Another thing that struck me as very weird, on my one and only trip to Canada, was all the businesses with names like “Bob’s Canadian Garage” – as if one would expect to find an Uruguayan garage in the middle of Toronto.
You recall correctly. It’s called Buru.
And elmwood, the majority of flags I saw in Québec didn’t have red Maple leafs on them … 
In Brazil, I have found that just about every everyday disposable product you encounter is much more fragile/thinner/weaker/cheaper:
Flimsy toilet paper
Paper napkins that have a waxy feel and are one ply
Disposable plastic cups that can barely withstand the pressure of one’s fingers
The only beds I ever slept on there were essentially plywood boxes with an inch of padding on top; you could thump them and hear an echo. My joints were all aching after a few weeks on beds like that.
Most people’s doors still use the old-fashioned warded locks, complete with a keyhole for peeking.
They don’t have bathtubs: strictly shower-stalls-only.
I started a thread a couple of days ago about the scary electric showerheads that are used in Brazil. Check it out – I included three pictures of prime examples.
Boscibo, they do that permanent accident shrine thing in Greece too. They look like little birdhouses. It’s creepy to be driving over the mountains, go around a turn, and see a bunch of those on the side of the road.
In Italy, I was never quite clear on what the average person drank with non-dinner meals. The choices always seemed to be water, carbonated water, and (much less popular and stuck in the corner) soda.
Well, this is true for the notes, but the coins do occasionally feature real buildings and people. The Italian coins include images of the Colosseum and Dante, for instance.
Many of the things that appeared “weird” to me on my first trip to Europe no longer strike me so–the lack of ice in Coke doesn’t bother me (and I don’t usually drink it much when I’m over there, since it’s usually about the same price as a glass of wine or beer–if not more!)
But I still can’t figure out the cord that hangs down from the ceiling in Italian showers. I think it’s just there for support, but I’m always afraid something will happen if I pull on it.
Tipping at restaurants is far less consistent than in the States (where it’s pretty much a given that you’ll pay 15% at any restaurant other than fast food joints). Many places include service in the bill, but I still feel obligated to leave something extra (at least 10%).
At pubs in the UK, I’ve learned you don’t tip at all–a bar instinct that most Americans have to suppress.
Of course I thought of another one, right after I posted.
Public transportation run on the semi-honor system in Italy. In Florence, it was buy your ticket at a newstand, get on the bus, validate it (but no one checks to make sure you do), get off at some later time. Random inspectors try and catch people who skip the validation step. The especially amazing part was that they used this same system for the water shuttles in Venice, which are very expensive (5 Euro IIRC).
It’s actually rather amusing, since it’s just the kind of system that tends to catch tourists who think it’s all free.
auRa, thanks for the clarification! I wish I’d known that before going… I would’t have wandered in circles for 45 minutes trying to find my destination. 
When you have a building with multiple staircases, are they connected internally? I have a vague feeling that they might not be, if the staircase entrances are part of the postal address.
Of course I shouldn’t complain about postal addresses, given that the format of Canadian postal codes is AFAIK unique in the world…
Helsinki is a great city; I want to go back very much.
The landscape of the city is very similar to that of the Canadian Shield and Thousand Island resort areas in central Ontario: all trees and granite hills and moss and rocky hummocks jutting out of lakes, renowned for its natural beauty.
I thought that that landform was unique to central Canada. I was surprised as heck to find it in Europe, especially with a beautiful capital city built on top of it. (Tunnelling through that granite for the subway must have cost a fortune…)
I felt completely at home in the Finnish landscape; Finland was like being in a weird alternate-dimension version of Ontario run by smarter and tidier people, with unreadable-to-me road signs, better urban design, and no Evil Death Highways Of Doom[sup]TM[/sup]. (Anyone who drives Highway 401 in Ontario will know what I mean.)
Actually, that’s not that improbable… (Sunspace thinks of the Peruvian restaurants and Brazilian travel agencies he’s seen recently.)
