what is that you usually do or see in your country or area but is weird to do in other area you have traveled or vice versa?? like it is unusual to wear footwear indoors in asia.
Wearing tracksuits in Ireland as regular day clothing. They are not nearly as common now as they were before, but many young people still wear them because they’re comfortable and cheap. I remember German foreign exchange students asking the teacher why do Irish people always go to gym because of the tracksuits.
France.
You’re at the grocery store and want to buy a single bottle of milk or coke, but they’re only sold in packs of 6? Just tear open a pack and take one bottle.
I think that’s a thing in many Central European countries
Belgium, same.
Austria - same.
I see that lots in Canada as well, but often the 6-pack is way cheaper per unit, to the point where sometimes a 6-pack is the same price as a single.
It’s absolutely acceptable to go to a university lecture at 8 am, and sit in the front row with a beer. The professors won’t mind. You can buy beer in the cafeteria as well as in a vending machine at the library.
Pulling out a bottle of hard liquor is frowned upon tho.
Germany ?
Yes. Bavaria specifically.
As a Canadian who graduated quite a while ago now. Jealous!
Don’t be, we all graduated as alcoholics
Yeah does seem a bit dangerous.
Our scientific branch of government telling people paracetamol (acetaminophen) can cause autism and leucovorin (a anti cancer treatment regimen) may cure autism. Also legelise ivermectin (worm pills) over the counter for COVID
Our government endorses them.
Wtf
Congratulate everyone with someone else’s birthday. Netherlands.
Also where we have laws but we make mental exceptions for it because of reasons.
So… As I read this, this comes to mind: “Gefeliciteerd met Rita’s verjaardag, Johnny.”
That’s not what you meant, did you?
Yes, that’s exactly what I meant. When you arrive to someone’s birthday it’s common to go around, shake everyone’s hand and congratulate them (with Rita’s birthday). Or just do a wave when you enter and collectively congratulate everybody.
And that, my friend, is why Flanders and The Netherlands will never unite ;-) That, and juderans.
Gefeliciteerd.
Dankjewel.
I think the way we treat The Law as a Suggestion is very much a national exclusivity. Other people, especially first worlders, are a lot more reverent about it.
Poutine.
I was in Canada and I wanted to poutine. I could hardly find any. Ask I had just gravy on fries
Where in Canada? That sounds like a 'berta thing lol. I can go to just about any random restaurant here and if they serve fries, chances are they have some sort of poutine option
Yeah, in Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes, you can get authentic poutine. It starts getting rare to find a good one the further west you go. Its a French-Canadian cuisine and thus Quebec-centric.
In BC the poutines are usually all wrong. Chicken gravy and shredded cheese instead of room-temp curd and a properly dark beef gravy.
When the place actually tries to make it an original take, its better. Like the Brown’s Social House Rocky Mountain Poutine, or that place that does it with tater tots. 😂
Poutine should be normal everywhere and I am devastated that it’s not.
Tabarnac oui!
Being able to go basically anywhere by bike, foot, or public transport. And just our bike infrastructure in general. I honestly don’t know how I could live in most other countries because it seems like basically everything happens by car or foot. Being able to bike anywhere is so much nicer and gives a lot of freedom from an early age.
Strangely we Dutch people also seem to be quite alone in our view that helmets on normal bikes are not really necessary. They make bikes more prevalent imo, because you don’t have to drag a helmet along everywhere. You just park you bike and the only thing you have with you because of it is a key, no special clothes, helmets, etc. I think that’s also possible because of our bicycle infrastructure and culture.
Kids learn to bike from a young age, in traffic. You see very young kids just cycle on their smol little bike with a parent on the outside sort of shielding them from traffic. Safely on bike roads, but also just on shared roads with cars. In general kids are quite free to just play outside. I live close to a school and I see plenty of kids all across the neighborhood, just playing without parental supervision. It’s what we did back in the day too, without mobile phones or anything. We’d usually be home on time for dinner or our parents would find us somewhere in the neighborhood and tell us it was time to get home.
We came from far but we’re working on it. Flanders is steadily moving to that utopia.
Dutch isn’t a country, therefore the utopia you describe doesn’t exist and is impossible to create.
Farofa.
Farofa is a type of meal made from toasted cassava. It is eaten mainly in Brazil. It can be found commercially produced and packaged but can also be prepared at home based on family recipes. Most recipes will also contain varying amounts of salt, smoked meat, and spices.
I don’t feel like I learned much by looking up what that is.
It’s added to the plate to add flavor and texture and to absorb moisture. It’s a side dish to feijoada and to churrasco too, but you can eat it with any meal.
