LOL@Ranchoth! Ain’t that the truth?
And MusicJunkie, great to see another Brazuca in the SDMB! I wonder if are there others?
Mexico, Puerto Vallarta, Old town (I’m sure things are different in the fancier parts of town). Not really strange, but different from what I’m used to.
Urinals: When you are done, you turn the water on with a handle. When you think enough water has gone through, you turn it off.
Garbage trucks: Preceded by a guy ringing a cow bell to tell everyone to get their trash out to the curb.
Ice trucks: See garbage trucks.
Napkins: All restaurants have the same napkin dispenser on the table (black metal with paper napkins in it). Some monopoly, I suppose.
I could mention beach vendors but they are probably the same everywhere.
All of Mexico: No price signs on gas stations. Since Pemex is a monopoly, I guess the only choice is to pay what they are charging.
Oh, yeah, Mexico City: Automobile repair places where they are repairing the vehicles in the street in front of the establishment.
Bob
Jerusalem. I’m on the bus, passing by the wall of the Old City. At an intersection, there’s a guy dressed in “Middle Eastern” regalia - sparkly harem pants, vest, turban, etc. Sitting astride a camel. Talking on a cell phone.
Totally made my day.
I spent my senior year spring break in Greece. Everything was wonderful, but they have this odd propensity for selling really hard-core (I guess) porn - tapes and movies - on every third street corner. The truly bizarre part is that even though the girl on the cover of the magazine is completely spread-eagled, they have airbrushed over her entire crotch with an odd, non-matching peachy-pink color - so she looks like Bondage Barbie.
Snap! I’ve been mistaken for a Russian whore here in Dubai. That’s because I lived in an area full of Eastern European/Russian/CIS hookers (many of the poor girls are more or less sex slaves, brought in by Russian mafia fucks) and I’m quite pale in colouring, like many of them.
Ah yes, the ubiquitous foreign pizza experience. As I mentioned in my previous post, mine was with Pepperoni as well, but in Germany. Perhaps the Pepper in Pepperoni should have clued me in. Or even the puzzled looks and repeated utterances of:
“Pepperoni?”
“Yes, Pepperoni.”
“Pepperoni?”
“YES. Pepperoni.”
“Okay (shrugs shoulders).”
In any case, the pizza came back covered in hot Italian peppers. And I, in order to save what little dignity I had, bravely ate it all to show that this thin cracker with almost no sauce or no cheese, was exactly what I had repeatedely and fervently insisted on.
Whenever I think of this I am reminded of Inigo Montoya.
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Oh- and the stuff that the Kiwis try and pass off as ketchup. A nasty, vile concoction that tastes like super-sweet tomato paste.
I did rather fancy the whitebait sandwiches, tho.
Cambodia- land of the weird.
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Giant (and I do mean giant) barbecued spiders on a skewer. Crunchy, with a peanutty flavor.
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Guy on moped with what appeared to be 35-40 durian strapped to his back. The smell of that particular vehicle was, in a word, astounding.
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Wok chock full o’ stir-fried locusts. Didn’t eat those.
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The less said about the food markets, the better.
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Land mines which float in rainwater :eek: (step lightly, fat American!)
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Vietnam- the Museum of American War Atrocities…
I’m sure I’ll remember more later…
blanx
I was traveling through Italy one summer. One morning in Padua, my boyfriend and I kept encountering all these male students in over-the-top drag. And there were big, fairly racy cariactures of the students pasted all over the walls of one street. We’ve never been able to figure out what was going on. Some kind of hazing, but for what?
We called 'em “sippy sacks”.
Swedes put ketchup on pasta. Apparently because it contains tomatoes they believe it to be some kind of pasta sauce.
Regarding Pizza, I am surprised that no-one here has mentioned the UK’s Baked Bean Pizza.
Various ads for Cock Soup in Jamaica.
Foreign pizza experience #587:
This is not the case in all of Israel, but I lived in Jerusalem, which is much more religious than Tel Aviv or Haifa, so it is rather difficult to get a non-kosher pizza. Which means…no meat at all, especially no treif like pepperoni. I’m a vegetarian now, but I wasn’t at the time, and I would have killed for a pepperoni pizza.
I also once requested black olives on a pizza. I might as well have asked for chocolate and caviar topping. The guy thought I was nuts. I finally gave in and said that green olives would be fine. Since black olives are abundant in Israel, I don’t know why it’s so difficult to get them on pizzas. A typical Israeli pizza has cheese, green olives, and onions.
I once visited Padua some years ago (also during the summer) and encountered something similar. My understanding was that the university students were celebrating the end of the academic year/term (Padua has one of the oldest universities in Europe, even older than the University of Paris–I think only Bologna’s is older).