Yes, elmwood, there’s a standard Southern Ontario kit of street names, most of them British-derived: King, Queen, Adelaide, Richmond, Prince, Victoria, Elizabeth, Albert, Wellington, York… There are also some names from local history; Brock comes to mind in the Niagara area, for example. There are also the innumerable Native-derived names, though these are more often on features of the landscape (such as lakes) than towns or streets.
Even within Canada there are differences that strike travellers: the horizontal traffic-signal arrays in Quebec come to mind.
Honestly, I live in Toronto and have never really noticed a super-abundance of Canadian flags.
What I have noticed, is lots of people put up flags/displays of their favorite sports teams - particularly around playoffs.
The “Royal this and that” is true. 
I didn’t think Canada had a lot of flags displayed, until I went to Finland and stood on the rocks at Suomenlinna and vainly searched the Helsinki skyline for a Finnish flag… finally finding one over the Suomenlinna fortress itself.
Another "weird’ non-American thing–and one which I am very fond of–are the zebra crossings in the UK. I was very impressed with the idea of traffic stopping for me if I stepped one foot onto the crossing. It made walking much more pleasureable.
After living in London for a while, I also became amused with tourists who didn’t understand how zebra crossings worked. I would often see tourists milling about the British Museum, where there are several zebra crossings. The tourists would be staring intently at their map, while they stepped off the curb (er, “kerb”) and onto the edge of the crossing–not intending to cross the street, mind you, they were just stepping off the crowded sidewalk (er, “pavement”). Meanwhile, they would be completely oblivious to the traffic coming to a grinding halt all around them.
I have also been struck by how many Parisians jump the turnstiles at the Metro rather than paying for a ticket (this was about six years ago; maybe they’ve started cracking down on this since then). I remember once seeing a whole family clambering over, or ducking underneath, the turnstiles, and began to think I was the only one who actually bothered to buy a ticket.
What about computer geekery? There’s supposedly an operating system called RISC OS that is popular in the UK. From the few screenshots that I’ve seen online, the GUI looks like a cross between Windows and the old Amiga workbench. Are there three-way OS shouting matches in the UK, as opposed to the Windows versus Mac arguments Stateside?
Speaking of Amiga, from what I see online, it seems like it’s one of the dominant operating systems in Germany. There are companies making new Amiga-based computers, Germans are still writing software for the machine, and so on.
Another strange European thing I’ve seen … televisions with the picture tube bulging far beyond the front of the set, as opposed to North American televisions where the picture tube is recessed. I don’t think it has anything to do with broadcast formats.
Light switches outside of North America - up is off, down is on. WTF?
Is it true that Australian light bulbs are plugged into sockets, rather than screwed in?
What’s with the dairy stores in Canada, Australia, NZ and South Africa?
Oh … longwave radio. What’s the deal with that?
Almost forgot… the plugs. 110 v 220. Burnt out many appliances forgetting to switch over the voltage.
Nothing wrong with longwave radio. It means ( because of the groundwave) you can cover a lot of area from one transmitter. There is a downside though . Because of the wide coverage there is a limitation to the number of TXs you can use ( in the whole of Europe and North Africa there are only 25 transmitters ) and there is interferance from electrical storms . But many radio sets in Europe are still equipped with longwave as well as medium wave AM wavebands.
Regarding your other points- never heard of that computer program , I do not think TV tubes bulge out at all except in very old ( 50’s ) sets . Light bulbs in the UK also plug in via a twist and push action , and surely is is more logical in a light switch to have down for on and up for off?.
Um… ‘down is off’ makes more sense to me, because, if something falls across the switch, the electricity will be turned off rather than on, adding a little bit of safety.
elmwood, do you mean stores like “Mac’s Milk”? They are just convenience stores: high-priced products, open long hours.
Oh, Brazil: everything is sweet. Coffee is served with sugar in it (in little flimsy plastic cups that I always worried would melt all over me). People like to add sweetener to their fruit juice - I once saw a man get a glass of carrot/orange juice, and add SIX (6) spoons of artificial sweetener to it ! my teeth are curling just remembering it.
And there is a Dunkin Donuts in Rio. For some reason I found that almost as startling as not finding donuts. I didn’t go in, but I hadn’t been without donuts for long enough.
I remember watching British sitcoms from the 1970s and 1980s; whenever a television set was shown, it looked MUCH different than the typical North American television. Looking on ebay.co.uk, it appears that modern UK television sets appear similar to those found in North America.
A now defunct company called Acorn Computer were very popular in the UK, mainly due to their computers being used a lot in schools. The last range of computers they created, called the Archimedes, was in production up until the mid to late nineties and used RISC OS as its operating system. My understanding is that the Archimedes was the first mass produced home RISC-based computer.
Anyway, it looked old because it is old. You still see them around, especially in schools, as for their time they were extremely powerful and hence have aged reasonably well.
An interesting sidepoint is that the part of Acorn that produced the Archimedes’ processor lives on as ARM, who’s processers are used all over the place (for example Nintendo’s Gameboy Advance uses an ARM processor). I believe ARM used to stand for “Acorn RISC Machine”
Actually, it was the differences that made travel fun.
That said, there certainly were some odd things:
Egg cups - to hold your soft boiled egg (when is the last time you even saw a soft boiled egg in the US?) They also have electric soft boiled egg cookers!
There is the old expression about the UK - if you like the weather, you’ll love the food. How true, although I did have the best Indian food in England. They wrapped fish and chips in a newspaper and it was dripping fat on the floor before you got out the door.
Tartar…raw hamburger with onions and spices spread on bread and eaten that way. Yuk.
Schmalz…basically pure bacon fat drippings mixed with some spices and onions, left to solidify and spread on bread. Double Yuk.
The most boring newscasts in the world are in Europe. Unsmiling men and women speak in absolute monotones and sit like puppets with a stick up their butts while an occasional news photo is shown in the background. They will also do a ten minute story on the plight of foot infections on Himalayan yaks.
At German movie theaters, you don’t get popcorn…they sell ice cream cones (They used to have a woman walk up and down the aisle selling them right before the movie started. I don’t know if they still do that.)
You can buy pre-popped popcorn in supermakets in bags. With sugar on it. I never met a German who knew how to make popcorn on the stove.
Nothing comes in a handy six pack. You can buy soda and beer in cans, but individually.
Bakeries are wonderful, but you will never see an American pie.
It’s no big deal for a guy to go pee against a wall, or by a tree on city streets.
People go to dinner at 10:00 or 11:00 at night.
A tomato salad is a plate with nothing but tomatos. No salad leaves, just tomatos. A tuna salad is an opened can of tuna, turned upside down and plopped on a plate. An American tuna salad sandwich is unheard of.
But on the flip side, once you get away from USA: Best breads, pastries, beer is real beer, fashion name-brand clothes at cheap prices, sexually and politically liberal thinking people, wonderful parks in cities, clean and safe and cheap public transportation, flower shops all over the place, outdoor cafes pop up everywhere at the hint of good weather, dogs in retaurants and bars, and did I mention beer?
[brief hijack] Skopo, is English your native tongue? Did you have any trouble with the Metro in Paris?[/hijack]
DMark, I loved those soft-boiled eggs and brought home egg cups and tiny spoons to continue to enjoy them. In Denmark, when they finished the egg, they broke the bottom out with a spoon “to save the life of someone at sea.”
I went to a movie in Denmark. We had to have tickets ahead of time. I had to have my soda in the lobby. It was served in a glass with no ice.
A photograph of a naked American First Lady was in the Danish version of a TV guide. I couldn’t believe how casual people were about nudity.
It was wonderful to be in a country with no poverty and a strong work ethic. Scandanavian countries all look like they have been scrubbed fresh every morning. So clean!!
Herring in cream sauce! I have finally found some in the States!
Desserts in the afternoon and cheese after a large meal was strange but nice.
But in one country, a hotel tried to substitute sandpaper #5 for toilet paper. That was so bad!