During my first visit to Japan a bunch of us took an MWR bus from Yokosuka up to Tokyo. I was the second person off the bus; the first guy, like you, was 6’2. He took two or three steps, stopped dead in his tracks, looked back over his shoulder, and said “Watch out for people below eye level.”
First trip outside CONUS was to Puerto Rico and the USVI; first foreign country was Canada. Don’t remember anything particularly odd about either.
Next was Japan, where I first saw those hole-in-the-floor squat toilets (much cleaner than the ones I saw a few years later in Crete). The really wild thing, though, was the vending machine out on a street corner – full of beer, with a bottle of scotch as well!
I really did like those Japanese hot-and-cold vending machines loaded with tins of juice or soda on the cold side and tins of coffee and tea on the hot side. I’ve often wished on winter days that we had machines like that around here…
On my trip to the UK I bought a bite to eat while waiting for the train in Paddington station. It was nearly impossible to find a trash bin. I don’t remember how far I had to go, but I remember thinking I probably would have run into 20 of them in the US by the time I got there.
Also no free refills for drinks was a mild irritant, “bacon” being more like a slab of ham, and eye-watering VAT taxes.
For a long time in the UK – a couple of decades ago, I 'd say (I tend to be vague about these things): what Americans call “trash bins” and Brits “rubbish bins” were largely removed from public places in urban areas, because of situations involving terrorism; and the usefulness of such bins to terrorists, for the planting of bombs. With that threat seen as less of a concern at the present time, this facility is nowadays more plentiful. Could it be, that your visit to the UK was during the period which I mention above?
The most vivid memory of my first trip to Cambodia in the mid 1980’s was the absence of an entire demographic: Where were all the middle-aged men? (Not all were missing. Some middle-aged men lacked legs and navigated the sidewalks on skateboards.)
I could write chapters about taxis in Bangkok. Interesting to me is the taxi driver who, lost in conversation with me, drove miles in the wrong direction. I never worried that anything was wrong — a tribute to Thai honesty (and my own ability to guess character?). I insisted on paying him, despite his not wanting me to, when he got me to an alternate destination. He then went out of his way to drive me to a slightly better place so I wouldn’t need to carry my bag.
No, it was last year. Just to make sure I wasn’t crazy I went on google image search and could not find a single interior shot of Paddington Station with a trash bin on it. I saw some bin-looking things, like here, but if they’re for trash they do not appear available for public use. Maybe it’s just Paddington Station, because I don’t recall “noticing” this for the rest of the trip.
I’ve only been abroad once unless you count Canada. My family took a “once in a lifetime trip” when I was 10. Coming off the plane I desperately needed to use the restroom only to have our family find a security guard type with such a thick accent we couldn’t understand him (our only such experience on the trip) and a toilet you had to pay for.
Have traveled much with a fair amount of experiences (almost mugged in Panama, nearly walked into a ‘honey trap’ in Athens), but earliest one I remember most was in the Philippines. Got there and after checking in the hotel and resting up, decided to go for a walk. Walked a block or two from the hotel and suddenly realized (1) I was surrounded by lots and lots of people, (2) I was taller than anyone I could see, so I stuck out, and (3) I was the only white person in sight.
Now I hadn’t traveled much before then and then only to England, so I found this…disconcerting…and had to do some thinking about it…and me…when I got back to the hotel. Since then I’ve been on multiple continents amid people of every background and have not had the same reaction…maybe that experience learned me something.
Yeah, pay toilets are still around quite annoyingly. It didn’t surprise me per se, because I hadn’t really thought about it one way or the other until I saw it, but it is pretty annoying since they don’t take cards so you have to carry around a lot of change if you’re in an area with a lot of pay toilets.
So much for my brilliant theory, then ! The “bin-looking things” which you depict – I’m not highly au fait with them, but gather that they’re for the railway’s purposes – indeed not for public use. I do reckon Britain as a whole, to be well-enough supplied with functioning public rubbish bins nowadays (pace pandemics in which very many things are out of kilter). Maybe, as you say, an oddity of Paddington Station. Prior to nationalisation of Britain’s railways in 1948, Paddington was the London terminus of the Great Western Railway, a much-loved, proud and highly individualistic concern which revelled in doing all kinds of things in different ways from other railways; traces of this “scene” still linger on former Great Western rail lines, seven decades later.
