Mundane but Significant Differences Between Countries

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
121

[QUOTE=matt_mcl]
So if you don’t throw your own parties, how does anyone find out it’s your birthday in the first place?
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I suppose it must come up in the course of a friendship somehow. A guy, hanging out with buddies, might mention. “Hey, it’s my birthday tomorrow. Why don’t you guys join me at the X Bar?” Women, it seems to me, are much more keen on finding out their friends’ birthdays, either by asking or by looking at your driver’s license, or some other such tactic. So if you have female friends, there’s a higher possibility that your social circle would be aware. Also, in my experience, employers often post upcoming birthdates on common notice boards and such.

122

[QUOTE=Alive At Both Ends]
Only in Dickens novels. I’ve never even *seen *goose for sale anywhere.

Edit: Oops, I see **Struan **beat me to it.
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I did check the price of a good-quality goose last November, as we only had three of us for Christmas this year, and I insisted on not having turkey. Yes, we were making sure we used a good local butcher, but £70 was pushing it! Went for a three-bird roast (duck, partridge, pigeon) instead, from another local firm. And it was goooood.

123

[QUOTE=Mindfield]
Basically there’s real mayo, which is made with egg whites 'n stuff. Then there’s salad dressing (which may or may not be related to salad creme in the UK, which is also available here), which is kind of mayo-like, but decidedly sweeter.
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Real mayo is made with eggs. All the egg. And we invented it, so you foreigners geroff my mayo jar. Other than that, I agree with Mindfield that what you usually get in stores is Not-mayo.

124

[QUOTE=GorillaMan]
I don’t agree that we only call savoury things pies. If it’s fully encased in pastry, it can be an apple pie, or a rhubarb pie, or whatever. Without the pastry top, then it’s often a tart. Unless it’s a specific item with another name, to confuse things, of course.
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And then again, some pubs serve an abomination they call a “pie” which consists of an earthenware bowl containing meat smothered in gravy with a huge balloon of overcooked puff pastry plonked on the top. If you ever encounter one of these, go somewhere else to eat in future.

125

[QUOTE=Anne Neville]
One thing I noticed in Australia- bringing your own alcoholic beverages to a restaurant seems much more common there. In the US, that’s something that is pretty much only done by hard-core wine geeks. I have no idea if it’s legal to do that at a restaurant that doesn’t have a liquor license. Restaurants that do allow this often charge fairly high corkage fees.
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In Australia, that depends on licensing laws, which are a state matter. My experience is a little old, so it might be out of date, but:
(1) In New South Wales, and probably in Queensland and the ACT, you can drink alchol anywhere it’s not forbidden, though the sale of alcohol has to be licensed. So you can bring your own beer or wine to any restaurant, regardless of whether it’s licensed. However, especially if it’s licensed, it may charge you corkage, which might be in te order of a dollar per bottle or a dollar per glass.
(2) In Victoria, there were (last time I went there) three kinds of restaurants: those licensed to sell alcohol, those licensed for you to BYO (bring your own), and those unlicensed for alcohol. In the latter kind, apparently it’s illegal for customers to bring their own alcohol and drink with their meals. But there were two advantages to BYO restaurants: one was that you knew there would be a bottle shop or hotel in the immediate neighborhood where you could buy beer or wine, and the second was that you knew the prices would be more moderate than at a fully licensed restaurant.

126

[QUOTE=acsenray]
Again, I can’t speak for Germany, but in India no one drinks untreated tap water – it’s not considered safe. Most people keep bottles of boiled or filtered water in the fridge.
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acsenray, in Germany you’d be very hard-pressed to find untreated tap water. It’s treated by the town.

One of the latest boutades of the Spanish government has been to make it illegal for a restaurant to serve tap water. Restaurants never charged for tap water, but did charge for bottled; for about a decade there’s been a law that if you ask for bottled, the bottle must be opened in front of you. But now apparently government-furnished water is not good enough to drink :confused: Please note that this was just a few weeks after trying to pass a law that would have declared all “public benefit” waters (“mineral waters”, so all the bottled water sold in Spain) “public ownership.” Apparently our guv’mint can’t decide whether they hate Font Vella and Solares or love them :stuck_out_tongue:

127

[QUOTE=matt_mcl]

So if you don’t throw your own parties, how does anyone find out it’s your birthday in the first place?
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What kind of crappy friends do they pass out in foreign countries who don’t even know when your birthday is?

