Asklemmy

Your urban planning. Your cities are unwalkable, the scenery makes me depressed af, everything is scaled up for cars, even restaurants are for cars, the highways are huge, all I can see is tar. I don't know how you can live like that.

American flags everywhere. Like EVERYWHERE. I get a bit of national pride but holy crap, every other house in the street is flying a flag, clothing has flag patterns, bumper sticker American flag, it's everywhere. And no, it wasn't even close to July 4.

It's like Americans are afraid they might forget what country they're in if they aren't in sight of a flag at all times.

German, only having been there once some years ago, so no idea if it still is that way:

Not knowing what I will have to pay in the grocery store until the cashier tells me what to pay. Here the price on the shelf is THE price. I might have a voucher that reduces the price in the end, but nothing is ever added only subtracted, all prices on the shelf are easily comparable, because no matter the weight of one package there is also given the price of 1kg or 100 g for everything.

No kids on playing grounds without parents standing around. No kids just playing on the side walk (often there is no side walk anyway), no kids walking to school. It made me aware of how much freedom kids have in Germany, how independent even 6 y.o. are in Germany compared to kids in the US. They walk to to school alone or use public transport alone, they buy groceries alone, they visit friends by foot or public transport, three y.o. already having a bike and cycling besides their parents to kindergarden...

On the other hand seeing so many very young people having a job, like a really hard job for many hours besides school. It broke my heart, they should be free to be young and having all the time, working comes fast enough and goes on forever. Also I saw very old people doing jobs that should be able to retire because you could see them being in pain and barely able to function, definitely not a "choice" for them.

The amount of medication, especially pain medication, people take in the US compared to Germany and how much of it is freely available while it is needing a subscription from a doctor here. Every time I was feeling unwell I was offered pills that I found to be numbingly strong and switching my brain off? Hard to explain. I found them scary, but was told that they take them on a daily basis and they are harmless ... nope.

Sorry to be honest, but this is my view...

Voting between two parties, and then getting whatever the "electors" pick. All the while, thinking they live under the biggest democracy of the world.

Having all sorts of inhuman behaviors, like robbing childs from immigrants.

Child marriage.

Having lots of weapons in the country but all wars outside.

Mmm.. What else? Ah, prisoners are slaves.

Many things. To say some...Billboards with lawyers advertising for things like demands after accidents. Like dozens one after another on the road.

So much sugar in everything. Last time I was there had to throw to the bin a yogurt. Was so sweet It was awful. Prices of "fresh" food.

Tips for everything. Going to a restaurant and have to tip like 20% of the bill, or even more, is crazy.

Wáter consumtion. Like big golf camps completely green in the middle of a desert (Vegas). When asked about It, people there just answered "no problem, we have the Hoover Dam for that".

Lack of public transport outside four or five big cities. And that just walking on the streets in some places is very strange fot the people living there. I was asked ten years ago in Palo Alto if I was Russian because I was not driving, just walking on the street!!

All of the ads for Medication on TV

Your bread is sweet. Like, all of it. And not just like, pleasantly so like a French brioche, but almost candy-like. Wonder Bread is one of the worst offenders, coming in at 5g added sugars per 100g: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Wonder-Bread-Classic-White-Sandwich-Bread-Sliced-White-Bread-20-oz/37858875?classType=REGULAR&athbdg=L1600

Edit: as a commenter pointed out, it's actually closer to 9g/100g, bringing it to soda levels of sugar ಠ_ಠ

I'll try to avoid stuff you know is weird.

