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Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
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.
The lack of a speed limit on our highways. Some people come here just to drive on a boring frigging highway.
Bonus question to anyone who visited the UK - was there anything that fascinated you but I’d be taking for granted?
Double decker buses maybe. I found them pretty cool compared to the boring buses we usually have here.
Edit: Also, urban foxes. I saw foxes maybe three times in my life before going to London, where they're basically seen as a nuisance.
no speed limit is annoying as fuck. there is absolute chaos on the autobahn because of it. everyone drives at different speeds and dangerous manouvres (like tailgating, driving 200 kmh on a full road or in the rain) are common occurances. i hate driving in germany. we are an idiot nation when it comes to driving and cars in general
Yeah, I could do without it. When it's really empty, it can be nice to go 180 for a bit, but more often than not, it causes the kind of problems you mentioned.
When I visited the US I was excited to see squirrels running around. We don't have squirrels where I'm from. We took pictures.
It must have looked like we were excited to witness a cloud in the sky.
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 was a bit excited that the US squirrels are gray and large, we have smaller red ones in Germany.
If you really want to see huge squirrels check out a US college campus. They're so fat!
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.
Chipmunks did it for me. They look and act so much like cartoon critters I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
These fellas
On the flipside, when I was in Japan some old guy mocked me for taking a photo of a no littering sign.
Hahaha that sign is so charming though
And it's another example of "if you don't want me to do it, don't make it look so fun".
I was visiting my friends in centrall europe and one if them wanted to show me the local speciality. We travelled 45 minutes by car and other 45 minutes by foot to look teeny tiny swamp. It was line 4m² and It was protectect area. My friend was really proud to show it to me.
I live in country where 26% of our landmass is swamps and wetlands...
Depositing bottles.
Put them into a machine, and it gives you money back 🤯
Honestly this needs to be more of things in the States. And the deposit cost needs to go up.
If companies were forced to retake their garbage, we'd see far less pollution.
It's not just that, they wash and reuse the bottles (without melting them down or anything)! Amazing stuff.
They're finally starting to put more stuff in them here opposed to plastic bottles, and I'm so glad for it.
The first time my cousins from FL visited Canada, it was July. They were surprised there was no snow. So, we took them over to the rec centre and they saw a small pile of snow out back. They were thrilled.
It was dumped out of a Zamboni.
Bikes! I live in Copenhagen and they're everywhere of course. I love seeing people at a big train station taking pics of cycle parking being overfull
At a train station in Amsterdam, there were so many bikes parked you couldn't count them. And it wasn't a major hub. I just stared in wonder.
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.
Marble is expensive in places where there isn't already a lot of it simply because it's HEAVY.
Leaves.
Yes, tree leaves.
Each fall when they start changing color flocks of tourists come up to gawk at them.
This is what I was going to say.
In the late 1800s when Jasper Cropsey was exhibiting landscape paintings in the UK, folks didn't believe that his colour palette was accurate
https://collections.brandywine.org/objects/2656/autumn-on-the-brandywine-river
I grew up in Portsmouth, England. Some my friends would come to school from the Isle of Wight on the hovercraft service. We all thought the hovercraft was pretty cool, but I only recently found out that it's the only commercially operated hovercraft in the whole world.
I moved to the midwest USA 15 years ago and I still can't get over the trees screaming at me. It's deafening but no one seems to care.
The trees are silent where I come from
Lakes. My small city has 330 lakes. There are more lakes in Canada than the rest of the world combined.
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.
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.
Deer. They are so common in this area they practically press the walk button to walk across the street. “hi bob. You gonna eat some more grass today. Yup ok. See ya later.”
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).
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.
The locations of past atrocities (N. Ireland).
Not even joking. It's a huge part of our tourism industry. It's like those Jack the Ripper tours in Whitechapel. Living here, you barely even think about them, but visitors act like they're meeting Taylor Swift when they spot a bullet hole, bless 'em.
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?
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"
Italy. I've seen tourists (probably american by the looks and the words) cheering and in awe because, in cities, there are free public drinkable water fountains.
UK here. Various right-wing governments have discouraged and torn out almost all the public drinking fountains on the basis they were being used by the homeless (they were also being used by everyone else, but ignore that bit). I've not seen much of Italy outside Rome but the water fountains there are amazing; just a simple gesture of mutual respect between humans.
Kangaroos, wombats and platypuses.
Kangaroos and wombats are dangerous when you're driving at night.
To be fair, I'm probably unique in my apathy toward, borderline dislike of, platypuses. When I'm out fishing and I see a platypus I pack up and go somewhere else because I know I won't be catching any fish.
Winter. I guess it's different when you only put up with the endless darkness, cold and snow a week once in your life.
The tides at the Bay of Fundy. Highest tides in the world but you have to watch it for 12 hours. Tourist flock there and the locals don't understand the appeal.
A statue of a dog pissing into a girl's mouth. It's a fountain. Not kidding either.
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.
Having young men and some women ride public transport in full military get up including their military gun.
I've often overheard tourists talking about them with respect or feeling alarmed something crazy is going on. The funniest one, was an older American tourist asking them for directions and talking very, very, very respectfull to them. The scene was just to comical seeing a boomer being so respectfull towards 18 years old boys.
Meanwhile for us here it's the most normal thing in the world to see a bunch of recruits going home from training or going to their base by train. If anyone feels anything towards them, it's pity. Because most of them are just there because they have to and not because they want to.
For the second question: I really liked the English houses with their red brick facade. Generally a brick facade it's not something I often see here in Switzerland.
There is this bridge over a river that people come from all over the world to fuck under.
I have no idea why. It doesn’t even show up in search results for the bridge.