128

Perhaps I meant to say that in India no one drinks tap water without subjecting it to further treatment, by boiling or filtering.

129

[QUOTE=Anne Neville]
One thing I noticed in Australia- bringing your own alcoholic beverages to a restaurant seems much more common there. In the US, that’s something that is pretty much only done by hard-core wine geeks.
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That’s quite common here, for wine at least. I believe it works the same as Giles described: some restaurants have a license to sell alcohol, and some have a license to serve it but not sell it. So it’s common for restaurants to advertise that you may bring your own wine. Oh, and apparently it is in fact only wine that you are allowed to bring: a friend of mine brought beer to a bring-your-own-wine restaurant and he was told that he couldn’t legally drink it. (They still allowed it, provided he hide the bottle.)

130

Drinking while moving (driving, walking, going to class, etc) is extremely common in Canada but doesn’t seem to be in England. I almost never saw people walking and drinking, and additionally:

  • I was mocked for my thermos mug - they don’t appear to exist at all there
  • cars don’t have cup holders
  • many coffee places, even if they did have foam cups, they didn’t have lids for them so you couldn’t carry them out

*ETA: There is one significant exception: in England people can (and do) drink beer wherever they want. There are always people holding pint glasses standing in front of pubs, and it’s not uncommon to wander off with the beer still in your hand. *

Well, in Ontario you get your beer from the beer store and your liquor from the liquor store - but when you’re finished drinking you return the containers (all of them - beer cans and bottles, wine and liquor bottles, tetra packs, wine boxes, etc) to the *beer *store.

Another strange thing about our liquor laws: if you are serving booze you MUST serve food. I was astonished to see a sign on a pub in London saying “We don’t serve food, bring your own!” Here you can’t even get a liquor license for a private event if you’re not serving food.

Also in England:

Getting (a) a bank account and (b) a doctor were the most difficult tasks I have ever had to do. (And yes, in order to get a bank account I was obliged to get a doctor first.)

I was surprised to see everyone unplugging appliances when not in use. A very sensible anti-fire precaution, to be sure, but much more common over there. It made sense once I realized how much more power comes out of their outlets, when I realized how little time it took the electric kettle to boil.

Compared to ours, the cold medicine is really wimpy. When I get a cold and decide to take something for it, darn right I want to be knocked out and stoned silly by some overly potent over-the-counter glop. I’ll reach for a NeoCitran or NyQuil and be happily dazed, simultaneously sedated (“may cause drowsiness”) and stimulated (“new non-drowsy formula!”), my mucus membranes dry as a bone and delightful hallucinations dancing before my eyes, until I can sleep it off, after which point I’ll be groggy and stupid but mostly healthy.

In England I took LemSip or … golly, I can’t even remember the other kinds … and got a sugar rush. “May cause drowsiness” my arse.

English people told me they sometimes took North American cold medicine to get high. I believe it.

131

[QUOTE=Sitnam]
<snip>Canada, mayonnaise, whats the deal?<snip>
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I dunno; you tell me. :smiley:
Do we use it more than normal, less than normal, have funny-tasting mayo, what? I personally hate mayo and could easily see it wiped from the planet, but I like Miracle Whip in its place on sandwiches. Mmm, the tangy zip of Miracle Whip. Maybe you got Miracle Whip when you asked for mayo. That might throw you off.

InvisibleWombat, we got the bill for our dinner right after being served at every restaurant we went to in Montana, Idaho and Utah (I think they did in Nevada, too, but I don’t recall now). It can’t be that rare. Maybe it’s a localized thing for those areas.

132

[QUOTE=featherlou]
I dunno; you tell me. :smiley:
Do we use it more than normal, less than normal, have funny-tasting mayo, what? I personally hate mayo and could easily see it wiped from the planet, but I like Miracle Whip in its place on sandwiches. Mmm, the tangy zip of Miracle Whip. Maybe you got Miracle Whip when you asked for mayo. That might throw you off.

