Ask Lemmy

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.

Opposite: I (US-ian) was visiting friends in Germany and they took me on a bike ride in the woods.

“Look!!” (Bike sudden halt, stop and point into a tree with full arm) “a squirrel!”

(Mostly) very good public transit in big cities and even in some smaller areas.

I personally still love to see the mountains. I grew up in a place scraped flat by glaciers in the US and seeing the mountains on a couple of sides of me every day here in Japan still feels really neat and inspiring, even a decade in.

Walking to a supermarket, riding your bicycle to work.

OP, I want you to know that you are not alone, I am also a Brit who loves seeing all the wee reptiles scooting about when he visits places that have them. We barely have any here and they're fun tiny little dinosaurs!

Edit: actually I do have a proper answer too. I'm in Scotland, which has different trespassing laws to the rest of the UK. In Scotland you have a right to roam under which you can enter any outdoor land, other than that with crops and the immediate surroundings of houses, provided you do so responsibly. There are other reasonable exceptions but the point is that you don't generally need to check for access here. The rest of the UK is far more restrictive and I have found that visitors find it incredibly weird to walk through a field of grazing sheep or similar when trying to get somewhere

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

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.

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.

Evergreen trees. I know they're a big deal to people who visit but I grew up around them and think they're kind of boring.

I lived in London for a few years and it always amazed me to see foxes just roaming about. I still think it's cool.

I'm from another country, foxes are not really a thing here.

cactuses

Niagara Falls. It's spectacular to visitors but for me it's right there so it's just a bunch of water falling off a ledge.

Norwegian fjords. I live here, and to me it's mundane landscape.

Whales, northern lights, reindeer

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.

The Redlight district. Every city has/had them and for us it's just normal. As a kid I had to pass some of those windows to get to school.

What in your country/area is totally normal but visitors get excited for?

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This is so mundane fried chicken for me, just comfort food in the Philippines, but no thanks to some influencers, tourists flock to this specific fast food restaurant expecting it to be some culinary treasure.

The ocean! So fascinated by it! I love it, but it is always there, waiting. No need to go to it. It will get you eventually.

In Southern California it's got to be the palm trees. Nope, not the ocean, the beaches, the Hollywood sign, iconic neighborhoods and buildings. It's the palm trees. Out of state relatives and coworkers always gawk at and comment on the palm tree lined streets.

The Henrik Ibsen statue near my home, and also just about all street-facing buildings built before like 1960. People stop to take pictures but I’m just like, people live there. It’s a pretty row of houses, but have some respect. See also, Bryggen.