I’ve only been abroad one time, and there were little gecko/lizard things everywhere, climbing up walls and scurrying across roads, and nobody cared. I was constantly fascinated but to the locals they’re just kinda there.
Bonus question to anyone who visited the UK - was there anything that fascinated you but I’d be taking for granted?
Pic unrelated.
Not my country, but something that fascinated me in Greece. Greece is a land of honey…and marble rock. Beautiful, swirling, sparkly rock in all different shades. It is so terribly abundant that they use marble in place of concrete.
To the Greeks, it is normal to use marble literally everywhere. They disrespect the beautiful stone, turning it into a curb on the street & slathering it in yellow paint. I saw a yellow curb that was cracked open - exposing the glittering marble rock inside. I found it so funny & sad that I took a picture. We love marble, we think it’s so decadent & fancy, it’s flooring in the finest hotels, businesses, and homes. These people just use marble everywhere; it’s just a rock to them. 😆
It really puts things into perspective.
Depositing bottles.
Put them into a machine, and it gives you money back 🤯
Nun weiß ganz Deutschland, dass du hier bist
Honestly this needs to be more of things in the States. And the deposit cost needs to go up.
If companies were forced to retake their garbage, we’d see far less pollution.
It’s not just that, they wash and reuse the bottles (without melting them down or anything)! Amazing stuff.
They’re finally starting to put more stuff in them here opposed to plastic bottles, and I’m so glad for it.
The US used to do that before the plastics industry (oil company derivatives) squashed it.
Where is here?
Happens in multiple countries. Germany, Netherlands, Belgium I know for sure. Probably elsewhere too.
Putting more stuff in washable bottles than before happens in many places? Are you sure?
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Oops, sorr. Austria
they wash and reuse the bottles (without melting them down or anything)
Idk where you’re talking about, but in Finland… That used to be the system, and the bottles which were actually washable were far sturdier than what we have now. Now it’s all flimsy PET bottles which just get shredded and “recycled”.
I used to work in a bottle room back when most deposits were glass bottles and sturdy plastics and only the cans got crushed not reused.
I was the guy in the backroom piling the bottles from a huge conveyor belt (glass bottles) to be organised in pallets. Could manage like 7 beers bottles in one hand, but that was pushing it and the most effective speed was 3-4 bottles per hand per move.
I liked the job but the employer was a massive cunt.
This was because PalPa, the company responsible for maintaining Finland’s recycling system was (and is) a corrupt heap of shit.
It’s owned by the largest breweries and they used it for keeping smaller and foreign companies out if business. You couldn’t get a right to use Finnish bottles –> You had to pay a steep punishment tax for using non-recyclable bottles.
They successfully argued that washing bottles from that many sources would be impossible to organize, so the EU required PalPa to start accepting crushable PET bottles, which are easy to produce without any active coöperation by PalPa.
PalPa(…tine?) was hoping that they could still somehow block this from happening, so they framed the change as Evil EU forcing Finland to stop washing bottles. And when the PET bottles were indeed accepted in the end, they dismantled the whole bottle washing system in Finland so that they wouldn’t be held accountable for their lies.
So, it’s the same thing that happened to our regional bus network (vakiovuorot), basically. And what’s currently happening to our railways.
So, it’s the same thing that happened to our regional bus network (vakiovuorot), basically. And what’s currently happening to our railways.
Don’t forget healthcare and dental. Kids don’t get free dental anymore?
That’s not because of an organization trying to make Finland ignore the EU legislation using strategies that then cause us to run headlong against a wall, though.
Oh yeah, that.
I love that we have nice systems, but I hate it we have so many people who are not willing to see any flaws in Finland.
In Finland the deposit for bottles of one litre or more have a deposit of 0,40 €.
(And what many foreigners don’t understand is that we are not anti-recycling, so it’s not a problem that the deposit is inside the prices you see in the shop. So, if you see 1,59 € as the price of a bottle of lemonade, 1,59 € is what you pay. Many countries have a system where the deposit is added to the price so that people would think more negatively about it and they’d sell more of the bottles with the text “NO DEPOSIT!!” on them, so people coming from those countries are easily confused by not having to add anything to the prices in their heads.)
I’m in this picture and I don’t like it.
But, yeah, seems like such an obviously good idea and it works so well. Why can’t we do that?
You go to some tiny, dying town and it has 700 years of history, often 1000+ years of proof of habitation before that and a majestic church that is a work of art on its own.