There’s corn and soy farofa too, but cassava is the main one.
Thanking the bus drivers when exiting the bus.
Depends on the bus type though. A lot of buses have a rear door, and sometimes it’s kinda rude to go out through the front when there’s a lot of people coming in through the front. So then you end up leaving through the rear and it would be awkward to shout ‘Thank you!’ to the driver, over everyone’s head.
In Dublin, everyone would enter and leave via the front door. Only Covid changed that, and drivers started opening the second doors in the middle of the bus. Still, people are used to exit through the front, or shout their thank-yous from the other door.
It was like this in the Bay Area when I lived there, like in Alameda county at least. People exited at the rear doors and gave a thank you to the driver. Became a habit for me. I moved to Norway a few years ago and absent-mindedly said “Takk!” as I exited and I was quickly educated that, we don’t do that here.
I started doing it years ago in Belgium and I see more people do it these days. I don’t shout but wave at the mirror. Bus drivers watch the mirror to check when to close their doors. After a while they get to know you and they trend to be more welcoming when you enter the bus.
i always have, even as a grade school kid–back then the bus rides to and from school were so long, i saw the bus driver more on school days than my family.
Damn i just heard one person doing that today first time in my life…
That’s a lot of thanks. It’s in a highly populated city.
Bzzt, unless you’re Australian this isn’t true. It’s not universal here, but I’d say around 50% do, moreso if you’re somewhere regional.
Ireland?
Got it in one :)
Could also be Canadia
Happens where I live in Denmark
guns. you can guess where im from
TIL lol. I meant the united states, but tbh good for canada
Yeah I was just joking. Although seeing that Canada has a ton of guns and not nearly the same issues means that it’s gonna take some doing to fix the problems of the US. Who knows, maybe if we ever get decent mental health care and stop people from being wage slaves with vast wealth inequality it’ll go a long way to fixing things.
Easy: school shootings, together with politician denial about the causes of this, guns, and lack of regulation for who owns them, make owning guns easier than getting a driver’s license.
Super sad, but here we are.
The police kills more people every year than the amount of people killed in mass shootings since 1983. They also repeatedly ignore reports of people who go on to commit school shootings.
You should look into common sense pig control. I think that would save more lives than just being hysterical about AR-15s.
2024
Police- 1270
Mass shootings- 500ish (actually a down year)
While I agree we need police reform, let’s be accurate.
Both problems need extensive work.
Mass shootings are likely now what we all imagine. I think most of us are imagining the left side of this chart. And I’d say the leftmost three sources are hardly conservative. :)
Yeah, the “high schooler shoots up a school” or “crazy guy shoots up a mall” school shootings are incredibly rare. The majority of “mass shootings” are gang related violence. And even if you include all the instances and assumed you were equally likely to be involved in any of them (you aren’t), it would still be incredibly unlikely for you to ever be involved in such a situation.
Gun deaths in general are not what most people imagine they are. 2/3 of them are suicides. Of the remaining 1/3, they will almost certainly be perpatrated by someone the victim had a pre-existing relationship with.
Not to say that gun violence is not a problem. But the view some of the lunatics on this site seem to have - that going out to eat lunch in America is more dangerous than living in Gaza - is just completely false.
We’re mostly agreed. But suicides and “gang violence” and “man shoots family” shouldn’t be discounted, but OTOH, they don’t count as random, and random is what most people fear. Gun violence isn’t random. Vehicular death is random, at about the same rate. And we don’t talk about that.
Always said, America doesn’t have a gun problem. We have a culture problem.
Oh whoop, wrong. There’s been only 14 deaths. Which one of these are actual mass shootings and not something the FBI defines as one but the media doesn’t? Like a bunch of gangbangers shooting at each other, wounding nobody, and causing a stampede that results in people twisting their ankles? That’s considered a mass shooting by the FBI.
I pulled the numbers straight from here. Since 1983, 1176 people were killed in mass shootings.
Also, implying that the “mass shooting problem” requires “extensive work” is not good optics. All that America needs to do is suppress extremist right wing bullshit and mass shootings will cease to exist. Controlling the police on the other hand would require a lot more political power and a lot of reforms, but it would both reduce the amount of deaths AND curb down mass shootings at the same time because literally every single mass shooter only got to commit it because the cops didn’t care.
1: Your source uses FBI data.
2: The criteria is clearly spelled out in your own source, and it changed in 2013 to be more strict.
3: Our mass shooting problem definitely requires extensive work.
4: Extremist violence does account for the vast majority, and right wing is the vast majority of extremist violence, especially if you count religious extremists. However, the abundance of guns certainly adds more since we are not the most extreme religious country, nor do we have the most percentage of right-wing idealologically aligned people.
