What in your country/area is totally normal but visitors get excited for?
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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!
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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 the US and one that I haven't seen others mention yet is the hummingbirds
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Fireflys.
I grew up in Ohio and lived a bit overseas and then jn the south. I got so excited seeing them last summer visiting family.
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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 live in the Gulf Islands of BC Canada. So. Many. Tourists. I don’t leave my house on the weekends in the summer. We have fabulous beaches though, and it really is lovely. I moved so much as a kid so I’ve always been like oh this is a cool place, I could move here whenever I travel. This is the first time in my life when I’m happy to be going home. Vancouver island is amazing.
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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 was in grad school, a French post doc saw one of the pine cones ( some get around the size of your head). She wanted to keep it to prove that “ everything is bigger in America “
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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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Awesome, thank you for sharing!
I do live in NL, almost 100yo house in area that has seen war. Resonate!
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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 Oxford, it's "normal" to see students walking around in sub-fusc (formal academic dress) at certain times of year. It's not just for matriculation and graduation, you have to do all of your exams in it, too. Tourists seem to love it, though. Some will ask random students for photographs. Some won't bother asking.
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The right to roam was something I found really charming and fascinating when I visited Scotland. We took a tour to see some standing stones and other ancient monuments, and I was shocked to find out that several of our destinations were in people's sheep pastures.
Our guide was really strict about our not littering (duh) or feeding the sheep (which I never would have dreamed of doing). He said that in some of the more popular places, the farmers have lost livestock to idiot tourists feeding them whatever junk food they have on hand.
Thank you for adventuring responsibly! I'm glad you had a good time here
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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.
He was probably exaggerating, while Hong Kong central is pretty built up, there are a lot of areas without any buildings, and even national parks large enough to get lost in (for a few hours at least).
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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.
our grocery stores
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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
black squirrels are here but very limitedly. you can not take them across state lines.
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In Seattle there are tons of cherry blossom trees. People come from around the world to see them in bloom. Most the locals I know are like "fuckin cherry blossom petals getting on everything, making the bike lanes slick, getting all over the cars, have to clean them off everything, tourists blocking things to take pictures"
I got the sense from being near the Hollywood sign that area residents would gladly blow it to smithereens if they could.
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Squirrels, I guess. Oh and so many prisons.
When my son was in college, he became good friends with a girl from Australia, and when she saw her first squirrel, she thought it was so cute, she cried. My son just said "These are just scrawny NYC squirrels. You should the fat guys we have where I grew up."
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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.
I'm in the UK and it's totally normal here to have kids sitting on harbour walls catching crabs (crabbing) at any seaside town. I don't give it a second thought but it seems to fascinate foreign tourists.
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Awesome, thank you for sharing!
I do live in NL, almost 100yo house in area that has seen war. Resonate!
Funny sidefact as Dutch tourists are the ones most keen on the Black Forest cake:
No matter who you believe invented the black Forest cake(either a baker in Bonn or a bakery in. Brandenburg):It's always closer to the Netherlands than to the actual black forest.
Gnhihihi.
