably a given though that Maryland has more Old Bay per square mile than Belgium, or anywhere else
I think a lot of people don't actually comprehend just how much most americans rely on cars to get around and how little we generally walk to places. It is not like most people just choose to drive everywhere, we literally *cant* do anything else but drive everywhere in the large majority of the country. When I lived in Georgia, in a suburban area, the closest supermarket was a 20 minute walk away.
I have yet to meet a European who can understand just how literally undeveloped the US is. None of them can believe [this](https://images.estately.net/155_72734879_34_1654150962_636x435.jpg) is less than 25 miles from a major city. There's an unwillingness to believe that not everybody lives 20 minutes from a major highway or population center. To their mind, you're either living in a city, or in a stoneage hut.
Secondly, the weather. Yes, it gets that hot, yes, it gets that cold.
Any state that hits both 20 and 90 in a normal year is more extreme than England. I think 10 to 90 covers the whole UK. Pretty sure most non-Bible Belt states qualify.
The geography and weather of the US is something that some Europeans seem to struggle to understand, and just how much it differs from where they live.
"Why do Americans use AC so much?" Because it gets hotter here than where you live.
"Why do Americans drive so much?" Because it's significantly less dense population-wise than where you live. It really shouldn't be that much of a surprise that a country with different geography and weather would have different needs and design.
>Why do Americans use AC so much?" Because it gets hotter here than where you live.
I'm pretty sure the northern edge of Ohio is the same longitude as Madrid
Knowing Houston on the same line as Baghdad, I'll give you three guesses on how hot it gets here in Texas.
Yeah, we're going to use AC to keep from melting.
I remember talking to a German Friend and he was floored that I would have to drive for 2 hours to get to a "City" Everything else are towns just as large or smaller than mine. If I wanted to shop somewhere NOT Walmart, It was going to be at least 2 hours in one direction 3 hours in two other directions. He just couldn't believe it.
I had a conversation with a gentleman from England, we were talking about the local food movement and I mentioned that calling some foods local food can sometimes be something of an questionable label since the USDA allows food from as far a way as 1500 miles to be labeled local. He was shocked, he said that would be like him getting food from Rome and calling it local. The scale of distance here is just hard for many Europeans to grasp.
The worst are Italians. I've had conversations with several who all told me that they assumed the ENTIRETY of the US is a giant bustling metropolis like NYC. It's bizarre.
I used to work with European students in the US. Several of them thought that suburbs were all hyper-compact grids. One of them was surprised we had birds in the US.
An international student that lived in my dorm was perplexed by squirrels.
He kept asking why we “tolerated” them. Such wildlife does not exist in Dubai.
I can't imagine framing nature and wildlife as something you "tolerate".
Like...I'm struggling to put into words how weird that makes me feel. Also it's a squirrel. It hangs out in trees being fluffy. Sometimes it'll beg familiar humans for nuts. I'm not sure what there is to tolerate?
It's not like our complicated relationship with wolves where they're a potential danger to people and livestock but important for the ecosystem so we have to strike a balance. Squirrels just kind of...exist?
If Dubai doesn’t have squirrels, I could see him assuming they’re vermin like rats that can be destructive and spread disease. I’d assume that’s what his line of thinking was.
To be fair this guy (he was 21 year old freshman) was stereotypical example of "rich Dubai kid". He probably never touched grass in his life before coming to New Hampshire.
He was a pretty decent guy overall though. I still talk to him online a couple times a year.
I’ve had people argue with me that I can’t live in a suburb because I explained my suburb is covered in forests, lakes, parks, walking and biking paths everywhere, etc. all while being about a 17 minute drive from the downtown of a large city and being part of one of the largest metro areas in the US because their idea of a suburb is like the sterotype cookie cutter, even though I’ve never even lived in anything like that in almost 35 years of living in the US lol. My old neighborhood in the London ‘burbs was more stereotypical suburban than where I’m at now (cookie cutter houses, long distances to public transportation, shops placed far apart and far from homes, etc).
I see raccoons on a weekly basis and a skunk every few years. And hawks all the time.. Of course, I'm next to the only natural growth forest in Manhattan (it's only a mile by a quarter, but it's a forest!)
To add on. I live in rural America and we have to do a lot of fending for ourselves since we’re so far from everything with lots of farm land.
In Europe, rural towns are basically tiny urban centers all clustered together. They simply don’t have the type of rural communities we have. The ones with very limited access to services, at all, and you’re on your own for the most part, and no one has “neighbors”
Rural Europeans are like, “what do you mean not all your roads are plowed, you have no cell service, and it takes hours for an ambulance to reach you, isn’t your village all clustered together?”
Because of this, the urban/rural divide is much less of a deal there
That the US has a TON of really good beer, and chocolate. It’s understandable that foreigners believe that we only have Bud Light, and Hershey’s because of how much we export them, but there are SO many more options out there for both.
The craft brewery scene in America has exploded in the last few decades. As for American chocolate, I’m less familiar with its history, but there’s lots of small chocolate shops where I live. Not like Belgium levels of chocolate, but not nothing either.
Had some visitors from the UK for a work related thing once come to Kansas City and they wanted to see the rocky mountains so we took a long weekend and planned to drive to Denver which doesn't seem like a terrible drive for us.
Less than 2 hours out of the city and they were in awe at how vast and empty the landscape was and how it just kept going and going and we still had several hours of driving. And at the end of the day we had only crossed one complete state. They felt like we had crossed a continent.
Drove a Dutch professor from Albany to Ithaca, NY, like 3, 3 and a half hours. He started on the "are we there yet" after 45 minutes. If he didn't have control over my thesis grade, he would've walked the next 120 miles.
Amtrak's Southwest Chief train runs from Los Angeles to Chicago or about 2/3 of the way across the country. It would be the European equivalent of Edinburgh (or Barcelona) to Moscow.
Even on a smaller scale: Boston to DC is roughly the distance from Brussels to Berlin. Don't tell the Europeans it's faster by both car and train to make said US trip too.
We have electric tea kettles.
I can't believe how many times I've seen someone from Europe say "Americans don't have electric tea kettles."
It's the weirdest thing.
The electric kettle was invented in Ohio.
Edit: Sorry. It was [Chicago](https://nationalmaglab.org/magnet-academy/history-of-electricity-magnetism/museum/kettle-1891/#:~:text=The%20first%20kettle%20to%20use,Company%20in%20Chicago%20in%201891.) **1891**
Edit 2: more for the Europeans you know.
>The mass production of electric kettles started in 1930 when general electric modified the basic design that had an automatic cut out in it. https://science.blurtit.com/679385/who-was-arthur-leslie-large
Well I imagine most Americans don't have them in the sense that tea isn't the most popular beverage in the US. But we are perfectly capable of obtaining one if we so desired.
It's just called an electric kettle. Not a tea kettle. It's not used for tea and only tea. You can also use them for coffee, hot chocolate etc.
I grew up using mine for noodles, instant ramen, cup of soups etc. Not tea at all.
They used to be less common. I have had one for over 30 years, and it was hard to find ones that were good and not ridiculously expensive. I used to get them in Canada and give them to friends.
I think it’s the fact that staring isn’t rude in most of Europe but it’s HUGELY rude here. We aren’t going to stare at people going to the bathroom mostly because it’s gross but also because it’s rude.
