I’m moving to the States and getting really nervous about the shoe thing. What if my roommate wears shoes in the apartment? What will I do if guests come in with their shoes on?
The horror!
It’s an individualized kind of thing. People won’t think that you’re completely weird for not wearing shoes around the house, and they’ll probably understand if you ask them to take their shoes off.
When we visited Darjeeling we arrived in the drizzling rain, and we had also only dirty laundry in our bags having left Kathmandu in a rush.
So the first undertaking is to do the wash, which I do, by hand in the bath, as it’s raining I cannot hang it out doors and so I drape it around our room instead. No problem, the rain will stop.
But it didn’t. 2 days later, we’re beginning to get a little rank and our clothes are still not dry.
What to do? Out of desperation I put them under the skinny mattress of our bed, directly under where we would lay, and sure enough, by morning, dry, if wrinkly clothing. Ladies and gentlemen I believe we have invented the human clothes dryer. We did it two more nights until the rain eventually stopped.
By the time we left on the train to Varnasi all our clothes were dry.
Let’s see them laugh at this. I used the wussy 50% version in Kenya and it ate the varnish off the bedside table :eek:
The thing my girlfriend enjoyed the most was the horseflies that bite holes in clothes to get at tender juicy human flesh. And they laugh at deet of ANY concentration.
She was also a bit taken aback by the number of naked people we encountered while canoeing, and she’s dutch. I can only imagine what the average 'murrican would think.
One thing I’ve encountered (well, not me personally, but a friend who’s living there) is the lack of insulation in houses in New Zealand. In Canada (as you can well imagine), insulating houses is a highly-developed science. All houses in Western Canada are air-and water-tight, with complicated systems for exchanging air so you don’t smother in your sleep. There are apparently few furnaces in New Zealand, either. Most doors and windows here are double - screens for summer and airtight “storm” windows and doors for winter.
Canadian mannequins are nipply, too. 
The plastic milk bags are not at all common in Western Canada. We had them for a short time when I was younger, but not anymore.
I learned here on the Dope that Canada’s ubiquitous electric kettle for making hot water is not used everywhere in the world.
I learned as an adult that cars didn’t come with block heaters - that you had to actually get them added on. Who would make a car without a block heater? How do you start it in winter? 
And finally, the shoes off inside thing. I was just as surprised as you guys that people come into houses without taking their shoes off in winter.
Western Canada… aren’t you the guys who used to confuse the heck out of everyone during weather reports by giving the wind chill in kilowatts per square metre? 
I’m glad we now all use the ‘feels like’ pseudo-temperatures.
One things that puzzled me about England was: no screens on the windows. How the heck can you live without screens on the windows? The bugs would come right in!
Yup. Nobody actually understood it or anything - “The wind chill is 500.” Okay, that’s nice, but how soon is my face going to freeze?
I’m always more comfortable with shoes on. Unless I know I’m not going to be walking around, or doing anything in the house or outside. Can’t go outside with a gravel drive without shoes. Not me anyway. Hurts like hell. My Wife takes hers off when she gets home. Puts them back on if she needs to go outside.
I’ll think nothing of going outside for a few minutes in the dead of winter with a tee-shirt and shorts though. As long as I have some shoes on. I rarely wear gloves or a hat. Nor does my Wife. A good shell with a hood takes care of it. Drop a fleece or down vest under it and a sweater and I’m good to go. Gloves, to me, are a pain, and I hate driving in them. Gloves make you drop stuff. Like keys. Give me some good hand warmer pockets. And a warm (sort of) car.
If I need gloves, I wear mittens with gauntlets. With a lanyard that goes over the wrist to prevent you from loosing them when I need to take them off. That’s my plowing set up, or if we get a lot of snow before going to work in the morning, and I need to push a lot of snow off the vehicles.
I will wear gators and boots if we have had 6-8” of snow. Or if big snow is predicted. Sometimes I will need to walk up our drive and plow it with the truck before we can get in.
Block heaters are nice, but kind of a pain. Got to plug them in. And remember to unplug them. If a car is in good shape, -20f (about the limit we get) shouldn’t be a problem for it. -30f or more would be tricky.
Our cars are just about 30 feet out of the front door. We start them first to warm them up. Even in ‘summer’ it’s not unusual to have frosty windows.
“With a lanyard to keep from loosing them…”
OH Puleeze.
Who do you think you are kidding, exactly?
Every first grader in this country knows they are called Idiot Strings.
(And most children insist on their removal round about 3rd grade. West coast, maybe 5th grade.)
What on earth is a ‘block heater’?
A block heater is an electric heater that warms the engine block of a car. This ensures that the lubricating oil is thin (i.e not viscous) enough to let the internal parts of the engine move when it is started.
Note: ‘warm’ is relative here: above freezing, I think. (I’m not really a car guy.)
I think it has to be built into the engine whe the car is constructed, but I could be wrong about that.
