Americans frequently meet up with friends in a restaurant, order coffee, never stick around to drink or pay for it, and no one seems to care.
Related; people always have coffee hot and ready to serve to the wacky neighbors who stop by unannounced. They too don’t actually drink the coffee.
And the doors are never locked, even in NYC apartments.
People in a workplace never take time off; everyone is always there from 9 to 5 every weekday.
You don’t?
If a teenage party in America features so much as a drop of light beer, Bad Things will inevitably happen: fighting, pregnancy, arrests, deaths or all of the above.
No matter how poor Americans are, their home will be huge.
Said huge home will nonetheless not have a spare room, requiring guests to sleep on the couch.
American high schools have huge and intractable divides between jocks, nerds, music freaks and so on. Many of the students appear to be in their thirties.
Americans either have tons of family that they see all the time or a tiny family that they see once every four years.
Nobody is ever unemployed for more than an episode.
Going without a date for longer than a month is a serious dry spell.
American dogs and small children don’t actually need much looking after at all.
American children age differently: they’re born enormous, remain tiny unspeaking babies for a while, then jump to age about 8 and know everything, then jump again to teenagers where they suddenly know nothing.
They also often disappear for several months and return with an entirely different physical appearance.
All step fathers are bad.
Elementary schools have fully enclosed corridors, and each student from first-grade up has their own full-size metal locker.
The office of student body president has more authority than any faculty member besides the principal himself, and has the power to change students’ grades, schedule dances, rewrite the cafeteria menu and have students expelled.
On the first day of school in each grade, it is expected that each student will give a written and oral report on what they did over the summer. Not having a sufficiently interesting anecdote is grounds for an F.
School assemblies are impromptu affairs which require no advance notice or reworking of class schedules, and are often held without any students or faculty knowing ahead of time what the assembly is about. The only forewarning of an assembly is an announcement by the principal over the PA, which all schools have.
All students eat school lunch in the indoor cafeteria.
Students in French class are expected to speak entirely in French for the entire class, even when discussing matters completely unrelated to the French language.
American wives are shrill, demanding, and always right. Their husbands are bumbling idiots.
Married couples lie to each other constantly, mostly to cover up terrible things they’ve done to the other. Hilarity ensues, and all is forgiven.
Dance club music is always low enough to have a normal (non shouting) conversation in.
Stalking is normal behavior for frustrated men (instead of xxx.com).
Any man from Texas is always bigger then life, prejudiced, and wears boots and a hat. Forget about major metropolises like Houston, everywhere in Texas is a small town.
No one ever says “Goodbye” on the phone. Just hang up, conversation is over.
Every student falls into a “Breakfast Club” stereotype.
There will be: self-centered jocks, vacuous cheerleaders, pregnant misfits, druggies, nerds, and one ordinary student who just wants to convince everyone that we’re really all the same… “can’t you see that?”
So far, these replies describe me to a T.
It’s all the hormones in the milk.
Oh, and I learned from “Cops” that every innocent driver pulled over for whatever minor offense will be drunk, wanted on previous warrants, be carrying drugs, and the car doesn’t belong to him; he borrowed from a neighbour.
Americans (such as myself) always find an empty parking spot outside the front door of whatever business they want to visit.
American teenage girls who pull their hair back, have glasses and wear baggy clothes are ugly outcasts. It’s ok though. They need only loosen their hair, ditch the glasses and change their outfits to become supermodel beautiful, and then they’ll be the most popular girl in school.
Well, that’s easy, because there’s never any traffic on the streets.
Except for New York, where there’s a cab every 12 feet (OK, that last bit may be true…)
Not true! some of them are policemen of the chocolaty-persuation who are perpetually two days from retirement.
Don’t forget the 1% of New Yorkers who are black, according to Sex and the City, Seinfeld, Friends, Mad About You, etc. etc.
All high schools, no matter what part of the country they’re located in, have classrooms that open onto the outside, have lockers on exterior walls, and have cafeterias that consist of a group of picnic benches outside. Sometimes you can see mountains and palm trees in the distance, even though the school is somewhere in the northern Great Plains. This is only bothersome for one week at year, usually around Christmas, when there is the usual one annual snowfall.
Any single adult, despite spending lots of time in restaurants or bars hanging out with just their long-time friends, and presumably spending unshown amounts of time watching TV, reading, surfing the Internet, playing sports, cleaning their house, doing laundry, paying bills, shopping, etc., can easily meet a complete stranger for their traditional weekly date with someone they’ve never met before. This is possible because of the long-standing American custom that if you see a single person of the opposite sex while walking down the sidewalk, shopping in the supermarket, passing them in the corridor at work, etc., they must accept a date with you.