5: Forcing cops to care has never worked because, according to SCOTUS, they’re not required to do their job, even while on shift and present. Also, the most red flag sign of gun violence is domestic abuse, which most cops do on the regular, as well as right wing extremist ideation, which most cops engage in already. We’d be better off firing the domestic abusers and domestic terrorists that make up the majority and hiring social workers for most roles.
Switzerland has more guns per capita.
27.6 per 100 people vs US, which is 120.5. Where are you sourcing that from?
Abundance of guns does not indicate that the country is more prone to violence, though. Switzerland has significantly laxer laws on who can own a gun than over 20 US states, EVERYONE is obligated to own a fully automatic SG550 from their military service, and a vibrant gun culture, and yet, no one’s going around shooting people. It’s a result of right wing extremism, decades of propaganda running on people’s TVs, toxic right wing gun culture that is not countered by responsible gun culture from the left because liberals hate guns (and only because it became a problem for them after school shootings became common), and the refusal of government to address those issues. To add to that, white liberals literally take over ANY gun control talk and make it about their white feelings. That’s exactly what’s happening here with you. Despite minorities being the lead in support for gun control, we literally do NOT ever get to talk about our experiences. The only thing that matters in gun control discussions is white liberals putting their feelings and their feelings ONLY in the table, and advocating for assault weapon bans (which wouldn’t matter), universal background checks (that already exist) and “common sense gun control” (which they change the definition every time to suit what they think). And liberal politicians also add fuel to the fire by EXCLUDING COPS FROM CERTAIN BANS and giving them more and more budget to “fight crime” every year.
There is no such thing as a “mass shooting problem” because it literally kills less people per year than GETTING STRUCK BY LIGHTNING. The media turns every single one of those into a spectacle and that’s why the majority of people think it’s such a problem. Police violence, on the other hand, is NOT statistically insignificant, and especially not for POC. After the assassination of the UHC CEO, the media literally turned every other time a CEO died into just a damn footnote, BECAUSE THEY DID NOT WANT COPYCATS. The media can stop making those mass shootings a spectacle, but they won’t, because IT GIVES THEM MONEY.
The gun control movement has a HUGE problem with white supremacy, including from people who THINK they’re not being racist, and then proceed to support liberal politicians with tough on crime policies who give 12 gorillion dollars to the cops of big cities so they can purchase MRAPs, IFVs, fully automatic rifles and tons of other shit they don’t fucking need. And the SCOTUS ruling doesn’t matter, just get yourselves a SCOTUS that would rule cops have an obligation to help and investigate everything.
Please listen to us. Common sense cop control WILL solve all of this shit you mentioned without ever touching gun laws.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted. I’ll try and do a better response later when I have some time.
In an ideal world we could replace SCOTUS members who, for example, lied under oath to congress. That would allow a lot of problems that seem impossible to solve to be pretty easily solved. I think the US is an example of a cascading system of measures to make it hard to undo the rot. For example: We need better rulings on cops, so we need a better supreme court, so we need to pack the court or get rid of the fascists on it, so we need a majority progressive congress, so we need campaign finance reform, so we need more people to vote, so we need laws against electioneering… I mean there are things that could be done that ate lynch pins for huge progress, but the system is certainly stacked against us. Not a reason to give up, but it explains a lot of the nihilism generally in our culture.
On a brighter note, apparently our casual friendliness with strangers is unusual elsewhere. So we’ve got that going for us, which is nice
That was my first thought too.
Losing a ground war against flightless birds.
Small dinosaurs.
@[email protected] , meet @[email protected].…
dude’s airing your dirty laundry in public.
I’m more than happy to replace him in your country. I’ll blend in ‘swimming-costume-wearing-at-lunch’ in no time.As long as you use those swimmers in the pool we named after the prime minister who drowned at a beach.
One of my favorite bits of weird history trivia.
Wearing thongs (flip flops) in a grocery store.
Kangaroos littering the side of the road (they have about 4 neurones and all of then are suicidal)
The only place I have seen young kids (think 6 years old) swear similarly to here in Australia is in Scotland, and they are just as feral as we are.
Walking down the street at night. In the UK and USA it was apparently just not a thing you did. Here I will walk home at 2am no worries, and tonnes of people walk home from the pub drunk enough to not always make it home and sometimes just pass out on the footpath. Never had a problem, never been mugged or similar in that situation, and after living in the UK and visiting the USA I can definitely say I would never do that there.
Wearing swimmers (bikini or budgie smugglers) and going for food and drink on the same trip. The number of times I’ve gotten coffee, had lunch, or jumped into the bank while dressed for the beach is uncountable, but never ever outside Australia.
