jjimm, no wonder. That’s one of the foulest uses of peanut butter I’ve ever heard. Ick.
What’s so confusing? It’s not like we don’t have numbers and the denomination spelled out on it. Plus different presidents.
Our money just looks classier than everyone else’s, as far as I’m concerned. Like the uniforms of the Yankees or Penn State. Classic look that never goes out of style.
Hey, this is the best time as any to ask this question. Outside of the US, what computer OS is more prevalent? Windows, Apple, Linux, or some other proprietary OS that we’ve never heard of?Also, does the death match between Microsoft and Apple’s fans exist elsewhere as well?
Went on vacation to California…
Asked for a kettle to make tea…and got a blank stare.:dubious: I was told they use microwaves to heat their water???
And it still throws me that you can purchase liquour in a grocery store.
I’d be willing to bet that automobile traffic here is among the worst in the world, at least around the major cities.
Most Americans who drink tea have kettles. As for the liquor thing, that varies from state to state. In some states, you can purchase beer and wine in a grocery store, but not hard liquor; in others, you have to go to the liquor store for everything.
Not around here. A liquor store can be attached to a grocery store, but it has to have a separate entrance. Liquor stores aren’t open on Sundays while grocery stores usually are. You can buy beer and wine in grocery stores, however.
Chicago Faucet, I can’t definitely answer your question (being an American and all that), but I play a lot of computer games from European developers, and they’re all PC games.
jtull, who keeps peanut butter in the refrigerator? Doesn’t that make it hard to spread? It’s usually eaten on bread, toast, crackers and occasionally with chocolate. Or by itself, if your description of your friend is any indication, though I can’t imagine standing around spooning peanut butter out of the jar. Peanut butter is one of the greatest inventions mankind has ever made.
I guess I should clarify my remark to Chicago Faucet. They’re all Windows-compatible games.
Which makes me think of another thing – most people from outside of the US have a hard time grasping how many laws vary from state to state or locality to locality. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen questions like “When is spring break in the US?” or “Do American bars allow smoking?” on travel message boards.
There are also a lot of questions from Europeans who simply cannot believe that the drinking age really is 21 here, and that it is enforced. (Of course, I remember wandering around London with a similar look of glazed incomprehension when I realized that yes, the pubs there really do close at 11 p.m., so I guess it works both ways.)
Huh? What do people do after eleven then? Go home?
Drinking age: My English friend was in America, and went to buy a bottle of wine with his friend’s little sister. They were asked for ID: he showed his (around 35 years old) but the clerk wouldn’t sell him the wine because she was not 21. His protests that he, in fact, was the one buying and drinking the wine, accomplished nothing.
So they drove on, and at the next 7-11 she waited in the car. But the clerk still wouldn’t sell him the wine, because the clerk at the previous 7-11 had phoned ahead and warned her that they were coming !
He was appalled. Also by the fact that you can’t sit in the park and drink said bottle of wine with your picnic.
I think it’s bizarre too but I wouldn’t complain - at least you can get booze outside of specially designated, and sparsely distributed, stores !
Peanut butter: it’s also an ingredient in some African cooking. Spinach, tomatoes, and a few spoons of PB, fried up with onions and spices, can’t be beat ! mmm …
I heard it was peanut butter and jelly that really surprises (horrifies?) non-N. Americans.
Windows is most prevelant. I’ve been using computer since the early 80’s in Europe and had never used (or actually even seen) a Mac until I moved to the US in 1995. I saw Macs (in use, rather than for sale) for about the first 3 months I was in the US then never saw one again.
Pretty sure the death match doesn’t go on over here. Is it still going on at all? I thought everyone (incl. Steve Jobs) admitted Apple lost; didn’t he say something to that effect whilst graciously accepting $400M from MS or something?
Have you ever driven anywhere else?
I just got home from Rio de Janeiro yesterday morning after a month of driving a little dinky Volkswagen Gol over cobblestone roads, highways with such poor lane paint that one risks flying off curves at night, dirt roads in the center of Brazil’s 4th largest city, São Gonçalo, that are so heavily rutted that I had to carefully navigate at walking speed as if I were rock-crawling. In São Gonçalo, most intersections have no signs or signals. To make things more confusing, many signals are ignored at off-peak times (Should I really stop for this red light?); the locals know which ones to ignore. Driving in town is like playing a video game: there are thousands of huge buses clogging the roads and you need to thread your tiny car through the small gaps that occasionally appear between them.
Even so, they all seem to get along quite nicely with all that, and I enjoy my time there.
Every time I return to New Jersey from Rio, I am amazed at how smooth the roads are, how orderly the traffic is, how good the signage is (Honest! Even Newark with its legendary horrible signage is far superior to where I was driving), and how clean the roadside is.
Thank you for the clarifications Fretful Porpentine and DeadlyAccurate.
We tend to group “liquour” under one category. None of it can be purchased at the grocery store here.
A major social problem in Britain is that a lot of people in the pub chug down as many beers as they can before 11.20 (last official drinking time) and then all stagger out onto the streets, plastered drunk, and has brawls. Of course, not everyone does this, but it’s felt by many to be contributory; if bars were allowed to close whenever, people would leave whenever, and there wouldn’t be such a concentration of drunkards in the street.
It’s extremely dumb.
There are, however, nightclubs that are open much later.
I’ve seen kettles in American homes, but they have all been stove-top types. What’s with that? I haven’t seen one of those in the UK since about the sixties. We had to pay quite a lot of money (compared to UK costs) to get an electric kettle, as all we could find was a European (OK, it was French) import.
Well, of course it isn’t confusing to you, you are an American - This thread is asking people who are not American what we think is wierd in America
For any other country I have ever been in, it takes a day or so to figure out that there are two of those small blue notes to one of those middle sized green ones and that five green ones make a big red one.
Once you have got your head round that, it’s easy peasy. Even if you are in a country which does not use the same alphabet as you.
When you travel to foreign countries, have you not noticed this?
Do you find it easy to differentiate, at a glance, by colour, or would you prefer to have to scrutinize every identically sized and coloured note in your wallet, to find the number and the picture of a dead man you don’t know?
If so, might I suggest a holiday in Panama?
(Thanks for the info, Paul in Saudi!)
Nah. At least the cities in the US were largely built with the automobile in mind (or have been restructured). I can drive right through the middle of Atlanta, about 30 miles, in less than an hour in the rush hour. Atlanta is often touted as one of the worst cities for traffic. Try drive through London, Paris, Rome and no doubt others, then see what you think of US traffic.
Huh. Color me surprised. I’d always heard that people in most other countries were more apt to use public transportation and that Americans were unique in the whole “every single person has to have a car and drive it everywhere” mentality. I complain about traffic a lot, maybe I should just be glad I don’t have to drive someplace like Rio de Janeiro.
Those are the markings for pedestrian crosswalks. You do have to stop if there is a pedestrian in the crosswalk, or if there is a stop sign or stop light.
What did you think you were going to crash into? Don’t they use stop signs in Australia?
I just look for the number. I always did that when I was in Mexico, France, the UK, Spain, Canada etc. It was never a problem. I never paid too much attention to the color. Maybe just because it’s habit, but it takes me about as much time to flip through my dinero and look at the number as it would to flip through and note the color, since most currencies have the denomination on the corners.
That would be different if I were in a country that didn’t use Arabic numbers, of course. But I haven’t done that yet, so no problems.
