I guess this is a “weird thing about North America”, but yesterday during lunch my Canuck coworker mentioned something about doggy bags and the Irish guys fell over laughing. Not just at the term, but at the concept.
The only problem with that is then you get these incredibly long and annoying pledge drives where you have to listen to them beg for money for 20 minutes at a strech. I’d rather just have the commericals so I have a chance to go to the toliet every 10 minues or so.
I had a good friend from China. I asked her why she came to the US. She said a friend of hers had visited the US and brought home some marshmallows. She said after one taste of those marshmallows she just new she wanted to live in the US.
I may be naive, but not that naive. It happened in several shops, one on the street directly south of Grand Central Station, another right across the NY Public Library (or whatever it is called). Before that experience the only time I’d seen haggling was in Life of Brian.
I dunno about other places but everywhere I’ve been here the cashier bags your groceries for you. Most shopping centers have a plastic bag dispenser beside the till so items go straight into a bag after being scanned. It’s efficient enough that I can’t see why anyone would waste 100 bucks a day on someone else to do the bagging bit.
Incidentally, my sister is a checkout chick and also the world’s worst (or best) complainer: if there was any sort of inconvienience to cashiers with this system I would have heard about it by now!
Over here (Australia), the checkout chick just bags the groceries. Do you have a seperate guy to do it?
Some places do, some places don’t. Some places it depends on the time of day or how busy they are. So it’s about as inconsistent as European shop open hours (just had to toss a zinger, sorry).
Euphemisms. Saying “bathroom” when of course you mean “shitter”. The best one I’ve ever heard of was one my father saw on a plane, where the sick bag was marked:
Flight discomfiture receptacle (or doggy bag)
Cranberry sauce…
Painted nails.
Wearing sneakers while commuting only to change to dress shoes at work.
Putting up make-up while driving.
What? They don’t paint nails anywhere else in the world? :rolleyes:
And the sneaker thing isn’t so weird! You suggest we wear heels on the walk to the subway, the subway ride, and the walk to the office? I personally don’t like the sneaker with a suit look, so I wear a cute pair of flats until I get to the office.
Have you ever worn heels???
I see every single one of these in Ireland every day (I have cranberry sauce in my fridge, you see).
You whaa?
All the marshmallows I can buy are made in China!
I meant the ornately decorated nails…
There are quite a lot of comfy heels that can be worn to work, no?
I may be wrong here, but they tend to have cranberry sauce mostly during Thanksgiving only here in America.
Never been at the states but I’ve just read that you’ve changed the french fries to Freedom Fries in the time of the Iraq situation…
I just can’t grasp the stupidity of this idea.
Why don’t you mail that post to back to June, when it was still news.
You mean the “looks like a pump, feels like a sneaker” variety?
No, thank yew.
:o
It may no longer be news, but it’s still a thundering tower of idiocy. That it happened at all should be fairly embarrassing to y’all. Thankfully it’s not representative of the majority of Americans.
While I agree it’s idiotic, I also think the media made more of it than it was. I mean, in actuality, I have never seen french fries being sold ANYWHERE in NYC as “Freedom Fries”, nor have I ever heard an actual person refer to them as freedom fries while ordering them.
Much ado about nothing, IMO.
IIRC, the only place it happened was the cafeteria at the Capitol where the Senators and Congressmen eat, right? And yes, it was VERY much ado about nothing. The media is to blame for that one. :rolleyes: