About that cold soda in the UK - My family and I once stopped in a convenience store in a tiny town in Ireland and asked for directions to the local cemetery. After my mom mentioned that we had ancestors buried there, the guy at the counter proceeded to sell us two ICE-COLD, liquid-nitrogen-style cans of soda he had in a cooler.
So I’m convinced that yes, there is cold soda in the UK, but they don’t bust it out for just anybody.
Pudding. “Wow! These people eat pudding for breakfast! That’s pretty cool! I wonder if it’s like oatmeal, or if they just give you a little cup on the side… What’s this dried-up black thing she just put on my plate? Is this, like, a pellet of instant pudding you have to mix with milk? Maybe I’ll try a bite… No. Repeat, this is NOT PUDDING.”
British kids traveling throughout other countries by themselves for a year or more. I met a ton of these kids when I was in New Zealand and it just blew my mind. Teenagers in other countries, I find, have much less of a short leash than teenagers in the U.S. do.
Vegemite. OY. Although I think if it were some color other than oil slick black, it might not be as bad.
…yeah, right. :dubious:
Full-service ice cream bars in just about every gas station and dairy in New Zealand. We’re talking eight flavors of ice cream in tubs in a cooler and/or a big cooler on the floor with loads of ice cream bars in it. It struck me as very weird.
Nutrition information on food labels containing a quantity of “energy” measured in kilojoules.
I wonder why all the stuff that struck me as weird only concerned food.
Talking about soda over here in europe…
Germany- anyone had the pleasure of a Spezi? yeah that would be orange fanta mixed with cola.
France in Allsace (borders germany) my german friend asked for a spezi (handwritten on the menu) and got half orange juive with pulp & half cola.
back to germany- everything can be mixed to dilute the stronger flavor e.g.,
Schorle add carbonated water to any juice. Granted most juices here border on syrup
Beer if you don’t want a refreshing drink but afraid about the alcoholic content go ahead and ask for a Radler (lemon soda _&beer) or a Cola Bier. Or of course a Bananenweizen (Hefeweizen with Banana juice)
I love the Italian idea of an outing. Hmm let’s pack up the family+picnic table, chairs and food and take a drive on the highway. hmm hmm nice drive… let’s eat. Okay. The driver pulls over to the side of the road, parks, gets out, and sets up the picnic. The family enjoys the beautiful scenery and watches the cars go by ON THE SIDE OF A HIGHWAY. (this was up in the mountains so it really was beautiful there just very different way of thinking about space)
This is one of the very bad things about the EU. They used crappy fake architecture drawings (not one of those buildings is real!) because all of their famous figures are famous for killing a lot of people from another country. Makes for some ugly currency.
I think that the first number actually indicates the plot of land that the building is on. (I’m basing this on the fact that some large apartment complexes have addresses with multiple numbers, i.e. Kivalterintie 17-19.) Apartment buildings often have more than one stairway, and these are lettered A, B, C etc. Mannerheimintie 12 B 15 means that the address is Mannerheimintie 12, and the actual apartment is #15, which is in stairway B. If there is more than one building at a specific address, there are two options. Either the stairways are lettered so that in one building, you’ll have A, B and C, in the next one D, E, and F, etc., or you’ll have a lower-case letter after the first number to indicate which building’s A, B, or C stairway you mean. e.g. Kivalterintie 17-19 b C 32.
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No, those are pretty common all over Finland. I don’t know the official reason why they are required, but it does make it easier to pick out building numbers when it gets dark at night.
Usually, we don’t write the country code abbreviation unless we are sending mail from abroad and want to make sure it gets to the right country.
I have no idea how the system works in other European countries, so I’ll use Finland as an example. We use a 5-digit postal code. The different areas of Helsinki all have postal codes that start with 00 (00100 Helsinki is the city center, 00640 Helsinki is Oulunkylä, in the northern part of Helsinki, etc.). The farther away you get from Helsinki, the higher the number of your postal code. For example, Savukoski, which is in Lapland, has the postal code 98800.
Mannerheimintie 12 B 15 00100 Helsinki would be the correct address in this case.
– Keeping leftovers in the oven instead of the refrigerator. (After four months of this, I learned that it’s really really hard to get food poisoning, and stopped worrying about it.)
– Complete and cheerful disregard for personal safety, to the point of letting toddlers run around with fireworks at festivals.
