What in your country/area is totally normal but visitors get excited for?
-
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.
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.
-
Norwegian fjords. I live here, and to me it's mundane landscape.
Slartibartfast won an award for those.
-
Squirrels
Awww. As a kiwi (no squirrels here) I can confirm.
-
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.
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.
-
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.
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.
-
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!
-
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.
-
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.
-
I've eaten armadillo (yes, it tastes like chicken). This was before I found out they can apparently spread leprosy to humans.
wrote last edited by [email protected]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!
-
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?
-
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?
-
Québec? Quelle partie?
wrote last edited by [email protected]No, Alberta. Unfortunately, my French isn't good. C'est merde, pardon.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Quebec is more like here than southern Ontario or BC, though. And definitely the US or most of the EU.
-
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.
-
Sunny and -30°C. You live in the arctic?
wrote last edited by [email protected]No, that's still a good few degrees north. Just the Canadian prairies.
TBF we only get a day or two worth of that here in a winter. There's quite a lot of -20, though, and -15 isn't even worth a remark.
-
Kay, but summer/spring is brutal for the deer flies and mosquitoes
wrote last edited by [email protected]Fucking mosquitos. They could probably survive Antarctica. Instead, if you go further north yet everything that eat them dies, and they grow endless and mutantly large. I'd love to see the territories but that bit gives me pause.
If you're somewhere wooded, blackflies also get bad reviews.
-
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'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.
-
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.
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
-
So who built the church? The emus?
/me tries to understand that comment and fails
