What in your country/area is totally normal but visitors get excited for?
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Hot air balloons. I see them in the sky most mornings when I go for a walk, weather permitting.
wrote last edited by [email protected]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?
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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.
School mass shootings. For some reason the rest of the world loses their minds over them.
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Raccoons.
The tourists visiting Mount Royal park in Montréal are often charmed by the raccoons. Enough so that they feed them and some even let the raccoons climb on them. The city tries to warn people but they obviously ignore the signs. So now we have gangs of raccoons begging for food near the two most popular view points.
I go camping in provincial parks and the same seems to happen there. It's obviously also locals doing this but, people feed the raccoons, they come back, they harass you for food, they can carry rabies, and it's annoying as hell. I watch people hiking and camping in other countries, like the UK, and I'm constantly jealous that they can keep their food and cook near their tents. Doing this here will result in frequent annoying visits from raccoons (if not bigger animals).
I've seen raccoons and white tail deer in a zoo in Mexico. They are both nuisance animals in the PNW. But then again I loved watching Mexican racoons everywhere (coati). Guess we all like seeing new and different animals.
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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.
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Haha I backpack/camp, too, and have seen that experience firsthand as well.
Felt bad about purposefully letting her sweat a bit as the sun went down and I started a fire. At the same time I tried to tell her that merely speaking out loud would run off any animals larger than a lizard.
Later, she tried to throw me under the bus with my wife. Now I wish I had tortured her for real!
"Yeah... We're gonna have to spend another hour here. I'm waiting to see that panther that was here last week."
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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.
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Don't forget cicadas!
Nothing new to me, but I was in Nashville for the Great Cicada Apocalypse of '24. My god. I have never experienced anything like that in my life.
Not only were they deafening, they we're spazzing around, sticking to your clothes, corpses everywhere. LOL, my office swept the bodies out every night. Birds were having a feast!
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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.
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.
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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.
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Norwegian fjords. I live here, and to me it's mundane landscape.
Slartibartfast won an award for those.
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Squirrels
Awww. As a kiwi (no squirrels here) I can confirm.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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?
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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.
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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?
