What in your country/area is totally normal but visitors get excited for?
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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.
I grew up in a place that looks like Greece, but the rocks are red.
Same thing - amazing mesas and red rock plateaus and craggy mountains? See it every day. Meh. Crystal blue seas? I can't stop starting and being amazed that something that color is real.
Though, I have noticed that very flat and forested places give me a sense of claustrophobia. When you're used to being able to see 20-50 miles all the time, not being able to see anything more than 200 feet away is strange. It makes the world seem so small and trite.
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Dont forget the bright green paraqueets
Those are not so uncommon here so it didn't register with me haha
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For the people who need the adrenaline rush we could reduce the driving speed on the Autobahn but add something dangerous to the car. Maybe add a random chance for the airbag to activate or tires to explode.
There's already a random chance for that
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But please donât eat it!
In my defense, in addition to finding out after the fact that armadillos carry leprosy, I found out that the one I ate was roadkill.
Omg that sounds foul! I to Uber in a small town and some rider saw a road kill whitetail with it's legs starting to create an obtuse angle it was so bloated, and seriously said we should pick it up.
First, I've been hunting before and cleaned my own deer once (but don't plan on doing it again unless it's the collapse of the food supply chain)
Second, that being said I'm not opposed to it cause I understand a healthy population needs occasional culling of the weak and/or diseased.(I know that may sound heartless, but it's legit how nature works)
And lastly, who the fuck looks at a animal that's been dead for an unknown amount of time and thinks "dinner"âœ
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I love when people see deer here in North America. You'd think they're seeing a unicorn, when it's just some plain ol' mule deer.
I always lived in states where deer hunting was a pretty common pastime. The first time I went to a zoo in South America, I cracked up when we got to the display of white-tailed deer.
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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]You asked about what we thought fascinating of the UK and what you might be taking for granted so I'll let 'er rip.
I felt the almost omnipresent pressure of an imperialistic black hole that pulled everything to it's centre. I walked the streets of London and saw enormous edifices to grief and religiosity and greed. I saw graffiti from people yearning to express themselves against systems that often held them down. I saw stolen art and belongings of my ancestors hung in galleries to be admired and gawked at. I saw the whims of kings cut entire forests to the ground so that they could "worship" a distant speck of Christianity while hunting their favourite game in their historically exclusive fields. I saw the hollowed out guts of the Industrial Revolution turned into trendy shopping centres and into walkable cities. I saw Palestinian protestors laying on the streets of Oxford as graduates in their gowns stepped around and over them. I saw the land literally wrinkle before my eyes as I went North to Edinburgh. I heard Texans make a fuss at the top of Arthur's Seat. I tried to see the Queen's yacht from a parking garage because I didn't want to pay (rather disappointing). I noticed that almost none of your industrial coolers and fridges actually kept anything cold (but the lights worked and I think I remember hearing the fans whirring, blowing lukewarm air). I saw a doorman enjoy his job and crack some jokes and making people smile. I saw the king's "gateman" with a bullet proof vest and a semi-automatic rifle intimidate tourists to keep them away from his gate. I saw a highschooler throw an orange at a fabulous black actor at the Globe, and another thrown orange from a different high schooler soon after - the play kept going. I saw weapons of war used as posts in the ground. I saw a cyclist get chewed out by a "pensioner" for going too fast and almost hitting her. I saw works of art painted on discarded gum.
I bought a Yorkshire pudding burrito and walked far too long to find a place to sit and eat it - rather tasty.
Fascinating place.
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I'm in Tennessee. The smokey mountains. They are wonderful... But pigeon forge / Sevierville/ Gatlinburg is just a touristy blight now.
There's much better places to go than there.
But some people apparently really want fudge, pancakes, and old-time photographs!
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Must be nice taking that beautiful scenery in for granted
In a way yes, probably. But at the same time, it means you have one less awesome thing to enjoy on this planet.
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Practically every house and apartment has (access to) a sauna. If not inside the apartment, there will most often be a shared sauna in the basement.