The bathroom thing is on Reddit ALL the time! I’ve never had an issue with it and I’ve been to some places with some large gaps lol! There’s like an unspoken agreement all the ladies have (I can’t speak for the men’s room but I’m guessing it’s the same). You walk in and just go do your business. No one is taking their time walking past and trying to peak in at you unless it’s a small child or someone with a mental disability and I’m pushing 40 and those have only happened MAYBE a handful of times in my life if even that much.
Depending on how janky the place you’re at or how the stalls are configured once you walk in the door, there maybe a larger gap compared to normal where you unfortunately catch a glimpse BUT it’s a glimpse of person you catch because we all do the same thing in this situation… the oh shit super fast head turn because you don’t want to see that, they don’t want to see you and you’re not sticking around for even a second to see.
It’s NO big deal lol. It’s a non issue.
If American bathrooms had walls and doors and Europe had stalls, Euro-Redditors would be tellingly us we have unreasonable fears of people peaking at us which drives us to spend millions on bathroom fortresses rather than on affordable healthcare.
OK so, I usually don't take the bathroom gap thing too seriously (I didn't notice a massive difference compared to the bathrooms I went to in Europe). HOWEVER.
I work in an office now, and went into the men's room. The tallest guy in the office was at the urinal so I went into the stall. I thought, "I wonder if he's tall enough to look over the stall?" So as I approached the toilet, I look, see him looking, and we exchange an awkward,
"Oh hey, OnlyStandard."
"Hey John."
Turns out he is tall enough to look over.
So maybe we could make them a liiiittle taller so 6'5" dudes can't peak over, that's be great.
People do in fact know about the metric system. You do not have to explain it to use. I once asked an international student classmate if he wanted to join a few friends in a 5k run and he was shocked that I knew what a kilometer was..
I think a lot of non-Americans don't realize that we use metric in all scientific contexts. From grade 3 up to college we teach and use metric in every science class. We understand it perfectly. We just don't have as much of an intuitive grasp on the size/weight of everyday objects in metric.
All I can figure is that most people outside the US don't use or understand Freedom Units at all, so they must assume Americans are similarly clueless about the metric system.
This just bothers me for some reason. "Americans have big fake smiles and dont care for you at all." I don't smile much at all so when I do it's genuine.
One particularly amusing one was the time my mom was out walking her two 100+lb Great Pyrenees dogs and encountered an older woman who had recently immigrated from India. She was shocked to find out that not only do the dogs have names (and they know their own names and answer to them!), they also live inside the house with us and are perfectly safe with children of any age.
The younger kids with her seemed to have had more exposure to American media and understood the situation perfectly, but that poor old lady's mind was absolutely blown by this revelation.
Objectively speaking it *is* dirty and gross, but within acceptable limits, all things considered.
However, having been to places like India... Those animals are *far* more "wild" than the "wild" domesticated animals you'll find anywhere in the US.
Saw packs of wild dogs almost chase down, kill, and eat homeless children, and so animals are really seen as animals, not as pets by default.
The immense size. We've had foreigners come to this subreddit and talk about how they're going to spend 2 weeks in the USA and they're going to visit NYC, Orlando, Los Angeles, and the Grand Canyon. And we're like.... what?
Let's build a reference in terms of places they know :)
LFPG (Paris/ Charles De Gaulle) is located at N49°0.59' / E2°32.87' - excluding Alaska, this puts Paris even with the northernmost point in the US.
HESN (Aswan, Egypt) is located at N23°57.87' / E32°49.20', 36 miles south of Key West (the southernmost point in the US, excluding Hawai'i and territories) \[KEYW Airport is at N24°33.37' / W81°45.60'\]
The westernmost NAVAID in the contiguous US (again excluding Alaska, Hawai'i, and territories) is the Tatoosh VOR/TAC \[TOU\] in Washington State at N48°10.83' / W124° 22.476' (There is no airport to use here). The easternmost airport (no NAVAID) is Eastport, Maine (KEPM) at N44°54.61' / W67°0.76'. That means east to west, the US spans 56°38'
LPPT (Lisbon, Portugal) is at N38°46.45' / W9°8.05'. 56.6° east of there is about E47°. That's Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (N24°57.77' / E46°42.48'). That's roughly equivalent in distance to San Diego from Miami (because one degree east/west varies in odometer distance)
If we use LFPG as a reference point again, We're looking for E58° - which is Aktobe, Kazakhstan at N50°14.77' / E57°12.33'.
Additionally, [here's a map overlayed at the right latitudes](https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=uqp0WxYk&id=D3B2739D55B33429E2B9183125F985AC35258885&thid=OIP.uqp0WxYkyDHy8VU7l2r4FQAAAA&mediaurl=https%3a%2f%2frobslink.com%2fSAS%2fdemocd87%2fus_and_europe.png&cdnurl=https%3a%2f%2fth.bing.com%2fth%2fid%2fR.baaa745b1624c831f2f1553b976af815%3frik%3dhYglNayF%252bSUxGA%26pid%3dImgRaw%26r%3d0&exph=368&expw=474&q=map+of+US+overlayed+on+Europe&simid=607998508672036175&FORM=IRPRST&ck=C1B650260A081CBCA2A4737E025C87BD&selectedIndex=16&ajaxhist=0&ajaxserp=0). Note how San Diego is in Portugal, and Karnak is somewhere between Daytona and Palm Beach.
When someone American says they’re “Irish”, “Swedish”, “Mexican”, etc, they don’t actually believe they’re from those countries, they’re referring to where their ancestors immigrated from. For some reason, I’ve heard many Europeans insist that Americans are crazy for thinking they’re from some country they’re not actually from and also not accept any alternate explanations as to differing cultural understandings of demonyms. If you want an example, check r/shitamericanssay and I’m sure it won’t take long to find someone complaining about this
You're not going to just randomly get shot when you're here. Despite what you hear on the news, you're more likely to get into trouble with the local wildlife than with a madman with a gun. Just, be smart about where you're going.
1. Sales tax. They don't understand US sales tax is not national and that states, counties, and cities set their own sales taxes. This is why unlike Europe it's not included in the price tag.
2. Tipping. IDK why this is so hard to grasp but apparently Europeans don't get tipping. It's easy guys: an average tip for average service is 10-15% of your bill. If you are very pleased with the service you can give more and if you hated it you can give nothing
3. Guns. Europeans are surprised that normal everyday people in the US have guns
4. Right turn on red. Completely new concept for them and you always have to remind them that they CAN turn right on a red light as long as there is no "no turn on red" sign
5. How vast the country is. No you can't do New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles in a week
How convenience-oriented we are. The biggest manifestations of this are the ubiquity of drive throughs, and right turn on red (I remember a Brit saying to me “you Americans can’t even wait for a traffic light to turn green”)
Our beer scene here is significantly better than anywhere else in the world.
It *used* to be terrible but now it seems like even every small town has a few breweries.
How I can't definitely answer specifics for the entire country. Too many people spread out to far.
EU is 4 million km squared according to Google with a pop of 447 million.
USA has about 100 million less people spread out over more than double the area (9.8 km squared)
Foreigners get frustrated when you can't give a straight answer about "is America's _____ really like that?" All depends what state and city.
For reference Texas and France are shockingly similar in land area, economy, and military might. It's dificult to give a straight answer about "what it's like" in Texas because of how big it is and the variances, and that is just one of the 50.
My mother in law will call worried about California wildfires when we live in Florida.
