The States: there is one thing that always strikes me as being alien with the road signs. It’s not the use of miles etc instead of kilometres; that’s expected. It’s not the use of words instead of symbols; there are some signs with words in Canada and the differences are more a matter of quantity than kind. No, it’s the use of fractions: “Exit 3/4 mile”.
And it doesn’t look that strange as I write it here. But there is something about the way they write it on the signs, like “Exit [sup]3[/sup][sub]4[/sub] mile”.
Europe, Finland to be exact: I was stunned to see how closely the landscape around Helsinki resembled the Canadian Shield country north of Toronto. Same rocks, same trees, same lakes, same bushes, same smells, same birdsong, same berries on the bushes. I had thought the Canadian Shield country was unique in the world.
But then it was all different too. The rocky hill that supported a cottage in Muskoka supported a brick-built Russian Orthodox Church in Helsinki. The rural arterial highways that had a clutter of roadside restaurants and souvenir shops near Gravenhurst had tidy verges, bus stops, and separated bike lanes on the way to the sauna resort by the lake outside Helsinki.
The architecture was more modernistic and more on a human scale, without the overwhelming size of some things — the highways for example — in Canada. And the details, everything from the bridge guardrails to the arrangement of windows on buildings, seemed to have been made with more care and artistic sensibility. And there were all these fascinating doors in Helsinki.
Finland. It felt like an alternate-universe version of Canada run by smarter people.
My first overseas trip was a high school graduation trip for the family, and I chose Greece as the destination. I was amazed by how old things were. Here in the US Midwest, a 100 year old house is considered old. 2500 year old buildings, road and art were mind boggling. I remember walking through one of the streets, and finding part of the pavement consisting of a fragment of fluted column. Here that would be on display over someone’s mantle.
The highways in Canada definitely have that in common with the USA, and that point was driven home to me when I was playing a game (I forget the name) where you went to a random Google Street View and had to figure out where in the world you were. One time I was plopped into a highway that looked American but figured it could also be Canadian not only because of the way it was engineered and painted and signed, but it was just had a massiveness about it that it shared with the US. (I eventually figured out it was in Canada when I “traveled” down the road a bit and saw a maple leaf flag on a house.)
It’s actually one aspect I like about the geography of America because it makes walking on a road between communities safer, helped by the fact that we also tend to have a shoulder capable of walking on, whereas the little walking I’ve done on English rural roads, they tend to be a lot narrower and with hardly any or no verge between the road and the hedge/ditch.
(Bolding mine) That’s the second time I’ve come across this phrase on this board in a few months, and I’m really curious where it’s come from. In over 35 years living in England, I’ve certainly never heard it here. You wait in a queue, or you queue.
It would be an unlikely local idiom even, being a homophone for ‘on cue’ as in ‘I made a cup of tea, and right on cue, my lift arrived’.
Anyway, regarding the thread topic, I honestly can’t remember being shocked or surprised by my first trip overseas, probably because I had several family members who absolutely loved telling stories about their travels to far away places, and Malta was pretty tame in comparison, and we regularly visited a Welsh speaking area, so even people speaking a language I didn’t understand wasn’t really new. I guess I was surprised that it was so similar. I was pretty fascinated by the fish though, being brighter and more exciting than the ones at home.
Going to Kenya as a teen was the first time I got the real culture shock; the street kids, and the massive slums outside Nairobi, all the more shocking for the contrasting shiny department stores in the centre.
As someone with a little history in construction trades, it kinda slapped me in the face how much obvious “eyeball” leveling and positioning takes place in construction. Walls 4-5 degrees out of plumb even in commercial buildings/hotels. Its almost enough to spook you into thinking the building is about to collapse.
I thought I had experienced hot and humid before i set foot in that country…omg…NOW I have.
The apparent wild west attitude towards micro buisiness. street vendors everywhere sometimes with just like a tiny table with a few things out for sale. Rural areas in the evenings are full of tiny mom and pop restaurants/bars. sometimes no more than a sign and a couple tables out front of an otherwise typical looking house.
Getting approached by and or hit on by women.
at 5’11 and 355 lbs I am in no danger of landing on a chippendales calendar, but 5-6 times in two weeks I was hit on/asked out by women. It was completely the reverse of what I tend to experience in the US.
My first trip to Europe I was surprised at how badly taxi drivers behaved. Our first taxi ride was in Paris from the airport to a hotel near the Tuileries and it ended up with him dropping us at a hotel with a similar name but not the right hotel. Fortunately it was only 3 blocks away. From this I learned to always have the name and address of the hotel written down so that the taxi driver didn’t have to worry about my pronunciation. This didn’t always help.
In Naples i gave the driver such a paper, and I’m not sure what went wrong. During the drive from the train station we mentioned that we were going to Sorrento after Naples, and he said he could drive us. I sort of laughed because I didn’t realize how close it is. He dropped us in a lovely area by the water, and about 1.5 kilometers from our hotel. From this I learned to always make the taxi wait for their money until I was sure we were in the right place.
