If you are an adult, sex with minors is illegal.
Also, Americans tend to toss things to each other, rather than walk over and hand each other the item. So if you forgot your keys, and I say, “Here, catch!” and throw them to you, I am not throwing them at you. (That was hilarious!) I tossed them within arm’s reach, an easy catch, and she just stood there! They sailed right past her. We both had dumbfounded expressions. “Why didn’t you catch them?” “Why did you throw them at me?”
To expand on the “things you don’t ask”, I’d add “don’t ask how old somebody is”. I think people in other countries might be a little put off by how much your work is a topic of conversation - when we don’t know somebody and are meeting them at a party or something, we often ask “so what do you do?” and we mean “where do you work and what do you do there”, not “what are your hobbies” or “what do you do on your day off” or “what do you do here, at this party?”
This kind of thing could also be a language issue. Maybe they know what that big machine in the basement is, but have never heard it called a furnace. Mr. Neville has a colleague from Australia. He was taken aback when he first moved here to the US and would be offered a napkin- in Australian English, that means “diaper”. You could get this kind of problem with immigrants from places where the English they learn isn’t American English.
Sales tax and tipping are two things it took me a while to get my head around when visiting the US.
To be fair, the concept of a separate Head of State and Head of Government is pretty foreign to most Americans, since both functions are combined in the President.
About the closest equivalent I can think of is in weak Governor states where there’s some other elected official who holds the practical power, but not the “Head of State” function. (e.g. the Governor in Texas is constitutionally weak, but the Lt. Governor has a lot of practical power, as he’s the guy who controls the legislative calendar directly, and can effectively kill stuff by just scheduling it for review and/or votes such that it never sees the light of day because the legislative session ends)
Don’t assume that if an American woman smiles politely or says hello to you that she is inviting you to bed.
I ran into this in college* where I was first exposed to immigrants from a wide variety of countries. I want to be polite and friendly to everyone I encounter, but this is the reason why I don’t make eye contact or make my usual polite “hellos” to men from other cultures even though I feel rude being that way. I suspect that some get into the habit of thinking that American women are exactly like what they see in movies like Porky’s.
Yeah, no - never toss things at people unless you know they are prepared! Not even most Americans toss things at each other (it isn’t done around here).
Don’t ask women whether they have children if they haven’t brought up the topic themselves. Even if they seem to be carrying or buying a child’s toy.
And if you do ask and they say “no,” don’t start quizzing about why not.
Seriously, this happens to my wife all the time and it really gets her down.
! Immigrants? Residents of this country need to be taught the same thing. I have been asked by people who live here just as much, if not more, in that nasally voice, “But whyyyyyy don’t you want to have children?”
I swear, I always want to snap and say “Because I don’t want to be a miserable POS like you.” Grr!
In a public men’s room with more than two urinals, never take the urinal next to another man unless it is the last one left. Always leave a buffer.
This is an out-of-line jab. Please don’t do this again.
Our death rituals may strike some as odd. When my husband died, the neighbors from Central America asked when he would be brought back home. Difficult explaining with a language barrier.
Don’t expect to see Boston, NYC, Miami, Disneyland and Texas in a single week. The US is larger than you think. A lot larger. I see those kinds of posts from people planning to work here temporarily or go to college here all the time. Even the small states like NJ are a lot larger than they think. Someone asked me if we could meet up for a day trip at Cape May. They were amazed when I told them it was a good four hour’s drive from my house in the northern part of the state.
Indeed. An English friend here in Bangkok drove across the US once. So he should have known better when on his next trip a couple of years ago, he planned a massive drive taking in all of the American West. He ended up cutting out much of his itinerary since he only had three weeks. Slightly less, actually.
When I first landed in the US, I wish someone explained how the hot water/cold water dial worked there. Matter of fact, I still might not know. They are just clumsy and unintuitive IMO. You turn some, you get ice cold water. Turn some more, suddenly you get blasted with hot water. So every shower, I get alternately frozen and burned. I just need some lukewarm water, damnit!
Tossing things is a habit that we could do without, IMHO. First sharp objects like keys might injure the catcher or a random person walking that way, especially if they are not unprepared.
Second, some people are just clumsy at catching stuff; I am not terrible at it, I think, but I am not great and I don’t enjoy it. Throwing is fine if the person is standing next to you is fine, not across the room. Moreover, some ambitious types throw it so that it’s just out of reach. What do you want me to do? Dive for it, and risk a tear in my pants? No, thanks!
Also, I doubt it’s an American vs foreigners thing, or even a Western vs non-Western thing. Some people like to throw & catch stuff; some don’t.
I don’t think any of us really get it either. I don’t know why single knobs have become the rule.
At university in West Texas, a young German who was crossing the country was staying with a friend for a spell. Two things I remember him saying was long-distance dialing instructions should be made clearer. (Seems it took him forever to figure out to dial 1 at the beginning.) And he was not aware of the strong sense in the US of “private property” until he almost got shot cutting through someone’s field just like he would have done back home.
Not really. They’re called nappies - which may well be short for napkin but no-one ever refers to them as that, and everyone would know what being offered a napkin meant. Serviette is the more usual word though.
Why is that? Here we do that all the time, it’s considered elitist and unfriendly to sit in the back. For a man, anyway, I expect unaccompanied women would tend to sit in the back so as to not give the (almost always male) driver them impression he had a chance.
I’d feel overly familiar. It would be like sitting right next to the only other person on a bus or in a waiting room.
Also, I think it’s seen as a safety issue by many drivers, and many taxis have plexiglass partitions between the front and the back. I expect I’d get told to ride in the back if I was traveling alone and tried to sit in the front.
I’ve sat in the front seats of taxis (in NYC) when there were too many people to all fit in the back (they are required to let you sit up front in that case), but yeah if you are a single passenger it’s really weird to sit up front. Actually I am not sure if a passenger is even *allowed *to sit up front if he is alone. Drivers are not required to keep the front doors unlocked.