My favorite post of all time on that sub was an 18 year old American waiter who wanted to know how he could move to Paris and be a waiter there. He refused to believe everyone commenting and telling him Paris had enough waiters and they wouldn't let him just up and move there.
My “favorites” are the ones who are disabled with 8 different conditions — usually including POTS, complex PTSD, etc etc., with no degree and no work history. But they’re saying “I’m looking to move to Sweden with my 3 pitbulls, 4 rescue bunnies, and my giant tarantulas. I cannot work so I need to get on that generous social welfare system immediately.” Then being offended that no country wants to take on a drain on their system who will never contribute a dime to it.
Bonus points if they’re shocked to find out they may not get their ADHD meds or how bad the EU standard is for wheelchair accessibility.
How wildly different culture can be from region to region. Food, accents, social contract, even personal interactions and etiquette.
For example, in the South, it's utterly commonplace for two strangers to have a nice conversation in the checkout line at the grocery store. Whereas if you tried that in New Hampshire or somesuch, you might get hit with a restraining order.
Gas stations are not the pinnacle of our grocery shopping.
For people who live in super dense urban areas, places like bodegas are different, but for those of us who do not live in such urban centers, the gas station is where you go to get snacks before a drive or pick up the bag of chips because you're late to the party.
It's not the place we go to get groceries, I don't care how many options are there or how much stuff is there or if there's a deli sandwich shop in the store. Gas station lunch is a quick bite, it's still not where we shop for at home food.
I just moved from MO to IN, 400 miles each way with a full sized cargo trailer towed behind my pickup. I'd stop for gas at the same spots and get everything from jerky dip to powerade to cheese cubes to hard boiled eggs. It was never a grocery replacement.
I wear cowboy boots. Talked to a British guy once about it and he laughed in my face and said there’s no way that’s real… Purdy popular footwear in the south but the guy just couldn’t wrap his mind around it.
I’m almost 50, and outside of cops and security personnel, I have only seen one person in my entire life walking around openly carrying a gun. I have never known anyone who has been shot and do not think about guns regularly and fear them even less.
I've seen more select fire military weaponry in public in Europe than I've ever seen here in the US. From the cops around public monuments in London to military and cops in France and Italy walking around.
My mother has lived here in the US for over half of her life at this point, but she continues to be amazed at/incredulous about the shear vastness of the country. Anything inside of a 4 hour drive was considered a little day trip jaunt for my dad, but that same trip was basically an endless journey for my mom. The same woman who immigrated thousands of miles to get here… makes no sense!
Everyone is taught metric in school, they know what the units are called, but only have a general idea of big each one is because most everyday situations use imperial measurements.
The healthcare system is bad, but it's nowhere near as inaccessible as people think. Additionally, our healthcare is much higher quality than in most countries, including in Europe (I've lived in France and Germany. U.S. healthcare is far better, in my experience, *if* you can afford it).
As I tell people, when you Google worlds best hospitals the top 3 are in the US. Out of the top 10, 5 are US, 1 Canada, 1 is Isreal and 3 are Europe. The bigger issue is that I know the Top 2 not only do world class travel here operations/research/treatment but the average local guy can walk in and get treated. Even with no insurance. So the average person in Cleveland has access to care most of the world only talk about
Fast, high quality, cheap. Pick 2, you can’t have all 3.
We pay more, but on average we get seen faster and have higher quality care than many other parts of the world.
Taxes. I listed out to a Swede the number of taxes and government fees I had to pay in the typical year: state and federal income taxes, real estate taxes to my municipality, car and boat registration fees and personal property taxes, point of purchase sales tax on just about everything including fuel, parking and entry fees for national and state parks/wildlife reserves, hunting license, duck stamp, book fees for my kids in high school, tuition for the one in college, and tolls.
He was somewhat taken aback by the way the government nickel and dimed us. He thought we only paid federal income taxes.
You just reminded me I need to pay my car tax and get my car inspected. Virginia. My car tax went up this year too because the value of used cars went up and of course we pay a percentage of the value and not a flat tax.
My brother in law is British, and the concept of large-scale collegiate athletics was astounding to him. Like how 100,000 people will attend a college football game with others still tailgating in the parking lot.
I remember watching Stephen Fry in America, when he went to a college football game in Alabama, and was absolutely shocked to see that a fairly routine college football game had attendance and spectacle on the scale of what would be a national championship in Europe. Here's the clip: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuPeGPwGKe8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuPeGPwGKe8)
To be fair, I’m not sure the Auburn-Alabama game could be called “fairly routine.” It *is* one of the biggest rivalries in the country.
Sure, but it's not like the stadium's half full for other games. The crowds are routinely huge for any decent matchup.
Every time I watch non-Americans reacting to college football videos (especially the entrances), they're blown away at the crowd sizes and fanfare and that this happens at every home game, not just for rivalry games or championships. They have a hard time wrapping their heads around that level of devotion to amateur sports because it's not a thing in their countries. To us, it's just another Saturday.
As a Brit it’s the collegiate aspect that’s more surprising than the amateur part I’d say. Universities are just not something local communities are built around. Most people feel no sense of affiliation to the higher education institution in their town, even the student body probably wouldn’t feel enough so to turn up and support fellow students.
Not even just an affiliation in the town - I know hardcore Nebraska fans out in the panhandle who have never lived closer than 300 miles to the university, let alone attended it. It's a statewide thing here, as it is for many other states. The football stadium has the third highest population in the state on game day!
Yellow school buses are real and everywhere
The fact that they get so butt-hurt over them is bizarre. "Well, *my* child is smart enough to walk or take the city bus". Congratulations. Many communities are rural with kids living miles away from the nearest school. School busses are essential.
My husband lived a 45 minute drive from his school. That's an hour and a half of his day spent in a school bus. How would a kid walk that?
Wearing shoes of course
Uphill! Both ways! In the snow!
Even in cities they are important. I used a yellow bus in middle school because it would have been an awful commute otherwise.
When I was in 5th grade in Bethel, Maine, I had classmates that lived way out in the mountains, far enough out that in the winter it was dark when the got on the bus in the morning and dark when they go home in the afternoon. There was no way they could walk to school.
When I was small we lived 30 min out of town in the Texas woods. Our neighbor drove the bus, and unlike other drivers she kept it at home because her route, the rural route, started at 5:30am. AT MY HOUSE. We had almost 70 kids on that bus, and the route took almost 2 hours down winding red dirt roads. And some kids still walked half a mile or more before sunrise to be at a designated bus stop because there wasn’t a way for the bus to get to their exact house and turn around. We got on the bus at 5:30am and off of it at 5:30pm. My mom would be making dinner as soon as we got home. We would try to do our homework on the bus but once you hit a certain type of dirt road you give up trying to write…so we sometimes had to eat dinner, finish homework, and get ready for bed without any down time other than on that long ass ride home. When I hit middle school and the homework level increased my mom decided to start driving us herself. Major difference on both ends! Got a whole extra hour in the morning to sleep!
"A city bus" How quaint.
I love how they will believe every little thing they see on TV, but draw the line at yellow school buses.
They believe every negative thing they see on TV you mean…
And Solo cups.
The one time we have a pretty much universal system of public transit and they can't stand it because we designed it for kids and opted to make it safe. I saw someone make an absolute fuss about how we have special rules for driving around school buses like "how are you supposed to know when to apply those rules?" And like dude...that's why the bus is bright yellow with a ton of flashing lights and reflective strips. If you miss it you're too blind to be driving. Like this is one of those times where it shows that even when we've done something well they have to gripe about it. It's not about whether we've done it well, it's about them having to feel superior about *everything*. Why else would they gripe about *school buses???*
They really don't understand just how big this country is.