1. Adjectives. You can't just have a thing. It has to have an adjective. For example: Milk. I wanted to buy milk. I get to the milk section, and there's no such thing. There's x milk and y milk and about a dozen other variants. Where is the basic milk (it turns out, I wanted "4% milk") in this damned place?
2. Fresh produce. In fairness you've gotten loads better on this one after subsequent visits, but beyond some basic staples like potatoes, carrots, corn etc it was really limiting what fruit and vegetables you could get in the supermarket. Also: baby carrots are weird.
3. Your cheese is radioactive yellow. Cheese is not supposed to be that colour - but you seem expect it to be for some reason, so your producers add yellow colouring to their cheese.
4. Your eggs are weird. I'm not sure what yous guys do to to them, but it's like you blast away half the shell and are left with a porous super-white textured inner shell. They need to be refrigerated and last a fraction of the time they'd last if you just left them alone and sold them as they are laid.
5. Your bread tastes weird. Maybe it's sugar or preservatives in it, I don't know. Bread is meant to have a really short ingredients list like flour, water, salt yeast and maybe a touch of oil and sugar. Take a look at the ingredients on your bread and it's 5 lines long.
6. Portions! Your food portions are ludicrous. I'd much rather pay half the price for half as much food as they offer on the menu.
7. Money. You have this weird unconscious pecking order thing in your culture where you value people more based on their bank balance. You show a weird unconscious level of respect to someone who is rich. And similarly, unconsciously look down on someone poorer than you. Not in a mean way - just as a "I'm better than this person" way that is hard to quantify. You are aware at some level roughly how rich everyone you deal with is. I see this trait far less in people under 20. I hope there's a cultural shift on this one, because money on its own is a weird way to measure someone's worth.
8. Your police are run by the local counties. I think your schools also? I know you have state and federal police also, but most places only have police and schools at those levels.
9. I'll mostly stay clear of health, because you know your health system is weird. But I will say that it's weird that very few of your hospitals are run by government. They're mostly run for profit. Health is meant to be a government service.
10. Outside a few cities, you barely have public transport of any sort. LA is a mega metropolis, and it's train network is a joke for that level of population - something like 100 stations for 18 million people?
11. You have no idea what's going on. Most of you couldn't name the UK Prime Minister (this one has been hard to keep track of, in fairness), the German Chancellor or any of the G20 leaders aside from USA and maybe Canada/China. You don't know about geopolitics beyond whatever you guys are doing. Your world news is literally stuff USA is involved in.
12. I'll finish on a weird one: you guys are lovely. This may because I'm white and have an exotic accent to you guys, but almost everyone I've ever encountered from the USA in or out of the country has been wonderful. You don't seem to think of your fellow countrymen you meet as 'good' by default. There's a lot less connection and respect to each other than other nations I've been to.

I noticed too many churches in Texas.

WEARING SHOES INDOORS

The fear of naked (intact) female bodies, i.e. censoring of even the slightest nudity, when at the same time, it’s totally fine to have minors play computer games where they can dissect other humans in great bloody detail.

Oh, and chocolate that tastes like somebody barfed into it during manufacturing.

I never understood the need to display multiple US flags in your yard. We get it, you live in america. You love America. We get that too. Are you afraid someone will think you no longer wish to be American if you took your flags down?

The god damn warning labels on absolutely fucking everything. Bro, I just wanna eat at a restaurant without wondering why the menu has a god damn "at your own risk" label... Also can't go 1 step in a water park without seeing a life guard, they're fucking everywhere. Not to mention on the rare occasion they aren't there, you just can't do shit. Land of the free my ass, feels like the optimal way to do anything is to always have a lawyer by side.

Sugar in hot drinks by default. Asking for coffee-no-sugar seems to trigger incredulity. At least this was my experience in the South. New York is another country altogether, no eyebrows raised there.

How annoying waiters are. I don't need small talk and I don't need you asking if everything's okay every five minutes. Just let me eat in peace!

Shoes in the house

School shootings Kids safety trainings for school shootings Guns everywhere Two party political system Rampant racism Prison slavery Everything about its police force Unaffordable medical system combined with absolute shit medical insurance I can go on for a while

Canadian here, British Columbia.

Going to a Wal-Mart in a small-ish town and counting 38 CCTV cameras across the outside front of the building. Ours, in a city with 28× the population, has only 6.

Inside that same Wal-Mart, going into a checkout line without first checking out the customers, and the very next guy ahead of us was an open carry: a semi-auto (AR-15 like looking weapon) slung over his shoulders, a handgun in a holster on his waist, and a lump on his right ankle above his boots. And two knives on his belt. Dude looked like he was ready for some urban warfare.