In Rome, the taxi stand at the train station is a bit confusing, and we got suckered into starting to accompany the driver of an unlicensed taxi. We were intercepted after a few steps by the legit taxi driver who was next in line, they had a row, and we ended up going with the legit driver (still not sure what had happened). The driver spent the entire trip yelling, apparently at us, for having fallen for this (I’m not sure what she was saying, since it was almost all in Italian). I did make sure we were at the right place before we paid her.
This was a very large percentage of the taxi rides we took, maybe half. Not a very good record.
You’re supposed to wait in the taxi line and wait to be assigned a taxi by the official standing there. You’re not supposed to go with people who walk up to you and offer you a ride. Licensed taxi operators will never walk up to you and ask you to follow them.
Mmmmmm - yes and no. We were driving on a tiny rural road in Malta, when our route was blocked by… a chameleon. There was no traffic, so we just stopped the car and watched. It dutifully changed colour for us and, after ten minutes or so, strolled off. Amazing. We had no idea - turns out Malta is one of the northern limits of the common chameleon’s range.
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(OK, so perhaps “our route was blocked” is an exaggeration. But you know what I mean.)
Mom and I went on a walking tour of Nassau that we had to prematurely cut short (the two of us, not the entire group) because Mom’s motorized wheelchair started dying.
The Bahamas does not at all have the same kind of Americans with Disabilities Act stuff that America has. The sidewalks were all raised with no lips. It made it an absolute pain in the ass for her wheelchair.
My husband (good looking but no Chippendales model either) said that when we went to a couple of department stores the salesgirls were all friendly and flirty with him until they saw me and our kid joining him from a nearby aisle
Yes, saw this in England and Scotland, and also in Japan
Tiny cars in Japan too! And supermarkets in foreign countries are wonderful for finding new stuff, in England rice pudding with fruit mixed in, in Mexico such a variety of breads, rolls and alcoholic drinks, in the Philippines a dozen different types of rum.
Saw this in the Philippines too!
That reminds me of a long layover at Seoul airport, looking out the window at a parking lot where all the cars were boring basic colors, white, black, gray, navy. Not one brightly colored car. This was 1993 and it may be different now but back then it was uniformly dull.
Also in Japan, looking at businessmen’s shirts and jackets, much more conservative in cut and color than in the US. Maybe one or 2 of them were pastels but overwhelmingly they were white, and almost all the suits were black or dark navy.
I do remember catching little geckos in the hotel, didn’t see any chameleons on that trip (did in Kenya). Given that Dad worked at Chester zoo at the time and I spent my Saturdays there hanging round behind the scenes, it wasn’t quite as exciting as it probably should have been.
I too was surprised at the smallness of my hotel room Mayfair, London, although I’ve been in buildings with short hallways so that part didn’t faze me. Given the exchange rate at the time it was tied for the most expensive room I’ve stayed at, yet it didn’t even have enough room for me to lay all my luggage out and still be able to walk and sit at the desk.
The other hotels I’ve stayed at in Europe have had rooms that were large enough for my needs at least. A couple of them would have been large enough for my needs even if I had planned on spending a lot of time in the room and thus would want more comfortability and room for lots of stuff, but not that hotel in central London! I’d hate to be a business traveler who splurged on that room only to find it was hard to work at the desk with your laptop. Although Mayfair is probably geared more toward tourists than business people who probably prefer other places depending on their purpose. I have to admit that for me as a first-time tourist there it was excellently placed.
I’ve been many, many times to the Netherlands (30-40 times), and I noticed that their hotel rooms are much smaller on average than in Germany or elsewhere I stayed. But that applies to local homes and houses in general too (and also leads to their narrow and steep staircases): they have so much water and so little solid ground that they have to be economical with their dwelling space.
In East Africa (Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania) the thing that stood out to me was how pretty much all construction was done with nothing but hand tools. I saw some (obviously Chinese) heavy machinery being used for road construction, but pretty much everything else was all hand tools, including the hole for the underground tanks at a gas station being dug bu a man with a shovel. I guess if labor is cheap enough and machinery isn’t, it makes sense.
On our first drive from California to Guatemala we were stopped at a Zapatista roadblock south of Palenque. Pay toll or die. We paid. It was cheap. We drove onward a few klicks and stopped to catch our breaths and stop shaking. No vehicles emerged from the road barricade after us - I bet some unhappy truck drivers in the toll line resisted paying.
The follow-up: We told a group of expats and their local friends of our experience, to varied reactions.
“Oh, Zaps won’t hurt anyone.”
“No, the real Zaps won’t, but the fake ones will.”
“Oh, they’re just stealing land.”
“Well, the way Mexico treats the people here, it’s no wonder.”
“What, they only charged eighty pesos? What a bargain!”
Lesson: If you see a line of vehicles stopped ahead, find another route.
We did wait in line. We couldn’t tell who was the official and who was just some random person standing around, there was no uniform or special jacket that we could see. It was just as we came to the front of the line when this guy started talking to us, for all we knew he could have been the right person. This was the last stop on our trip, by the way, we were getting overloaded. If the taxi driver we ended up with had ever shut the fuck up I would have done my best to apologize to her.