I’m lucky enough that I see these little guys on a regular basis.
The first time I went to London, the size of the Ravens caught me off guard. I couldn’t get enough of seeing those things. We only really see Grackles in South Texas that regularly and they’re half the size, so I’m sure I was the weird bird guy that day to many people.
School mass shootings. For some reason the rest of the world loses their minds over them.
The first time my cousins from FL visited Canada, it was July. They were surprised there was no snow. So, we took them over to the rec centre and they saw a small pile of snow out back. They were thrilled.
It was dumped out of a Zamboni.
Grew up in Ontario and it was always fun as a kid to grab some of the shaved ice behind rec centres to throw at your friends when it was like 33C out
My aunt is a teacher at one of the poorer schools in LA. She says every once in a while they’ll arrange a plow to bring a load of snow down from the mountains and dump it in the parking lot for the kids to play in it for the afternoon until it melts
Kinda the opposite of the question, but I’m a USian and I was super excited when I saw some European countries have public bathroom doors that didn’t have tiny slot that you could see through while I was pooping.
What the fuck are we doing over here? Besides the letting fascists take over thing.
Leaves.
Yes, tree leaves.
Each fall when they start changing color flocks of tourists come up to gawk at them.
When I was a kid we hosted two Trinidadians as part of an exchange in the Autumn and they’d never seen the leaves falling - they were worried that all the trees were dying off. This isn’t a “stupid foreigner” gag, it was probably just the thing that shocked them the most. They loved the trains and the narrowboats.
We visited DC in the fall last year. It took us close to 2 hours to walk from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial statue because my wife was taking pictures of all the trees along the way.
I just moved to New England and this will be my first fall here. My property is completely surrounded by 50’+ trees. I’m sure it will get old quick.
Every region is different in that regard.
Maybe youre just numb to the view.Man… I’m in east Tennessee.
Folks just roll up to look at the leaves… and I’m like.
Eh. Not much rain this year so they are pretty drab looking currently…
But you still see tons of people taking photos on their phones that they’ll never look at again. Haha
This is what I was going to say.
In the late 1800s when Jasper Cropsey was exhibiting landscape paintings in the UK, folks didn’t believe that his colour palette was accurate
https://collections.brandywine.org/objects/2656/autumn-on-the-brandywine-river
Wait hang on, the UK has heaps of trees that go that colour every year
Michigan, or New York?To be fair it’s very pretty. I get that one
To answer OP’s question, I’m American but spent a few years in the UK. Things that fascinated me included:
- How green it is (being from Texas this was the first thing that stood out to me)
- The shear amount of history that is just everywhere (I remember eat lunch at a park and reading a sign about how it was the site of a huge battle during the war of the roses)
- Pubs (man I miss going to my local. We really don’t have 3rd places in the US anymore)
Lakes. My small city has 330 lakes. There are more lakes in Canada than the rest of the world combined.
Ontario has lakes bigger than some countries
Practically every house and apartment has (access to) a sauna. If not inside the apartment, there will most often be a shared sauna in the basement.
About the UK, I’m going to go a bit deeper and note that it was somehow eye-opening that there’s a whole society that actually just daily drives English. For my whole life before the visits to UK and later US, English was the language of the internet and some specific international situations where it was most people’s second language. Until well into my mid-20s, I basically didn’t have real life contact with any community that would just speak English natively, despite speaking it myself fairly okay-ish.
Opposite: I (US-ian) was visiting friends in Germany and they took me on a bike ride in the woods.
“Look!!” (Bike sudden halt, stop and point into a tree with full arm) “a squirrel!”
I live in New York City. Apparently (based on how shocked they look) tourists come from places without: Gift Shops, Theaters, Rats, Black People, Buildings, or Walking.
Walking to a supermarket, riding your bicycle to work.
Raccoons.
The tourists visiting Mount Royal park in Montréal are often charmed by the raccoons. Enough so that they feed them and some even let the raccoons climb on them. The city tries to warn people but they obviously ignore the signs. So now we have gangs of raccoons begging for food near the two most popular view points.
I go camping in provincial parks and the same seems to happen there. It’s obviously also locals doing this but, people feed the raccoons, they come back, they harass you for food, they can carry rabies, and it’s annoying as hell. I watch people hiking and camping in other countries, like the UK, and I’m constantly jealous that they can keep their food and cook near their tents. Doing this here will result in frequent annoying visits from raccoons (if not bigger animals).