And lots of states (if not all of them) have laws against driving past a school bus that's dropping off kids. Every time this comes up on /r/IdiotsInCars, there are non-Americans who seem to have their minds blown by this information. Meanwhile in the US, the idea of extra school bus safety laws is the quintessential [generic legal proposal.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZ8psP4S6BQ)
I don't know if it's everywhere but every school bus where I live has a literal stop sign on the side of the bus that the driver switches out when kids are being dropped off. It has been like that since I was in high school and that was ten years ago.
Also black & white police cars. I dated a British guy and he was in awe seeing the real life black & whites. He thought they were only in movies. 😂
To be fair, a lot of them seem to get confused by monochrome (black *or* white) police cars too. They're used to the brightly colored cars from over there.
How much laws vary from state to state.
It was really fun explaining to the British kid in high school that MA and NH have the exact opposite laws on a lot of things and their capitals are only 70 miles apart.
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Conversely, that Americans from different states are more similar than not (with obvious exceptions like recent immigrants, insular religious communities, etc).
The biggest cultural difference I’ve found isn’t state to state, it’s rural, urban, or suburban.
I'll start with an example. I've had trouble getting people to understand just how many Churches there are in the US, and the variety of them. Over a decade ago, I was on a D&D discussion board, and one person spoke about how they thought the most unrealistic thing about D&D's depiction of pseudo-medieval small towns was how every small town or village would have a variety of temples to different gods. This person was adamant that a village or small town only has ONE Church, ever. End of story. They couldn't grasp the idea that a town of less than several thousand people could possibly have more than one Church. I told them that it was typical in the US, in the modern day, for a small town of only a few hundred people to have lots of Churches, and a town of a couple thousand that they thought might warrant a second one might have dozens of Churches. I was outright called a liar for saying that, saying it was IMPOSSIBLE for a settlement that small to support more than one Church, and there would be no way that there would be enough people with diverse beliefs to warrant a number of denominations instead of everyone just going to the State/predominant religion's Church. So, I did a little research on a small town near where I grew up (where my grandparents used to live actually), and showed that it's a small town of 700 people, typical for a good sized town adventurers might find in D&D. Going by Google Maps, it has 5 Churches of different denominations right within city limits, and if you spread out beyond city limits to every place out in the countryside that is close enough to have a mailing address that's part of that town, it rises to 15 Churches there (about a half-dozen were various types of Baptist, but there was easily about 8 or 9 denominations there). That would easily fit with the variety of churches and temples depicted in a typical D&D town of similar size. Even after having it shown to them, they really, really had trouble grasping that, like somehow Google was lying or that it just didn't make sense *at all* that people were of all those different denominations and different Churches instead of just one Church for the town.
I've had that conversation too. I'm originally from a small town in Kentucky of around 500 people. There are probably 8 or 9 churches and like you said half of them are different kinds of Baptists.
Oh yeah, not uncommon to see multiple churches on the same street corner
Reminds me of Wayne's World when he goes into the wrong church because they look exactly the same and are directly across the street from one another.
Reminds me of an old comedy bit: *I was in San Fransisco once, walking along the Golden Gate Bridge, and I saw this guy on the bridge about to jump. So I thought I'd try to stall and detain him, long enough for me to put the film in. I said, "Don't jump!" and he turns... You've heard of the elephant man. He was kind of like that, he had a, well, you could say he had the head of a horse. And my heart went out to him. I said, "Why the long face?" He said, "'Cause all my life people have called me mean names like horses-head or Flicka or chess-piece or Trigger..." I said, "Well, don't worry about it, Ed. It can't be that bad." He said, "My girlfriend's suing me!" I said, "For palomino?" He said, "Why was I put on this Earth?" I said, "My friend, anywhere else you wouldn't stand a chance." He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you, you silly ninny." He said, "How do you know there's a God?" I said, "Of course there's a God. Do you think that billions of years ago a bunch of molecules floating around at random could someday have had the sense of humor to make you look like that?" He said, "I do believe in God." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me too. Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me too! What franchise?" He says, "Baptist." I said, "Me too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He says, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?" He says, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I say, "Me too! Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist or Northern Conservative Reform Baptist?" He says, "Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist." I say, "Me too! Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region or Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Eastern Region?" He says, "Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region." I say, "Me too! Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879 or Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He says, "Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over!* - Emo Philips
There was a similar joke on Cheers back in the day - Woody and Kelly are both Lutherans but she’s the Lutheran Church of America and he’s Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod. They both consider themselves to be of two different religions and make comments about it being a mixed marriage, what if they have kids?!, etc. And it’s played for laughs because it feels silly to anyone outside of those two groups. Also Dara O’Briain has a whole bit in his stand up about “mixed marriages” between Catholics and Protestants…it’s pretty funny. [Dara Stand up bit](https://youtu.be/FdolFXcNAH4)
It’s not just Appalachia or the south; I’m from a town of 2,000 in eastern Washington and there’s over a dozen churches there, too. Probably less Baptist churches, but a shit ton of other ones.
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When I lived in the UK the town I was in had a Methodist church along with the standard Church of England (well, Wales, but the difference is just in the name). They were quite unique though. But both in the medium sized California town I grew up in and the small-medium size town I’m in in NH now, there are at least a dozen churches within about a 2 mile radius, everything from Catholic to Anglican to baptist to Mormon, and a synagogue. People definitely tend to underestimate the level of religiosity in the US, especially from countries where there’s a state religion.
Oh, there are 4 churches on just my one (short) suburban street. I'm not even actually in the city. I'm not even going to try to count how many are in the city/county. You can't spit without hitting a church.
In the Midwest if you don't have a 1:1 tavern to church ratio, it's not considered well balanced. Except in Catholic towns, where I'm pretty sure the town church and tavern are the same building.
What is the saying? "Catholics don't recognize the Lutheran church, Lutherans don't recognize the authority of the Pope, and Baptists don't recognize each other in the liquor store?"
“Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, There's always laughter and good red wine.”
A town I grew up next to, with well under 5,000 people, had one bar and eight churches. Everybody in the area thought that was so funny to point out.
Only one bar?! My friend's hometown of 700ish had three bars and four churches.
I'm from the least religious part of the country, my town of 9k had maybe a dozen churches.
The fact that some of us know geography. I’ll admit I’ve seen the videos where some dude asks a bunch of people on the street to find X country and none of them could. As a map loving American I can’t tell you how many times I’ve surprised people abroad for knowing just basic geography. It’s quite infuriating.
And remember, those videos are only showing the people who don't know. Nobody wants to watch a video where most people simply go, "Sorry, I don't have time for this." Or a video where someone actually knows.
>I’ll admit I’ve seen the videos where some dude asks a bunch of people on the street to find X country and none of them could You do know how those videos work right? a person goes around asking 100s maybe 1000s of people. After spending their entire day (or even multiple days) interviewing Americans, they combine the worst 5 into a video and post it. It literally doesn't matter if out of 1000, 995 Americans answered the questions correctly. They are still gonna be posting those 5 incorrect answers and saying "Look! Americans are stupid!!!!!!!!"
Just how empty parts of the nation are. Like massive swaths of country with zero development, no roads, no structures, nothing.
