What in your country/area is totally normal but visitors get excited for?
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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
We started getting black squirrels up here in New England about a decade ago. They're uncommon but it's still cool to see them running around every so often.
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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.
In Montreal, it's pretty typical to see groundhogs and raccoons. It was a fairly regular phenomena for me to walk through St-Helen Island and see tourists that stopped to take pictures of groundhogs.
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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?
I visited Tampa many years ago and I was the anole guy for the trip. I like reptiles and was completely elated to see them running around everywhere. My host for the trip didn't get my excitement.
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Walking to a supermarket, riding your bicycle to work.
wrote last edited by [email protected]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
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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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I have lived in Tucson, Arizona for about 5 years. I still get excited about all the little lizards and birds. And Coyotes, and bobcats. Last night I saw a toad for the first time. There is a TON of wildlife here, kind of like you hear about Australia, and it's pretty amazing. I'm sure it's all pretty old hat to a lot of people. I also see gorgeous mountain ranges every day, which is not something I grew up with in New York.
Oh, and there is legal weed (marijuana) every damn where. It's fucking. Awesome. We....did not have this in NY growing up.
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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.
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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.
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I live in the middle of a very sparsely populated forest. Tourists want to see the black bears, wolves, eagles, loons, and deer. You will see the deer, eagles, and loons if you are on a lake. But you probably need to spend serious time in the forest on foot to bump a bear or wolf. If you want to see those, we have a bear and then a wolf center where biologists study their behavior and keep a small number in captivity. And evidently, both centers are pretty famous for the work they do with other wildlife biologists around the world.
And oddly enough come fall, they drive around to see the leaves on the trees turn pretty colors. It's popular enough that news stations in the one large metropolitan area we have in this state, actually tracks and includes the rate and areas where the leaves are turning color so tourists can drive and see them.
When winter arrives, we get a fair number that drive here to go ice fishing when the ice gets safe enough to drive on.
Iron range?
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I've heard that! Anne of Green Gables is big there too for a weird reason. There's an anime airing right now, even.
wrote last edited by [email protected]This post did not contain any content. -
I admit that tourists anywhere often have piss poor situational awareness, and are often rude re: how they go about taking pictures.
Doesn't mean someone can't take a picture of a train pulling in without violating the rules though (off-peak times, cropped angles, etc.). Fuck anyone carelessly or deliberately taking pictures of folks on the platform without permission, though. I agree with you there and know it's probably common, which sucks.
Well, it wasn't so much the legalities, I just saw a gaggle of tourists waiting on the platform with huge anticipation for the metro to pull into the station, like they've never seen a train or a tunnel. Yet, if I may use my racism for good, they seemed to be from a far away land, so they flew here, how many pictures did they take of the flying train?
It just seemed out of proportion to the banality of a mundane situation, and they were snapping away, and I do not want to be immortalized as a sad, fat middle-aged man, where were these people when I was 25 and a movie star?
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Try Florida, flattest state in the union. You would laugh out loud at what I call a valley around here.
My grandparents lived there when I was a kid but the flatness didn't bother me when it was near the ocean
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Oktoberfest
Idk. When I went to Munich seemed like it was hella packed and everyone there was having a dope ass time, whether they were foreigners or not.
It felt like something even the locals got stoked for during the walk from the train to the entrance. This was Sept 2019, so idk how the comeback after covid feels.
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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.
The way y'all collect garbage is pretty unique. The rats involved there are impressive.
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Summers are wonderful, it doesn't rain very much. We tell outsiders that it rains all the time. Oregon, USA.
The entire PNW is this way.
Summer Solstice in the Seattle area has twilight til ~10pm, even later up in Vancouver.
But yeah, don't come, it's always raining.
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I saw my first chipmunk last week and I totally screamed oh shit there's Alvin! in my heart.
Don't let your inner child die!
I still remember my first chipmunk encounter. I heard the little guys before I saw them and wondered “who the f is out here playing laser tag in the woods? ”
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There are native British lizards. Though they are very small, and possibly only in the south.
I usually see a few sunbathing on rocks near where I work, just outside Southampton.
Also, slow worms are lizards. Legless lizards. Not snakes.
I have only been to London and the north, but that is cool & makes sense, it doesn't freeze there, right?
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Like a Jolibees or something?
You're looking at a Jollibee product.
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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.
Fireflys.
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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.
Living in the Black Forest is sometimes fun.
First of all people admire the "mountains". While yes, the Black Forest is not quite flat and especially in winter it is often underestimated (we have avalanches and occasionally people die in them) it's not like they are that step and high.
At least from my perspective - I grew up in the actual alps. It would be totally different If I grew up in the Netherlands.
(And again: The nature is nice and we have wild wolves, Lynx and s few other rare animals here)The other thing people totally get excited about is "Black forest cake".
But.. It has nothing to do with the Forest... it's just a reference to its looks and was invented hundreds of kilometres away. While you can get a decent one here by now, it's still funny.So...what is the most original thing you can get here? It's the thing the tourists think that they are all produced overseas.
The cuckoo clock.
Not kidding, while a shitload of them are cheap china trash, you can actually get nice ones for a reasonable price that were still built here. (And some really really nice ones that look modern and stylish as well. I need one of those one day,but they are ridiculously expensive)Other than that: Old buildings. My last apartment had some walls that were built at a time Australia wasn't discovered by Europeans yet. My kids friend lives in a house that is 800 years old - and always belonged to the same family. The hill the local kids go tobogganing in winter very likely was already used in that capacity 2500 years ago as some archeological sites have shown.
Even my current house is 80 years old and that sometimes sounds absolutely ridiculous to friends overseas.
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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.
somebody had ripped open one of the bags and placed a roll under the windshield wipers of every car on South Street
I wish Santa Amoroso would visit me!
