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.
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.
I’ve eaten armadillo (yes, it tastes like chicken). This was before I found out they can apparently spread leprosy to humans.
Fuck these things! I moved into an old wood cabin on the edge of town with a small crawl space. Two of these little fuckers got underneath the house and sounded like they were carrying a heavy rock, scraping against other rocks(r as one fever dream showed me, a tiny coffin). Also you can’t bait them cause they only dig up and eat live grubs. So you have to study their movements and set up some 2x4 walls to guide them into a trap. And they can jump like you wouldn’t believe! When I released one of them out in the boondocks near a creek, the little fucker reared back and launched itself four feet straight up in the air to clear a fence.
There’s a place in San Antonio called Cowboys Dance Hall that occasionally has live armadillo races. They’re adorable when they run.
I thought you were talking about ravens and got thoroughly confused.
Grackles being half the size is a bit of an understate, a common grackle tops out at about 5 oz & 13" with a wingspan up to 18". A raven’s common size, on the larger end, is 4½ lbs & 28" with a 60" wingspan.
Absolutely. Grackles are like my hard wired “default bird size”, so when I saw what looked like a grackle the size of a dog, it short circuited the more logical, in charge of measuring things parts of my brain.
I want to hug it. Would it be wise to hug it? I don’t care I still want to hug it.
I live in the Canadian prairies.
One time I was flyin’ down the highway and I noticed a man with car parked on the shoulder, staring out into a farmer’s field of flowering Canola.
I stopped because I could think of no reason other than he’s had car trouble, and is staring off into the distance trying to figure out WTF he’s gonna do now.
He explained to me that he wasn’t having car troubles, that he was on a visit from Hong Kong and it’s the first time he’s ever traveled outside. He told me that from the structure of the city and sky rise density, he’d basically never seen a patch of sky or open land. The biggest patch of sky that he’d ever seen would be about the size of a 2 packs of cigarettes held at arms length.
Woah.
And here we have the joke that the terrain is so flat and monotone that you can watch your dog run away for 7 hours.
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.
A hero, (good guy with a gun) has to be able to inspect all the toilets, in case there is a trans or weird looking person in there.
When I was a kid, my dad brought me to a public park where he played racket ball. T the public toilet there didn’t even have doors on the shit down toilets. So my only experience with public restrooms until like middle school, was that, various single toilet far food/gas station restrooms where I could lock the door to the entire thing, and school. So I thought like half of all public restrooms didn’t have doors for the toilets.
I moved to the midwest USA 15 years ago and I still can’t get over the trees screaming at me. It’s deafening but no one seems to care.
The trees are silent where I come from
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’m originally from the Orlando area and worked for Disney for a while. Tourism folks there pass stories around and have their own folk tales of sorts. Your question reminds me of one of them.
Central Florida has anoles, little lizards, absolutely everywhere. A woman was working the front desk at a hotel, and a couple comes up to check in. She tells them the room number and hands then the key. A few minutes later the husband runs back up to the desk and tells her that “there’s an alligator in our room!” “An alligator?!” She replies and they both rush to the hotel room, where she finds the wife screaming and pointing at the couch. “The alligator is under there!” The front desk worker lifts up one end of the couch and spots a four inch green anole. She catches it and sets it outside.
OP, I’ve never been to the UK, but don’t you have hedgehogs? How common are they?
Not OP, but can confirm we have hedgehogs and they are adorable.
Hedgehogs are far less common than they used to be, unfortunately. I haven’t seen one for years. A friend who lives in a more suburban area has one living under their shed, and she (the hedgehog) is such a creature of routine that my friend’s family will often gather near the window to watch her potter around on her nightly walk
The anoles are one of the few things I miss about living in Florida. There are lizards here in Kentucky, but they’re more elusive.
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.
For me it is hearing little kids speak English. In my country people learn English in school at around 13 years old so it was surreal to hear children talking in English
Walking to a supermarket, riding your bicycle to work.
When we went to the USA, people believed us that we lived in little huts on mountains without power. (From Austria) They didn’t believe us that we would ride our bike to work.
Just to be clear, hardly any Austrian lives without power in their house, even if they live up on mountains. But almost all my coworkers and myself included take their bike to work. (Although we live in a city, hard to get up your little mountain hut with your bike ;) )
Evergreen trees. I know they’re a big deal to people who visit but I grew up around them and think they’re kind of boring.
Just trees in general. I was ferrying around some VIPs from California once, and they were amazed at the endless miles of thick trees on both sides of the highway. Yeah, they’re trees, they’re nothing special. They grow everywhere, you don’t even have to do anything.
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.
Do people really say “ay im walkin’ here”?
The way y’all collect garbage is pretty unique. The rats involved there are impressive.
Lived in the UK for a while - Squirrels, and the fact that the church in the town we lived in was built before ANY humans set foot in New Zealand
It’s not very common to see squirrels in Japan but they’re all over the place in the states. I was hiking in the woods with a group and one of the Japanese people spotted a squirrel and told everyone so they could have a look. Where I’m from maybe you’d point out a deer or rabbit or something (although those are pretty common too), but it’s pretty much impossible to not see a squirrel or chipmunk if you go outside.
Damn, that’s an old church, I know there are a few still standing from around the Norman conquest
So who built the church? The emus?
I had to be the only person in Central Park in NYC excitedly taking photos of squirrels when I was there. They were everywhere.
Whales, northern lights, reindeer
cactuses