The sheer amount of infrastructure decay. Sure, even Canadian towns that haven’t seen economic good times look run down and dilapidated, but American towns really kick that up a notch. Most small-town buildings look like they haven’t seen a makeover since the Carter administration.

Unusually authentic Mexican food. Up here 90% of Mexican places are run by white dudes who make semi-authentic “fusion” dishes that are mainly just spicy. Cross the border and less than 15 minutes in, there is one family-run chain (Rancho Chico, Rancho Grande) with super-cheap 100% authentic foods run and staffed solely by Mexicans. And like, holy shit, that’s good food.

The sheer number of people who support and vote for a party who will do absolutely nothing for them, and will enact policies that will drive them even further into poverty and destitution just so their Parasite-Class campaign donors can get even more obscenely wealthy. Conservative voters are just weird, man.

Seems to have deliberately taken the opposite path of anything British:

• Drive on the wrong side of the road
• The light and power switches are upside down
• Weights & measures. Imperial? Ha!
• Screw your English dictionary. Ima put z's everywhere, drop the letter u and randomly pronounce words like buoy so you think there's an animal in the water over there

It kinda makes me laugh to think about it as just anti-British 🤣

Family eating at shooters (and the whole hooters/twin peaks concept)

Need to take the car for a 500m trip because there is no sidewalk and a highway to cross

Non-stop televangelism channels are quite something. But probably you know that’s weird.

The amount of sugar in any food of yours! It's incredibly sickening and I'm not sure how you deal with that.

First thing I (another Canadian) noticed when we switched from the car to a shuttle to the airport (crossed the border by car to take a flight to Florida) was that there were multiple people on that shuttle that were at least as big as the most obese person I'd ever seen in person up to that point.

Even though our cultures overlap quite a bit, there's something different in that aspect.

Extreme focus on sports, wearing sportswear (both men and women do this), always “exercising”, mentioning calories on a menu card (a Caesar salad contains 1200 calories!).

Being overly fake nice because you want a tip. Tbh I'd be more inclined to tip you if you left me alone and stopped talking to me.

The whole tipping thing in USA is weird. Everyone wants a tip, it's entirely random (as a non-American) how much tip to give. Just pay your staff a wage they can actually live on ffs.

Your public toilets are not private. There should never be a gap around the door. The height should be above what any reasonable person would grow to, and the lower height of the door should hide the person's feet on the toilet unless you crouch down. It's weird and very off putting to use one

Fast food portion sizes. It's out of control. Drinking 1 liter of soda for lunch shouldn't be normalized. BTW most people are super friendly and nice, in Michigan at least.

Oh, and why is all the cheese orange ?

Shoes. Indoors, in your own house, on your furniture?!

Another Canadian.

All-green money is weird, about as weird for us as ours is for you. Once I knocked over some products in a store and then picked them up. The staff acted like that was saintly, so I guess other people just make a mess and move on? Drive through liquor stores are weird, and seem like an invitation to drink and drive. Paying at a hospital is weird just in concept, although thank god I've never had to deal with it down there.

Uhh, other than that it's been pretty similar in the places I've been. Etiquette around "sorry" is famously different, but aside from giving me away as Canadian it has little impact.

Edit, to add a couple positive things: Amazing Mexican food and barbecue not only exists but are ubiquitous. Coding jobs pay good money.

Everyone has an air conditioner, although Canada might be the weird one there.

British.

I found a lot of things weird, but I did go to Florida like 8 times so it’s to be expected and maybe some of these are exclusive to that state.

• I found it weird that alcohol seemed to be sold only in liquor stores. But you can buy a machine gun in Walmart.
• The food. Don’t get me wrong it’s nice and all but the quantity. Take sizzlers, you go in order your main meal then get an endless buffet for free. Like I couldn’t eat my steak when it arrived as I was full from the buffet.
• syrup all over breakfast items and people bigger than id ever seen were gorging and then taking a box home too.
• enthusiasm: grown ass adults whooping and hollering as we were queuing for rides. I’m a man child myself but it was startling.
• Jaywalking. Wtf

To throw out some positives. Everyone I met was lovely and nothing like the nut jobs we get to see online. People were polite, friendly and accommodating.

Beautiful nature and national parks.