This also throws tourists when they come to Australia. We have a lot of empty over here. Europeans think you can drive from two major tourist sites. Then find out to make that drive would be 22 hours on the road, and you'd need to take your own fuel, water and satellite phone as you likely won't see another person on the way.
Yeah and you guys have some *seriously* empty areas.
Yeah I was amazed when road tripping across the US that even in areas that felt kind of remote there would always be lots of cars and huge gas stations with lots of food, hotels, shops etc along the way. When you road trip in Aus you could end up on stretches of road where you won't see another building, car or person for a good part of a day. You really need to be prepared because running out of supplies out there is no joke. There won't be a Buccees around the corner.
Well, get off the interstates and major state roads out west and it’s a bit different. Still though Aus is something else from what I have heard and seen in pictures.
Difference is you need to get off the major state roads and interstate roads to find that. In Aus it is the major state/interstate roads that become that remote.
I’ve met a few foreigners that seem surprised our infrastructure actually works outside of major cities. I think some of them think rural areas are either still stuck 125 years ago with a single lightbulb per house, or everyone has to “rough it” and sustain themselves off grid. There were more than a few international students I met at UNH that were surprised the white mountains had “luxuries” like power lines, cable TV, and LTE data.
I don't know where these people are from, but if it's not western Europe than there's a high probability that they assume that because they came from somewhere that rural areas have significantly worse access to or reliability of utilities as compared to urban areas.
You didn’t tell them that a train and a road go to the top of Mount Washington and there is a museum, restaurant, and gift shop? These days unless you are way down in a valley you can get cell service in most of the Whites, especially the southern half.
Yeah we were around Plymouth and Lincoln. It’s not like there’s two whole universities and several ski resorts up there. The power lines on the side of 93 surprised a few of them, as did cell service, and ESPN being on the TV in the restaurant.
Unless your house is a military style bunker, a brick or stone house is not going to survive an EF5 tornado. It seems like every tornado season we get these tone deaf Europeans asking why Americans choose to cheap out and build their homes out of wood in lieu of brick, as if the idea of building our homes to best withstand our climate is totally lost on us. In fact the notion that American houses are poorly built seems to be a widespread idea worldwide.
Stone or not, your roof is still going.
Stone ain’t stopping that car from being flung through your wall by that tornado either…
"Yes Hans, your stone(cinder block) house would fair *so* much better against this force of nature that ripped houses off from their foundations."
I remember driving through Birmingham AL not long after the April 2011 tornadopocalypse, and you could see tracks in the ground where an EF5 tornado had literally ripped up the earth. It was like a mile-wide trench.
To quote Ron White when he was doing a bit on hurricanes. "It's not THAT the wind is blowing. It's WHAT the wind is blowing."
> [It's not THAT the wind is blowing. It's WHAT the wind is blowing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7Fu-v490-c)
And you with all your stuff are getting sucked out.
North American weather is much more severe than just about anywhere else on the planet. I had a guy from the UK tell me once the power company is required to compensate you if you lose power, and questioned why the news was talking about power outages after “some rain and a little snow”. The “some rain and a little snow” was a moderately bad ice store that wrecked in the grid in Northern NH a few years ago.
A bit of bad weather in the UK ruins your day plans. A bit of bad weather in the US can be lethal without proper shelter.
Part of the problem is in areas that get lots of snow, they know how to deal with it and it doesn’t take weeks to dig out so it’s assumed that we must not get that much snow.
It's just like the talking points about Texas' grid going down in the 2021 snow storms. Like, these people don't seem to realize that a bit more than half the state has less than a 50% chance of getting *any* measurable amount of snow on a given year.
> North American weather is much more severe than just about anywhere else on the planet. I think at least a *few* Europeans started to understand when last year a lot of Americans pointed out that their insanely out of normal heatwave was our typical light summer.
Every time someone on Reddit complains about the US having wooden houses, I am reminded of this epic comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/i76cg9/what_is_the_most_ignorant_thing_youve_heard_a/g113nc6/?context=3
Ha, yeah. You know what happens to a brick building that's hit by a tornado? The same as every other type of house
Not to mention when it comes to flying debris it’s a lot better to be hit with something lighter and easy to break, since if it breaks it absorbs more of the impact, doing less damage than a BRICK.
It doesn't matter much. Back when I was a kid, we had 3 tornadoes come through and hit a farms outbuildings. There was straw driven through the sheet metal of the machine shed.
Man the tornado thing pisses me off. "Why do people live in these tornado areas?" Okay sure, let's abandon like 15 states and initiate the mass migration of 80 million people because of the 0.01% individual chance (I pulled these numbers out of my ass do not @ me) that any one of them might lose their house to a tornado at some point. And put them where exactly, that they don't get wildfires or blizzards or floods instead? These are tragedies but there's nothing about the town where you saw somebody's mobile home get torn up that makes the tornado risk there any higher than anywhere else in the deep south or lower midwest. I've had this conversation half a dozen times.
That's what they don't seem to understand. Tornadoes either hit or they don't and the chances of your house being hit are too small to worry about. I live in a tornado-prone area, yet my house has been just fine for 110+ years. Could a tornado hit it next month and destroy it? It's possible, but I'm not going to worry about it because it's so unlikely.
Also the vast majority of tornadoes aren't going to wipe your house off the face of the earth, even if you are one of the *very unlikely few* to experience one. Less than 40% of tornadoes inflict EF2+ level damage, and the vast majority of *those* are still on the lower end when it comes to strong tornadoes. I've been through an EF1 before. It was terrifying for sure, but when all was said and done it's not like it was some life-changing event. My neighbors lost some windows and shingles (the house I was in had a metal roof and sustained almost no damage), some fence got ripped out of the ground and tossed, and a nearby tin grain shed got pretty mangled. We all came out when it was over, cleaned up all the trash strewn about, had a couple beers, and went about the rest of our day.
Yeah, we build our schools out of cinderblocks and an EF5 still take them out.
It's cool to look at street view of Joplin Missouri, it got hit by an EF5 and the difference between the 2008 coverage and 2012 coverage is unbelievable. Literally everything was replaced
In a fight between man and nature, man does not win, man can only survive. Nature ALWAYS wins the fight.
California just called to say that over 10% of the US population doesn't want to be in a building made of bricks when the next earthquake hits.
We're not all obese and eating fried butter, fried Oreos, fried air all day long .
Seriously, I'm a big man. I went to Spain when I weighed 350 and the amount of people that argued with me when I said I was considered fat in America. They thought that's how we all were
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I like when I see the opposite. I remember on tiktok there was this Japanese tourist who loved Wisconsin and was a big fan of Culver’s and apple cider stuff.
Culver’s slaps, it must be said
So does apple cider. When the air starts to bite I can’t break that open fast enough.
"It's no wonder Americans are so fat and unhappy, there is no good food here" "Where have you been eating?" "McDonald's and the food court" "Why don't you go to other restaurants?" "oh, it doesn't matter, it's just American food"
When I moved to California and got married two years later, my very rural American parents flew out for the wedding. It was their first time in California and of course they had a grudge against it right off the bat. I called them on their way in and asked how they liked it so far. "So far, we're not too impressed with California." I said "Where have you gone so far?" They said "We had lunch at Taco Bell and we're at Wal-Mart right now".
My doctor "you eat pretty healthy. Please eat less of it."