Cars with block heaters have electrical plugs sticking out of their front grilles. In colder areas of Canada, it’s common to have plugs on parking lots to plug the block heaters into. Not so much in warm Southern Ontario (though even Ottawa, away from the moderating influence of Lake Ontario, is enough colder to have them…)
Sometimes it does get cold enough to need them even around Toronto. My aunt’s funeral was on an unusually-cold day in February one year when it was -35 out in the morning. We were at my other aunt’s house in Peterborough, Ontario, and we planned to go to the funeral home in my stepfather’s big black Buick Roadmaster.
It wouldn’t start. First time in memory.
My stepfather plugged the block heater in to an outlet in the garage, and left it on while we had breakfast. Half an hour later, the car’s engine was warm enough for him to start it, and we let the car warm up while we pulled out coats and boots and mitts on and got ready to go outside.
Incidentally, jabiru, I understand from looking at various ski websites that the climate in the Australian alpine snowfields is roughly four months of winter a year, with minimum temperatures of around -10 or -15. This is almost exactly the climate of Toronto, i. e. the warmer of the climates I’m describing here that doesn’t really need block heaters.
Thank you, Sunspace. I had actually heard about Canadians having to plug their cars in, over winter but I didn’t associated ‘block heater’ with ‘engine block’. I’m also not a car kinda person.
-15 to -10 is warmer, eh?
Yes. It could be worse. Subtract twenty degrees from this, and you’ll have the Prairies, where my mom spent her childhood. She often described walking to school in on the wooden sidewalks of Regina in -40 temperatures.
Celsius or Fahrenheit?
Oy! You’re such a kidder!
It’s better for and easier on cars to use a block heater when it gets cold. My car will usually start down to about -30°C without plugging it in, but I don’t do that to it.
As for remembering to unplug it, if you ever visit a prairie city in the winter, look for the pieces of extension cords on the roads. Pretty much guaranteed you’ll see one or two.
Oh, and the block heaters are easily and cheaply added to a car after-market. We had to have one added to the Tercel we bought a couple of years ago.
Speaking of winter etiquette (we were, weren’t we?) it is considered the height of “things not done” to unplug someone else’s car in winter.
In France and Brazil most of the milk you could buy was UHT, sold in cartons on the shelf (as opposed to bags in the refrigerator, naturally).
In Montreal (and probably other, snowier places I’ve never been) the fire hydrants have tall little flags on them, so the fire department can find them buried under several feet of snow.
Pizza toppings are a whole nother world of culturally-specific weirdness. When I took my French roommate to a Pizza Hut in Canada for the first time and asked her what she liked on her pizza, she said “Oh, the usual, you know, corn … egg …”
Observations from England:
Everyone seemed to put a blanket over top of their couch. I guess it makes sense because it’s much easier to wash a blanket than a couch … also it makes your couch last longer, I guess. But it’s a pain to have to straighten it every time something touches the couch.
Fridges are much smaller. I only saw one house with a Canadian-sized one, mostly they’d have a bar/dorm size one (or two, if there were lots of people).
I also noticed the washing-up bucket in the sink and utterly failed to get a good explanation for it from any of the people who used it.
OTC cold medicine in North America is much stronger than it is in England. I knew people there who would take Tylenol Cold recreationally. Lem-Sip is a feeble, lemon-flavoured joke compared to Neo-Citran.
It was common practice to not only unplug appliances (eg television, heater) when not in use, but also to switch off the outlet with the on-off switch that each and every power outlet has.
Block heater related hijack anecdote.
One of my friends from Cali was visiting, and wanted to take my old truck in the mountains to ski. I told him sure and gave him the key. I guess he took a look at it and asked what the power cord through the grill was for. I told him it was the block heater, what it was for, but I never used it cause it didn’t get that cold anymore. Once the gets to the mountains he is deathly afraid of the truck not starting, so he decides to plug in the heater. He said he had to go into town to get the adapter. About five minutes I started thinking “what adapter, it’s a freakin power plug”? Then I remembered the truck has both a block heater and a power-take-off. I’m not sure exactly what would happen if you rig the PTO to plug into a wall outlet, but decided it couldn’t be good, so I called the condo desk and told them to not let him touch the damn truck. So don’t assume the cord through the grill is a heater, particularly on your own damn truck or you will feel like an idiot.
You’re right. It is better for the oil circulation.
Yep. When we have used block heaters, I usually drape the extension cord over the drivers side mirror so they are sure to see It and unplug it. Or maybe just rip the mirror off as they drive away. You will never do that twice.
For us, having an extension cord from the house the the cars can be a bit of a pain. It always gets burried in the snow. I suspect we don’t get near the cold that you do, just once in a while. Mostly, we get tons of snow.
And every one that has lost a mitton or glove on a ski lift disagrees with you.
Maybe your post was a whoooose. But, when you need mittons, or gloves, you NEED them. It’s nice to have a lanyard to put around your wrist so that you can pull it off and not worry about it for a minute.
I’m not talking about toys for children, I’m talking about equipment.
Ever adjust snowshoes in the dark? Puleeze yourself. :wally
Know one. Exactly.
http://www.orgear.com/home/style/home/handtools/gloves/ascent/71870.
Mine are older. They don’t have an elastic ‘idiot string’ as you call it. Just a bit of thin nylon webbing into the mitt with a sincher on it.