– Bathroom doors that are closed all the time, making it impossible to tell whether anybody is using the bathroom without knocking (which I was reluctant to do, since in America one never knocks on a closed bathroom door except in cases of dire emergency).
An odd thing about the Netherlands:
– Chocolate sprinkles on the breakfast table. (I had no idea what they were for, until I watched the Belgian guy at the next table sprinkle them on a slice of white bread and roll it into a tube. Uh, OK.)
Sandwiches in Holland - I like to have a choice of bread, mayo, mustard, lettuce, different types of meat (pastrami, salami etc.), salt, cracked black pepper, tomatoes, onions, pickles and so on. All I found in Holland was large slices of a cow in a roll, optionally with cheese. I believe the dutch word for these sandwiches is a “boot” (quite probably wrong there and if I’m right I’m certain I’ve spelt it incorrectly).
When I lived in the US I had a friend visit from Holland. After about 2 day she refused to go to a deli because they asked her too many questions. She thought she was being interrogated.
Deep Fried Mars Bars (Snickers) in Scotland - I’m not even going to attempt getting my head around that one
Forming a queue in the UK - 1 person at bus stop will form a queue. If you just hang around in the general vicinity of the bus stop rather than standing, bolt upright, in the same spot for 20 minutes, everyone will think you are wierd.
The location of traffic lights. Rather than being across the intersection there are two lights. One above where you stop and one right beside the first car. Also when the light turns green it doesn’t go from red straight to green. It goes red, red and yellow together then green.
Driving on the same roads as trains also freaked me out a little bit.
When you ask for water in Germany they don’t give you plain water. You get mineral water instead. If you want plain water you have to specifically ask for it.
Little ice cream stands run by college students in the summers, with huge wooden signs of a pink ice cream cone on top if the big signs saying ICE CREAM confuse you
Hot summers yet few electric fans and almost no air-conditioning
Money with cute nicknames and a frumpy furriner woman on one side, critters on the other
Everybody has “somebody down working in the States” even though the quality of life is much better than it was when my grandma left Cape Breton in the 30’s
More bald eagles than I ever saw in the States, downright unpatriotic
Seeing a speed limit of “100” everywhere
Milk in bags, zillion different kinds of tea (I can find that in NY, but we’re talking small towns)
Seeing “Royal this and that” attached to things
British monuments and forts left intact, not pulled down by outraged Revolutionary mobs or whatever; Tory-related history in general
Tiny little maple leaves on all the labels of the obviously American-origin brands
In fact, anybody who thinks Americans are jingoistic with the flags might want to attend a festival in a Canadian city. Streamers, flags, bunting, signs, all covered with more maple leaves than there are in the Botanical Gardens. Dudes, we’re in Halifax, we’re hundreds of miles from Maine, and we did notice it took us hours to fly here and we’re not in America anymore! Chill!
Oh man … reminds me of the time back in college, when I received a letter from a buddy who was in England for the semester. The letter was handwritten with a thin felt-top marker on toilet paper. The ink didn’t bleed.
Mehitabel noticed a few things about Canada that I’ve mentioned. The other observations are spot-on, especially the flags and bunting. I mentioned in an old post that the level of Canadian display patriotism in Southern Ontario, at least what I’ve seen, is a couple of orders of magnitude greater than what would be encountered in the States, even immediately after 9-11. Foreigners who think Americans are obsessed with national symbols should really look at Canada for some perspective.
On top of the “Royal this and that,” it seems like every Canadian city has a Queen Street, King Street, Prince Street, Princess Street, Coronation Street, a bunch of streets named after British royalty prime ministers, and so on.
Oh man … reminds me of the time back in college, when I received a letter from a buddy who was in England for the semester. The letter was handwritten with a thin felt-top marker on toilet paper. The ink didn’t bleed.
Mehitabel noticed a few things about Canada that I’ve mentioned. The other observations are spot-on, especially the flags and bunting. I mentioned in an old post that the level of Canadian display patriotism in Southern Ontario, at least what I’ve seen, is a couple of orders of magnitude greater than what would be encountered in the States, even immediately after 9-11. Foreigners who think Americans are obsessed with national symbols should really look at Canada for some perspective.
On top of the “Royal this and that,” it seems like every Canadian city has a Queen Street, King Street, Prince Street, Princess Street, Coronation Street, a bunch of streets named after British royalty and prime ministers, and so on.
