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.
Mountains, Great beer and legal weed.
Chiang Mai?
Pnw?
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!”
Black squirrels. They’re very normal to us but I find a lot of people who travel here, especially from the U.S. are shocked to see them lol
When I lived in the US, I lived in cities on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. People who weren’t used to river traffic would get excited about riverboats and barges.
And people from other climates always got excited about snow. Even the slightest flurries were cause for celebration.
Now I live in the Andes, and the exciting things here that the locals take for granted (or even count as nuisances) are the volcanoes. I can see one from my apartment. Four years in, and I still admire it every day.
In the UK, the thing I thought was fascinating was just the sheer amount of history literally everywhere. Like, 2000-year-old stone monuments in people’s sheep pastures. It made me understand how extraordinarily young my native country and my current home country both are.
School mass shootings. For some reason the rest of the world loses their minds over them.
It’s the high concentration of Likes and Prayers.
I knew god was personally responsible for the few thousand children killed every year by gun violence!
So I do Uber in a small town tourist trap in a very red state. Convention center has a gun show what seems like every other month. I picked up some people from another country at the hotel next to the convention center on one of these all too common days. A dude was in the cross walk with some kinda hunting rifle on his back, and they immediately started trying to take pictures. Granted I have never seen the dude at McDonald’s/Baskin Robbins with an AR strap to himself and two other pistols on his hip, so this city is at least that civilized.
Montreal. I don’t understand the people that excitedly wait for the metro to arrive and take pictures. It’s a subway.
People that take panoramic shots of downtown of people walking on the sidewalk.
I guess some tourists come from places with no rail or sidewalks.
As someone who has never ridden a train (unless you count the thing they use to get around the Atlanta airport or the slow ones at a theme park or zoo), I wouldn’t be shocked if I ended up doing something similar. I just think trains are neat and would love to ride one someday.
Sure, ride one, but is it an emotional experience to see a motorized vehicle on tracks arrive in a metro station?
Cheesesteak sandwiches (Philadelphia area). It’s just blocks of low-quality frozen meat fried up on a grill with some onions and cheeze-whiz (or provolone if you’re not insane). The bread is good but god damn. I used to live across the street from one of the more famous steak places in center city and the line outside was almost always more than an hour long, even in rain and snow. It just made no sense. WE HAVE FUCKING MUSEUMS AND SHIT!!!
I wonder if the people in that line would have been so keen to get their horsemeat sandwich if they’d walked through the neighborhood at 6 am and seen the clear plastic bags filled with sandwich rolls just dumped on the sidewalk in front of each restaurant (yes, that is how Amoroso’s delivers them). I went for a run early one morning and when I came back somebody had ripped open one of the bags and placed a roll under the windshield wipers of every car on South Street.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve eaten armadillo (yes, it tastes like chicken). This was before I found out they can apparently spread leprosy to humans.
Only the nine banded ones. I had to do some research on dillos when I had to trap a couple under my house. Now they are the more common ones in the southern US, but there are so many more types. Like check out this cute little fucker named the pink fairie armadillo
Completely leprosy free!
Edit to add: But please don’t eat it!
same, but I already knew
What in your country/area is totally normal but visitors get excited for?
This is so mundane fried chicken for me, just comfort food in the Philippines, but no thanks to some influencers, tourists flock to this specific fast food restaurant expecting it to be some culinary treasure.
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.
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.
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
So who built the church? The emus?
/me tries to understand that comment and fails
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
to be fair it wasn’t the complete church, it was rebuilt in part in the mid 1700s
Still, something that old, is always special to behold
Hot air balloons. I see them in the sky most mornings when I go for a walk, weather permitting.
Where are you located? I thought hot air balloons are really rare these days, like less than 200 in the world
Or am I thinking of blimps?
More common in plain areas with mild weather. driving around the central US I would occasionally see at least that many in the air at once.
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.
Marble is expensive in places where there isn’t already a lot of it simply because it’s HEAVY.
But it also isn’t used in the fancy rich places simply because it’s expensive, it’s also because it’s beautiful.
I live in the US northeast coast in a touristy area. People have been surprised to see: white beach sand, seashells, docks, boats, seagulls, deer, opossums. I could go on. I get most people don’t live coastal, so none of these reactions surprised me except the white sand one. Apparently a lot of lakes in the mainland just have dirt at their shores. Never would’ve guessed.
People that live in former glacial areas don’t realize the difference if you don’t. They made a lot of sand and lakes.
I’m down the shore right now, and holiday weekends especially bring out folks who may not come often, and one thing that certainly grinds my gears is seeing someone feeding seagulls, or parents watching their kids doing it and not stopping them. I have a fairly strict don’t feed wildlife anywhere, ever, policy, but seagulls especially are an issue. Like, they’re like this because asshats have fed them for so long, and now I need to guard my sandwich.
My dad used to feed the pelicans with left over bait fish when coming back from fishing. As a kid it was cool to see them up close landing on the outboard motor. As an adult hearing all the stories of how bills they’ve gotten made me realize how wrong it was at the time.
I grew up in Ohio and we had shitloads of opossums. Also deer.