I lived in Chile for a while in the late 90s. What I really miss is the bargaining. Haggling with vendors was so very much fun. It was such a thrill to get something for half of what you were quoted - it was one of those things that made you feel like you really belonged there.
The downside of that was all the people you had to bribe. You want to get your care package without it sitting in the post office for a month? Show up to the central mail office, grease a palm and they’ll suddenly find it.
The other thing that took me aback was how important your network was. I mean, that’s true in the U.S. today, but I remember that even as a 19 year old, I couldn’t get a minimum wage internship at the museum without knowing someone who knew someone, having drinks with the department director and being careful to avoid talking about the job I wanted and my qualifications.
Last year we were in Victoria station and I bought a beverage which had a foil lid on it. Ended up carrying the foil lid back to the hotel, along with the beverage itself, as I did not find a trash bin in Victoria station.
There are bins outside the station, and in all the parks, but not many in the stations themselves.
In Paris, most “bins” are actually a metal ring with a clear plastic bag hanging from it. It’s easy to see if there’s anything ominous in it.
Something that I only realized recently is that much of the world has had to deal with terrorism a lot more than the U.S. did before 2001. When we visited London in 1993, one of our buses had a detour due to a bomb threat, and there wasn’t that much of a fuss on the bus itself, as it wasn’t that uncommon. The Saturday we left was the Bishopsgate bombing.
In Switzerland it is possible to get on a train with luggage at any station, and to leave luggage at the bigger stations. To board a train in Madrid, you go through a scanner similar to that at the airport, and the luggage is also scanned. And if you want to leave your luggage at the station, it also has to be scanned.
I don’t mind these, because the bacon tastes like bacon even though it is differently-shaped, and the Red Bull and Beaujolais is around the same price as in America or cheaper. And these days I don’t get non-tapwater non-alcoholic drinks at restaurants.
But that did remind me of another thing that surprised me: the popularity of sparkling water. I got a nasty surprise the first time I got some water from a buffet only to sip something tasting like fountain soda that had run out of syrup. Blegh! Thankfully they had still water available as well.
Same with Germany. But man, they where clean and spacious. Except, oddly at the Frankfurt airport before customs. That was a hole. When we flew in that was my first stop and gave me a very bad first impression. Everywhere else was great.
Germans apparently like cold cut sandwiches for breakfast. Sort of makes sense as there is so much train travel there. You go to a shop, get your sandwich made fresh and eat it on the train. Small local hotels where the same. All had cold cuts and bread for breakfast. Eggs, where sort of rare it seemed. At one hotel the hostess announced that she would make eggs if anyone wanted. Someone piped up “You’ll make us eggs?” Hostess replied “I might, for you”. Was kinda a funny sarcastic dry sense of humor.
Most jarring: on my first trip to England, finding out that ordering iced tea in a restaurant got you one tiny ice cube, and that people put vinegar on french fries (chips) instead of ketchup.
We do this in Michigan. It’s not the majority, sure, but it’s not uncommon. Vinegar (preferably malt) goes on fried fish, too. Maybe it’s our shared cross-border heritage.
My first trip outside the US was a trip to Egypt about 15 years ago. The baksheesh culture there really took my breath away (along with a lot of 20-pound notes because I hadn’t thought to get small bills when I changed my money). The very last guy to baksheesh me was some random dude who ran up to our van at the airport, unbidden, and pulled all the luggage out of the back onto the sidewalk. I tried to give him a 50 piaster note (USD value at the time ~3 cents?), and he looked at me like I’d spit on him. Tough shit, bro. I didn’t ask you to do that work, you did that on spec.
Second to that, I would say the fact that from my experience there, the concept of standing in an orderly line appears to be utterly alien to Egyptians. Getting a train ticket looks essentially like a rugby scrum. You take your money in your hand, reach into the pile of people, and when your hand finally finds the hole in the glass behind which the ticket agent sits, you just hope you have enough for the number of tickets you’re trying to buy.
I don’t know if it counts as “travel,” exactly, but when I moved from the UK to the US at 14, it confused the hell out of me when all the kids stood and faced a loudspeaker at noon to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. It has a super-creepy authoritarian vibe, particularly in a country that styles itself as the Land of the Free.