About the UK, I'm going to go a bit deeper and note that it was somehow eye-opening that there's a whole society that actually just daily drives English. For my whole life before the visits to UK and later US, English was the language of the internet and some specific international situations where it was most people's second language. Until well into my mid-20s, I basically didn't have real life contact with any community that would just speak English natively, despite speaking it myself fairly okay-ish.
For me it is hearing little kids speak English. In my country people learn English in school at around 13 years old so it was surreal to hear children talking in English
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they wash and reuse the bottles (without melting them down or anything)
Idk where you're talking about, but in Finland... That used to be the system, and the bottles which were actually washable were far sturdier than what we have now. Now it's all flimsy PET bottles which just get shredded and "recycled".
I used to work in a bottle room back when most deposits were glass bottles and sturdy plastics and only the cans got crushed not reused.
I was the guy in the backroom piling the bottles from a huge conveyor belt (glass bottles) to be organised in pallets. Could manage like 7 beers bottles in one hand, but that was pushing it and the most effective speed was 3-4 bottles per hand per move.
I liked the job but the employer was a massive cunt.
This was because PalPa, the company responsible for maintaining Finland's recycling system was (and is) a corrupt heap of shit.
It's owned by the largest breweries and they used it for keeping smaller and foreign companies out if business. You couldn't get a right to use Finnish bottles â> You had to pay a steep punishment tax for using non-recyclable bottles.
They successfully argued that washing bottles from that many sources would be impossible to organize, so the EU required PalPa to start accepting crushable PET bottles, which are easy to produce without any active coöperation by PalPa.
PalPa(...tine?) was hoping that they could still somehow block this from happening, so they framed the change as Evil EU forcing Finland to stop washing bottles. And when the PET bottles were indeed accepted in the end, they dismantled the whole bottle washing system in Finland so that they wouldn't be held accountable for their lies.
So, it's the same thing that happened to our regional bus network (vakiovuorot), basically. And what's currently happening to our railways.
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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.
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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]- Beer
- Old buildings
- a statue of a peeing boy
- a forest with huge beech trees with flowers underneath
- castles or manors everywhere.
About the UK.
I really liked the Edwardian and Victorian heritage. You'll find remains of beautifull crafted industrial stuff and craftsmanship that is nearly lost.
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Canal bridges that open to let ships through for some reason? I often see tourist making pictures of that.
wrote last edited by [email protected]If you are talking of NL then we are also fascinated with how large the ships are in such a narrow canal.
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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]In Sydney most trains...
(a) Are double decker
(b) Have seats which flip to face the opposite direction.
Australian pedestrian crossing lights cater for the blind and the deaf-and-blind. Billie Eilish's brother/producer sampled the sound, when he visited, for her smash hit.
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School mass shootings. For some reason the rest of the world loses their minds over them.
The way this is treated reminds me of the South Park episode.
âWhy? What happened?â
ââŠâŠâŠOh yeah. Some kid shot up the school.â
âWha? Who did that?âŠWas it you?â
âNo.â
âOh. Then whatâs this about a Math quiz?â -
I feel like it's 80% the expense. If most rock was like that everybody would be looking for boring sandstone.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Do rich people in Greece import sandstone?
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I love explaining the Autobahn to my foreign friends. "It's just the word for highway". "All highways are called autobahns". "Yes, sometimes there is a speed limit". "Even where there's no speed limit, we won't be driving that fast".
wrote last edited by [email protected]"All highways are called autobahns"
Does Germany not distinguish between highway and freeway?
In Australia a highway has traffic lights while a freeway does not.
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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."
It's a shame things that are exciting as kids become scary as adults, even when they don't need to be. Sure, there can be risks, but we tend to over-exagerate them when we are unfamiliar.
My issue is heights. But only sometimes. Brains are wierd.
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I had to be the only person in Central Park in NYC excitedly taking photos of squirrels when I was there. They were everywhere.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Even though I've seen plenty of squirrels before I still get excited when I see one, and seeing so many at once is fascinating every time.
I snapped a pick of one sitting upright holding a big nut in his tiny hands, and only after showing multiple people "this cute squirrel with his nut", did I notice that he was proudly displaying a prominent ballsack, at least a third of this fuckers visible body was just...his nuts.
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Driving 200 kmh is also incredibly wasteful
But itâs super fun