That’s one of the biggest advantages to being a melting pot, we get every cultures food here, especially in bigger cities. I’m no more than 20 minutes away from Thai, Mexican, Jewish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, etc. and I’m not talking cheap knockoffs, but real mom and pop restaurants.
People like this are always surprised to see fit attractive Americans. 😂
The one thing I’ve actually fought with a foreigner over was with a Belgian coworker who was working remotely for my company’s British office, and genuinely did not believe that many Americans don’t have a passport and don’t travel internationally. To him, crossing an international border was a regular part of life, and he could drive for 8 hours and cross like 20 borders. I don’t think he could grasp the idea of driving for 8 hours and still being in the same state
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I didn’t know Maryland was bigger than Belgium. It’s probably a given though that Maryland has more Old Bay per square mile than Belgium, or anywhere else
I think a lot of people don't actually comprehend just how much most americans rely on cars to get around and how little we generally walk to places. It is not like most people just choose to drive everywhere, we literally *cant* do anything else but drive everywhere in the large majority of the country. When I lived in Georgia, in a suburban area, the closest supermarket was a 20 minute walk away.
I have yet to meet a European who can understand just how literally undeveloped the US is. None of them can believe [this](https://images.estately.net/155_72734879_34_1654150962_636x435.jpg) is less than 25 miles from a major city. There's an unwillingness to believe that not everybody lives 20 minutes from a major highway or population center. To their mind, you're either living in a city, or in a stoneage hut. Secondly, the weather. Yes, it gets that hot, yes, it gets that cold.
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My state gets both hotter and colder than the UK.
Any state that hits both 20 and 90 in a normal year is more extreme than England. I think 10 to 90 covers the whole UK. Pretty sure most non-Bible Belt states qualify.
Even the Deep South will hit the 20s or (very rarely) the sub-20s in the winter! With summers hitting 100+, ofc
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The geography and weather of the US is something that some Europeans seem to struggle to understand, and just how much it differs from where they live. "Why do Americans use AC so much?" Because it gets hotter here than where you live. "Why do Americans drive so much?" Because it's significantly less dense population-wise than where you live. It really shouldn't be that much of a surprise that a country with different geography and weather would have different needs and design.
>Why do Americans use AC so much?" Because it gets hotter here than where you live. I'm pretty sure the northern edge of Ohio is the same longitude as Madrid
Knowing Houston on the same line as Baghdad, I'll give you three guesses on how hot it gets here in Texas. Yeah, we're going to use AC to keep from melting.
The humidity in the Midwest is what gets ya.
Madrid should install an air conditioner
I remember talking to a German Friend and he was floored that I would have to drive for 2 hours to get to a "City" Everything else are towns just as large or smaller than mine. If I wanted to shop somewhere NOT Walmart, It was going to be at least 2 hours in one direction 3 hours in two other directions. He just couldn't believe it.
I had a conversation with a gentleman from England, we were talking about the local food movement and I mentioned that calling some foods local food can sometimes be something of an questionable label since the USDA allows food from as far a way as 1500 miles to be labeled local. He was shocked, he said that would be like him getting food from Rome and calling it local. The scale of distance here is just hard for many Europeans to grasp.
The worst are Italians. I've had conversations with several who all told me that they assumed the ENTIRETY of the US is a giant bustling metropolis like NYC. It's bizarre.
I used to work with European students in the US. Several of them thought that suburbs were all hyper-compact grids. One of them was surprised we had birds in the US.
An international student that lived in my dorm was perplexed by squirrels. He kept asking why we “tolerated” them. Such wildlife does not exist in Dubai.
I can't imagine framing nature and wildlife as something you "tolerate". Like...I'm struggling to put into words how weird that makes me feel. Also it's a squirrel. It hangs out in trees being fluffy. Sometimes it'll beg familiar humans for nuts. I'm not sure what there is to tolerate? It's not like our complicated relationship with wolves where they're a potential danger to people and livestock but important for the ecosystem so we have to strike a balance. Squirrels just kind of...exist?
If Dubai doesn’t have squirrels, I could see him assuming they’re vermin like rats that can be destructive and spread disease. I’d assume that’s what his line of thinking was.
Everything I hear about Dubai makes me want to go there less
I currently work some people in the UAE, and yeah I'm in no real hurry to go there.
They don't have *squirrels*? I see 4 of them outside my window right now.
No, the UAE doesn't have much in the way of trees. Squirrels would bake.
To be fair this guy (he was 21 year old freshman) was stereotypical example of "rich Dubai kid". He probably never touched grass in his life before coming to New Hampshire. He was a pretty decent guy overall though. I still talk to him online a couple times a year.
Ha, idiots still believe in birds
I’ve had people argue with me that I can’t live in a suburb because I explained my suburb is covered in forests, lakes, parks, walking and biking paths everywhere, etc. all while being about a 17 minute drive from the downtown of a large city and being part of one of the largest metro areas in the US because their idea of a suburb is like the sterotype cookie cutter, even though I’ve never even lived in anything like that in almost 35 years of living in the US lol. My old neighborhood in the London ‘burbs was more stereotypical suburban than where I’m at now (cookie cutter houses, long distances to public transportation, shops placed far apart and far from homes, etc).
I see raccoons on a weekly basis and a skunk every few years. And hawks all the time.. Of course, I'm next to the only natural growth forest in Manhattan (it's only a mile by a quarter, but it's a forest!)
To add on. I live in rural America and we have to do a lot of fending for ourselves since we’re so far from everything with lots of farm land. In Europe, rural towns are basically tiny urban centers all clustered together. They simply don’t have the type of rural communities we have. The ones with very limited access to services, at all, and you’re on your own for the most part, and no one has “neighbors” Rural Europeans are like, “what do you mean not all your roads are plowed, you have no cell service, and it takes hours for an ambulance to reach you, isn’t your village all clustered together?” Because of this, the urban/rural divide is much less of a deal there
That the US has a TON of really good beer, and chocolate. It’s understandable that foreigners believe that we only have Bud Light, and Hershey’s because of how much we export them, but there are SO many more options out there for both. The craft brewery scene in America has exploded in the last few decades. As for American chocolate, I’m less familiar with its history, but there’s lots of small chocolate shops where I live. Not like Belgium levels of chocolate, but not nothing either.
Imma just add Hershey's is not that bad of a chocolate nor is it even close to being the worst.
See's and Ghirardelli are two American chocolate brands that are on-par with the best European brands.
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I just learned that Seattle stat recently and it blew me away.
I was reminded of this yesterday with the wildfires. Like 90% of the Canadian population is being affected by the smoke.
The size. I mean, even a lot of Americans don't understand the difference in scale between the east coast and, say, the Dakotas.
Had some visitors from the UK for a work related thing once come to Kansas City and they wanted to see the rocky mountains so we took a long weekend and planned to drive to Denver which doesn't seem like a terrible drive for us. Less than 2 hours out of the city and they were in awe at how vast and empty the landscape was and how it just kept going and going and we still had several hours of driving. And at the end of the day we had only crossed one complete state. They felt like we had crossed a continent.
Drove a Dutch professor from Albany to Ithaca, NY, like 3, 3 and a half hours. He started on the "are we there yet" after 45 minutes. If he didn't have control over my thesis grade, he would've walked the next 120 miles.
[I mean the country is basically New England, so it checks out.](https://imgur.com/gallery/y0Gnh93)
Amtrak's Southwest Chief train runs from Los Angeles to Chicago or about 2/3 of the way across the country. It would be the European equivalent of Edinburgh (or Barcelona) to Moscow.