InvisibleWombat, we got the bill for our dinner right after being served at every restaurant we went to in Montana, Idaho and Utah (I think they did in Nevada, too, but I don’t recall now). It can’t be that rare. Maybe it’s a localized thing for those areas.
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It’s very common in traditional diners or truck stops, but not in regular, non-diner restaurants. At Bob and Edith’s 24-hour diner, you get the check with your meal. If you want to add anything, the waitress just scribbles it on.

133

If you don’t have your location in your profile, please be more specific than this. It is kind of important to know location for this thread…jesus, what is KL?

134

[QUOTE=Merkwurdigliebe]
If you don’t have your location in your profile, please be more specific than this. It is kind of important to know location for this thread…jesus, what is KL?
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Well, apart from KLM, the other nine results from googling ‘KL’ all point to one place. So it’s hardly cryptic. I feel the same way about mine (I’ve explained this a number of times - I got fed up with having a boring & obvious location field and it getting ignored completely)

135

That may explain it. I eat at very few diners.

Even at Denny’s or Perkins restaurants, you don’t get the check until you’ve finished the main course and they’ve asked about dessert.

136

[QUOTE=Alive At Both Ends]
I don’t know why you’re surprised, either. Most cemeteries are full up, there’s little room left for burials.

A few years ago I went to the burial of an aunt, with at least fifty people present. Not one of them had ever attended a burial before. Just cremations.
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Don’t most European cemeteries dig bodies up after a hundred years or so and rebury the remains in a mass grave? :confused:

137

Originally Posted by Wendell Wagner
Apparently, North American supermarkets have decided that processed foods are the big moneymakers. That’s why the aisles holding them are the first thing you see. There are plenty of fresh foods in North American supermarkets, but you have to walk past the processed foods before you get to them.

I was overgeneralising a litte - I did encounter fresh produce but the amount and variety palled in comparison to the amount and variety of processed food. I truely had no idea that so much processed food even existed - things in packages I had never dreamed of. My American friend was appalled by the lack of breakfast cereal choice but bowled over by the fresh produce and bread sections in supermarkets here.
Which brings me to another observation - in the US, people don’t make food from scratch - you buy the ready made filling and the ready made pastry - and assemble more than make.

Also - I’m a girl (someone back there referred to me as a he) and the hole in the pants thing - is what it seems, the toddlers have trousers which have a hole in them so when they need to go to the loo, they just squat down and go. I noticed it particularly in Korea and parts of China.

138

[QUOTE=cowgirl]
Drinking while moving (driving, walking, going to class, etc) is extremely common in Canada but doesn’t seem to be in England.
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It isn’t common in France, either. Surprisingly enough, after 3 weeks in France last fall, this was one of the things we missed the most. We wanted to get up in the morning, grab a to-go cup of coffee and stroll around whatever town we were in. But nooooooo… can’t do that in France, you have to sit and drink your damn coffee in the cute little patisserie. It was quaint the first couple weeks, but after that we wanted our morning walk!

139

[QUOTE=Athena]
It isn’t common in France, either. Surprisingly enough, after 3 weeks in France last fall, this was one of the things we missed the most. We wanted to get up in the morning, grab a to-go cup of coffee and stroll around whatever town we were in. But nooooooo… can’t do that in France, you have to sit and drink your damn coffee in the cute little patisserie. It was quaint the first couple weeks, but after that we wanted our morning walk!
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In Japan it is rude to walk and drink or eat at the same time. It is also rude to have bare feet outside.

140

[QUOTE=Giles]
In Australia, that depends on licensing laws, which are a state matter…
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It’s the same way in the States. Every state has it’s own liquor laws and adjoining states can have extreme variations. Just look at Utah and Nevada :eek: ! This cause some trouble back when states still had different drinking ages. In some states it can be very hard for a restaurants for even be allowed to serve beer and wine. Then there’s the subject of dry towns/counties versus wet towns/counties that exist in many states (and let’s not forget moist counties).