However, I recall that at that time, the large caricatures on the walls were actually of the professors. They were quite racy, and pretty funny.
My favorite Italian “festival experience” was the Corsa dei Ceri in Gubbio (the website seems to be only in Italian, but there are lots of good images–follow the link under “Archivio fotografico”). Three teams, representing the three different neighbourhoods, carrying giant wooden contraptions (the “ceri,” or “candles”) through the streets and racing them up the side of the hill. Each team has a little figure of their patron saint affixed to the top of the “candle.”
The funniest thing was the order of the race always finishes the same every year–it’s mandatory that the town’s patron saint comes in first. Same for second and third place. How the Gubbioese get motivated enough to lug these things up the side of a hill year in and year out, i do not know.
I was touring Greece in the offseason, late November. A few of us went into the town of Napflia, which has a waterfront and is pretty touristy. Well, there was a pack of mangy stray dogs running around downtown. Everytime a car passed, they would take off after it en masse, and I can’t believe there weren’t some run over. Every so often they would remember we existed and run over to us. Then they’d do laps for a little while. One woman was almost shaking due to her fear of dogs. They didn’t bite or anything, but it was definitely wacky.
Haven’t seen that in the US.
At the risk of running over all the posters who have already mentioned Japan, I have to add my Japan experience. (Nothing relating to Collunsbury’s young lass, however.)
In Japan, they have fertility shrines. The symbol of the fertility shrine is the phallus. In Aichi prefecture, near the city of Inuyama, there is a fertility shrine called Tagata-jinja. (There is also a female shrine a short distance away, but it is less exciting. Just a rock that some really horny guy could imagine resembling female genitalia.)
Anyway, Tagata-jinja. The grounds are covered with stone and wooden phalli. 7 or 8 inch long wooden talismans are sold to ladies who want to become pregnant. The shrine bell is shaped like a phallus. Next to the main shrine is a secondary shrine that is worthy of note. Instead of dropping your coins in an old wooden box like most shrines, there is a cute litte stone phallus with two large marble balls in front of it. Between the orbs is a slot for a coin. You drop your coin in and rub the spheres until the coin strikes a little bell at the bottom.
Tagata-jinja has an annual festival every March, where an 8 foot long wooden phallus is decorated with flowers and paraded around the town, carried by men in elaborate costumes. As the phallus is carried down the street, women who wish to conceive will reach over and stroke the side of it.
There are other similiar shrines in other locations, some with much larger phalli, but few are as well organized.
Unfortunately, western influence is spoiling everything, and the popularity of traditional shrines like this is waning, except among the foreign community.
Hmmm…I found that in Scotland, toilet paper is soft and absorbent. And not just in the hotels. In fact, I found very little “out of the ordinary” in either Aberdeen, Edinburgh or the Highlands. I feel so left out.
I liked the toilet paper marked “Property of her majesty the queen” at the tower of london.
The shelf toilets in the Netherlands I could have done without. Err, without the shelf part, at least. And I wasn’t fond of the tunafish pizza.
I liked the signs for “Donner kebabs” in australia. The Donner party was of course a group that resorted to cannibalism when trapped in the snow.
Also, to my eye signs that say “XXXX Pokies” mean quadruple-X porn featuring penetration, rather than a particular brand of beer along with card games.
In St. Kitts, the “buses” are actually mini-vans. They all have their own names and slogans, like “Vicious” which says on the side “De Original Whoosh” There’s also “Everybody’s Peepin’” with big eyes painted on it. My fave is “Dr. Ninja” printed in rasta orange, yellow and green, complete with a ninja head with pointy ninja hood with stars on it. Private cars also have slogans; one of the few that I can remember says “Don tek it, ask fu it.” Wha’??
There are also vehicles here that are technically vans, but they’re incredibly tiny. My wife, thinking of the VW microbus, coined the term “nanobus” for them.
And mustn’t forget the sign saying “Pest Control, Fumigation, Guest House.” At least you know it’ll be bug-free…
Okay, blanx, let me get this straight. You ate the giant barbecued spider, buy the locusts you woundn’t touch! No spider will ever touch my mouth.
Like the vehicles Collounsbury described in Kenya, they have “dala-dalas” (I think, if memory serves) in Dar es Salaam. Quite an experience, but gets normal after a few trips.
And back in the 1980s, Paris had these rather large motorcycles that would patrol the city and pounce on any espied dog poop on the sidewalk, and clean it up with a grand panoply of sound effects, mechanical gyrations, and water and chemicals pouring forth. Haven’t been back since the mid-90s, so don’t know if Parisians are getting better in cleaning up after their petits chiens, rendering the crotte brigade redundant.