Hitting your kids is rare here. Spanking is not really normal and is definitely not common in public compared to my visit to the USA or my time in the UK. In both of those people would cuff their kids or slap their hand when they were being unruly. That is uncommon here and I have seen people intervene when someone was hitting their kid in public on more than one occasion. The same goes for animals, people don’t like you hitting your dog either. Not to say it doesn’t happen, but it is not considered OK.
Healthcare. We have it. We love it. In the UK the NHS was OK, not great, and the USA is terrifying. My meds would cost me about $310 per month but end up costing a max of $38, unless I spend $1200 in the year at which point the rest are free. As in, no cost, just pick them up, zero dollars. Mine are half medically necessary and half for better function, but for some people they are way more necessary and I am so happy they can just go get them, no risk of rationing meds.
People do talk about politics and religion here, but not with random people and not in public. If someone isn’t interested you are generally going to back off quickly and leave it be. Religion and politics are mostly private and the few people who do talk tend to not be too intense about it. Certainly most don’t become a registered Labor or Liberal party member with the group identity associated. It is much more loosely held and less culturally relevant.
First of all,
You fuckers need to bring out your own dictionary.
Budgie smugglers? I thought that’s Australian for Gum Boots. Turns out, it kinda is actually, but for your Johnson & co.
Secondly, When wearing a thong (the real sexy kind) in a grocery store becomes a norm in your part of planet, I’m moving there permanently.
Third,
Lunch\Cafe in your beachwear?
Bro, you should’ve started with this.
Imma land there now.Secondly, When wearing a thong (the real sexy kind) in a grocery store becomes a norm in your part of planet, I’m moving there permanently.
I want you to pause for a second and think what the average person looks like.
Yep, though self selection plays a role here. If you feel like you look bad you will probably be less likely to go out in swim gear. The average you will see in swimmers is well above the actual population average.
I am average!
Kangaroos littering the side of the road (they have about 4 neurones and all of then are suicidal)
To be fair to them, cutting across the path of a predator is pretty effective right up until the predator is a two-tonne death machine.
Walking down the street at night. In the UK and USA it was apparently just not a thing you did. Here I will walk home at 2am no worries, and tonnes of people walk home from the pub drunk enough to not always make it home and sometimes just pass out on the footpath. Never had a problem, never been mugged or similar in that situation, and after living in the UK and visiting the USA I can definitely say I would never do that there.
Still pretty dangerous for women, I’ve gotten plenty of harassment at night. But definitely far safer than the US.
People do talk about politics and religion here, but not with random people and not in public. If someone isn’t interested you are generally going to back off quickly and leave it be. Religion and politics are mostly private and the few people who do talk tend to not be too intense about it. Certainly most don’t become a registered Labor or Liberal party member with the group identity associated. It is much more loosely held and less culturally relevant.
I think it depends. People are still fairly likely to talk about what they think is a “fair go”, and we’ve had some massive political protests lately. But it feels like each party has to meet in the middle a lot more, so stuff isn’t as polarising, and things that are don’t get talked about as openly.
Also in the US they have to register for a party when they register to vote. Feels like they heard about the concept of the secret ballot from us and then just failed completely on the execution.
Most states in the US don’t require you to register for a party, although there are some that do.
Also, there are places in the US that are incredibly safe, but most of the big cities are not. But the US is very large and diverse.
In Canada, people do not run from the rain… if they are out and about and it starts raining, they just ignore it, they don’t walk faster, rarely improvise coverage, etc
In Venezuela, my country of origin, people run from the rain like it’s lava falling from the sky
I actively go out when it’s raining. Refreshing af
that’s a new level of crazy!!!
just kidding, I remember doing that as a kid… fond memories
Not much point in running from it, you’re already getting wet if you’re caught out in it 🤷♀️. I’ll run if I hear thunder though, don’t want to get electrocuted.
When I visited London (around the year 2000), I noticed that every man walking in the streets either wore a hat or carried an umbrella.
The Brits don’t either. So probably cultural heritage.
Huh, thought everyone ran from the rain. I usually have a hat if I’m outside so the rain doesn’t annoy me.
It really depends on what rain is like in your location in my limited experience. In the pacific northwest rain is usually a drizzle, it’s fine, you don’t run. In the american Midwest, you get a feel for the air pressure, listen for thunder, and look at the sky, then you make a comment about your prediction and keep going if you predict a drizzle but start running if it seems like a downpour.
Canadian here, from the wet coast. I’ve run in the rain before, but it needs to be monsoon level before that’s necessary. Anything less is just meh.