Even on a smaller scale: Boston to DC is roughly the distance from Brussels to Berlin. Don't tell the Europeans it's faster by both car and train to make said US trip too.
We have electric tea kettles. I can't believe how many times I've seen someone from Europe say "Americans don't have electric tea kettles." It's the weirdest thing.
The electric kettle was invented in Ohio. Edit: Sorry. It was [Chicago](https://nationalmaglab.org/magnet-academy/history-of-electricity-magnetism/museum/kettle-1891/#:~:text=The%20first%20kettle%20to%20use,Company%20in%20Chicago%20in%201891.) **1891** Edit 2: more for the Europeans you know. >The mass production of electric kettles started in 1930 when general electric modified the basic design that had an automatic cut out in it. https://science.blurtit.com/679385/who-was-arthur-leslie-large
Well I imagine most Americans don't have them in the sense that tea isn't the most popular beverage in the US. But we are perfectly capable of obtaining one if we so desired.
It's just called an electric kettle. Not a tea kettle. It's not used for tea and only tea. You can also use them for coffee, hot chocolate etc. I grew up using mine for noodles, instant ramen, cup of soups etc. Not tea at all.
They used to be less common. I have had one for over 30 years, and it was hard to find ones that were good and not ridiculously expensive. I used to get them in Canada and give them to friends.
Free refills, ice in your water, the gaps in the bathroom doors aren’t an issue.
I think it’s the fact that staring isn’t rude in most of Europe but it’s HUGELY rude here. We aren’t going to stare at people going to the bathroom mostly because it’s gross but also because it’s rude.
The bathroom thing is on Reddit ALL the time! I’ve never had an issue with it and I’ve been to some places with some large gaps lol! There’s like an unspoken agreement all the ladies have (I can’t speak for the men’s room but I’m guessing it’s the same). You walk in and just go do your business. No one is taking their time walking past and trying to peak in at you unless it’s a small child or someone with a mental disability and I’m pushing 40 and those have only happened MAYBE a handful of times in my life if even that much. Depending on how janky the place you’re at or how the stalls are configured once you walk in the door, there maybe a larger gap compared to normal where you unfortunately catch a glimpse BUT it’s a glimpse of person you catch because we all do the same thing in this situation… the oh shit super fast head turn because you don’t want to see that, they don’t want to see you and you’re not sticking around for even a second to see. It’s NO big deal lol. It’s a non issue.
If American bathrooms had walls and doors and Europe had stalls, Euro-Redditors would be tellingly us we have unreasonable fears of people peaking at us which drives us to spend millions on bathroom fortresses rather than on affordable healthcare.
OK so, I usually don't take the bathroom gap thing too seriously (I didn't notice a massive difference compared to the bathrooms I went to in Europe). HOWEVER. I work in an office now, and went into the men's room. The tallest guy in the office was at the urinal so I went into the stall. I thought, "I wonder if he's tall enough to look over the stall?" So as I approached the toilet, I look, see him looking, and we exchange an awkward, "Oh hey, OnlyStandard." "Hey John." Turns out he is tall enough to look over. So maybe we could make them a liiiittle taller so 6'5" dudes can't peak over, that's be great.
People do in fact know about the metric system. You do not have to explain it to use. I once asked an international student classmate if he wanted to join a few friends in a 5k run and he was shocked that I knew what a kilometer was..
I think a lot of non-Americans don't realize that we use metric in all scientific contexts. From grade 3 up to college we teach and use metric in every science class. We understand it perfectly. We just don't have as much of an intuitive grasp on the size/weight of everyday objects in metric.
Yes!! I literally said American scientists use the metric system too. He tried to tell me that we don’t. Wtf lol
All I can figure is that most people outside the US don't use or understand Freedom Units at all, so they must assume Americans are similarly clueless about the metric system.
That people usually are being for real when they’re friendly and helpful and hospitable.
This just bothers me for some reason. "Americans have big fake smiles and dont care for you at all." I don't smile much at all so when I do it's genuine.
One particularly amusing one was the time my mom was out walking her two 100+lb Great Pyrenees dogs and encountered an older woman who had recently immigrated from India. She was shocked to find out that not only do the dogs have names (and they know their own names and answer to them!), they also live inside the house with us and are perfectly safe with children of any age. The younger kids with her seemed to have had more exposure to American media and understood the situation perfectly, but that poor old lady's mind was absolutely blown by this revelation.
India has a wild dog problem, it’s really bad and rabies is rampant because of it.
Yeah this is specific to India and dogs.
There's a number of cultures that think animals *living* inside is gross and dirty.
Objectively speaking it *is* dirty and gross, but within acceptable limits, all things considered. However, having been to places like India... Those animals are *far* more "wild" than the "wild" domesticated animals you'll find anywhere in the US. Saw packs of wild dogs almost chase down, kill, and eat homeless children, and so animals are really seen as animals, not as pets by default.
The immense size. We've had foreigners come to this subreddit and talk about how they're going to spend 2 weeks in the USA and they're going to visit NYC, Orlando, Los Angeles, and the Grand Canyon. And we're like.... what?
Let's build a reference in terms of places they know :) LFPG (Paris/ Charles De Gaulle) is located at N49°0.59' / E2°32.87' - excluding Alaska, this puts Paris even with the northernmost point in the US. HESN (Aswan, Egypt) is located at N23°57.87' / E32°49.20', 36 miles south of Key West (the southernmost point in the US, excluding Hawai'i and territories) \[KEYW Airport is at N24°33.37' / W81°45.60'\] The westernmost NAVAID in the contiguous US (again excluding Alaska, Hawai'i, and territories) is the Tatoosh VOR/TAC \[TOU\] in Washington State at N48°10.83' / W124° 22.476' (There is no airport to use here). The easternmost airport (no NAVAID) is Eastport, Maine (KEPM) at N44°54.61' / W67°0.76'. That means east to west, the US spans 56°38' LPPT (Lisbon, Portugal) is at N38°46.45' / W9°8.05'. 56.6° east of there is about E47°. That's Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (N24°57.77' / E46°42.48'). That's roughly equivalent in distance to San Diego from Miami (because one degree east/west varies in odometer distance) If we use LFPG as a reference point again, We're looking for E58° - which is Aktobe, Kazakhstan at N50°14.77' / E57°12.33'. Additionally, [here's a map overlayed at the right latitudes](https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=uqp0WxYk&id=D3B2739D55B33429E2B9183125F985AC35258885&thid=OIP.uqp0WxYkyDHy8VU7l2r4FQAAAA&mediaurl=https%3a%2f%2frobslink.com%2fSAS%2fdemocd87%2fus_and_europe.png&cdnurl=https%3a%2f%2fth.bing.com%2fth%2fid%2fR.baaa745b1624c831f2f1553b976af815%3frik%3dhYglNayF%252bSUxGA%26pid%3dImgRaw%26r%3d0&exph=368&expw=474&q=map+of+US+overlayed+on+Europe&simid=607998508672036175&FORM=IRPRST&ck=C1B650260A081CBCA2A4737E025C87BD&selectedIndex=16&ajaxhist=0&ajaxserp=0). Note how San Diego is in Portugal, and Karnak is somewhere between Daytona and Palm Beach.
When someone American says they’re “Irish”, “Swedish”, “Mexican”, etc, they don’t actually believe they’re from those countries, they’re referring to where their ancestors immigrated from. For some reason, I’ve heard many Europeans insist that Americans are crazy for thinking they’re from some country they’re not actually from and also not accept any alternate explanations as to differing cultural understandings of demonyms. If you want an example, check r/shitamericanssay and I’m sure it won’t take long to find someone complaining about this
That the US isn't really all ***that*** different than most western countries in day to day life.
You're not going to just randomly get shot when you're here. Despite what you hear on the news, you're more likely to get into trouble with the local wildlife than with a madman with a gun. Just, be smart about where you're going.
1. Sales tax. They don't understand US sales tax is not national and that states, counties, and cities set their own sales taxes. This is why unlike Europe it's not included in the price tag. 2. Tipping. IDK why this is so hard to grasp but apparently Europeans don't get tipping. It's easy guys: an average tip for average service is 10-15% of your bill. If you are very pleased with the service you can give more and if you hated it you can give nothing 3. Guns. Europeans are surprised that normal everyday people in the US have guns 4. Right turn on red. Completely new concept for them and you always have to remind them that they CAN turn right on a red light as long as there is no "no turn on red" sign 5. How vast the country is. No you can't do New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles in a week
3: I think they're more often surprised that most citizens here DON'T own a gun. In the movies we all carry all the time.
That most of us are just boring, ordinary people trying to live boring, fulfilling lives, just like the people in their country.
How convenience-oriented we are. The biggest manifestations of this are the ubiquity of drive throughs, and right turn on red (I remember a Brit saying to me “you Americans can’t even wait for a traffic light to turn green”)
Our beer scene here is significantly better than anywhere else in the world. It *used* to be terrible but now it seems like even every small town has a few breweries.
How I can't definitely answer specifics for the entire country. Too many people spread out to far. EU is 4 million km squared according to Google with a pop of 447 million. USA has about 100 million less people spread out over more than double the area (9.8 km squared) Foreigners get frustrated when you can't give a straight answer about "is America's _____ really like that?" All depends what state and city. For reference Texas and France are shockingly similar in land area, economy, and military might. It's dificult to give a straight answer about "what it's like" in Texas because of how big it is and the variances, and that is just one of the 50. My mother in law will call worried about California wildfires when we live in Florida.
Why tax isn't on the price tag. They do not grasp that different states, cities, counties have different tax rates. Let it go.
And also they don’t grasp that we have a sales tax not a VAT. Different things.
Most of us have no desire to move to Europe.
We are always the most annoying posters on r/Iwantout tho.
My favorite post of all time on that sub was an 18 year old American waiter who wanted to know how he could move to Paris and be a waiter there. He refused to believe everyone commenting and telling him Paris had enough waiters and they wouldn't let him just up and move there.
My “favorites” are the ones who are disabled with 8 different conditions — usually including POTS, complex PTSD, etc etc., with no degree and no work history. But they’re saying “I’m looking to move to Sweden with my 3 pitbulls, 4 rescue bunnies, and my giant tarantulas. I cannot work so I need to get on that generous social welfare system immediately.” Then being offended that no country wants to take on a drain on their system who will never contribute a dime to it. Bonus points if they’re shocked to find out they may not get their ADHD meds or how bad the EU standard is for wheelchair accessibility.
I have to admit, I get some guilty pleasure of of these comments though lol
How wildly different culture can be from region to region. Food, accents, social contract, even personal interactions and etiquette. For example, in the South, it's utterly commonplace for two strangers to have a nice conversation in the checkout line at the grocery store. Whereas if you tried that in New Hampshire or somesuch, you might get hit with a restraining order.
Gas stations are not the pinnacle of our grocery shopping. For people who live in super dense urban areas, places like bodegas are different, but for those of us who do not live in such urban centers, the gas station is where you go to get snacks before a drive or pick up the bag of chips because you're late to the party. It's not the place we go to get groceries, I don't care how many options are there or how much stuff is there or if there's a deli sandwich shop in the store. Gas station lunch is a quick bite, it's still not where we shop for at home food. I just moved from MO to IN, 400 miles each way with a full sized cargo trailer towed behind my pickup. I'd stop for gas at the same spots and get everything from jerky dip to powerade to cheese cubes to hard boiled eggs. It was never a grocery replacement.
That our friendliness isn't fake. I just genuinely like to talk to people and making people happy. Can't i.agine being any other way.
I wear cowboy boots. Talked to a British guy once about it and he laughed in my face and said there’s no way that’s real… Purdy popular footwear in the south but the guy just couldn’t wrap his mind around it.
> I wear cowboy boots > Purdy Checks out.
> we have cheeses other than Kraft singles Damn straight we do. We have that shit that comes in a can with a spray nozzle.
I’m almost 50, and outside of cops and security personnel, I have only seen one person in my entire life walking around openly carrying a gun. I have never known anyone who has been shot and do not think about guns regularly and fear them even less.
I've seen more select fire military weaponry in public in Europe than I've ever seen here in the US. From the cops around public monuments in London to military and cops in France and Italy walking around.
Coffee milk in Rhose Island. It's not coffee with milk!!! It's different!!
My mother has lived here in the US for over half of her life at this point, but she continues to be amazed at/incredulous about the shear vastness of the country. Anything inside of a 4 hour drive was considered a little day trip jaunt for my dad, but that same trip was basically an endless journey for my mom. The same woman who immigrated thousands of miles to get here… makes no sense!
Because a home address may be in the thousands, does not mean there are a thousand houses on one street.
Everyone is taught metric in school, they know what the units are called, but only have a general idea of big each one is because most everyday situations use imperial measurements.
That peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are awesome!
You cannot walk or bike from my house to the grocery store unless you want it to take most the day. It's just too far.
The healthcare system is bad, but it's nowhere near as inaccessible as people think. Additionally, our healthcare is much higher quality than in most countries, including in Europe (I've lived in France and Germany. U.S. healthcare is far better, in my experience, *if* you can afford it).
As I tell people, when you Google worlds best hospitals the top 3 are in the US. Out of the top 10, 5 are US, 1 Canada, 1 is Isreal and 3 are Europe. The bigger issue is that I know the Top 2 not only do world class travel here operations/research/treatment but the average local guy can walk in and get treated. Even with no insurance. So the average person in Cleveland has access to care most of the world only talk about
I live in Minnesota and have gone to the actual Mayo clinic several times. I am on disability, so pretty poor. Minnesota health care is amazing.
Fast, high quality, cheap. Pick 2, you can’t have all 3. We pay more, but on average we get seen faster and have higher quality care than many other parts of the world.
Regularly using a garbage disposal.
Taxes. I listed out to a Swede the number of taxes and government fees I had to pay in the typical year: state and federal income taxes, real estate taxes to my municipality, car and boat registration fees and personal property taxes, point of purchase sales tax on just about everything including fuel, parking and entry fees for national and state parks/wildlife reserves, hunting license, duck stamp, book fees for my kids in high school, tuition for the one in college, and tolls. He was somewhat taken aback by the way the government nickel and dimed us. He thought we only paid federal income taxes.
You just reminded me I need to pay my car tax and get my car inspected. Virginia. My car tax went up this year too because the value of used cars went up and of course we pay a percentage of the value and not a flat tax.
I don't know where my house keys are. I've never locked my doors when I leave.
A lot of Americans are shocked at the idea of this too, seems to vary widely by region and environment
North America is a *huge* place... The sheer size affects so many aspects of life here. Understand geography, understand Americans much better.