I’ve only been abroad one time, and there were little gecko/lizard things everywhere, climbing up walls and scurrying across roads, and nobody cared. I was constantly fascinated but to the locals they’re just kinda there.
Bonus question to anyone who visited the UK - was there anything that fascinated you but I’d be taking for granted?
Pic unrelated.
The lack of a speed limit on our highways. Some people come here just to drive on a boring frigging highway.
Bonus question to anyone who visited the UK - was there anything that fascinated you but I’d be taking for granted?
Double decker buses maybe. I found them pretty cool compared to the boring buses we usually have here.
Edit: Also, urban foxes. I saw foxes maybe three times in my life before going to London, where they’re basically seen as a nuisance.
no speed limit is annoying as fuck. there is absolute chaos on the autobahn because of it. everyone drives at different speeds and dangerous manouvres (like tailgating, driving 200 kmh on a full road or in the rain) are common occurances. i hate driving in germany. we are an idiot nation when it comes to driving and cars in general
Yeah, I could do without it. When it’s really empty, it can be nice to go 180 for a bit, but more often than not, it causes the kind of problems you mentioned.
Driving 200 kmh is also incredibly wasteful
But it’s super fun
For the people who need the adrenaline rush we could reduce the driving speed on the Autobahn but add something dangerous to the car. Maybe add a random chance for the airbag to activate or tires to explode.
That would still be just as dangerous for other drivers…
A little less, less speed means less energy and more time for others to react
So one fact that I like telling people in America and they dont fully understand: I have 2 speeding tickets in my life and both come from the autobahn
username checks out!
how did you get them?
So only between cities is it without speed. Which I didnt know when I first got there. The next time I was just being dumb, showing off, and didnt notice
The worst part is when you get a ticket, especially at night, they essentially flash bang you to get a clear picture of your face. So not only are you speeding but now your blind for a couple seconds.
Driving too fast
it actually creates a lot of traffic jams too. The differences in speed and the goal to drive even faster produce hard braking moments which have a chain reaction. Especially in rush hour, where it matters, we really don’t get anywhere faster.
We are stupid for not limiting speed
Imagine drivers 10x worse and that’s the USA.
We had bendy buses for a brief moment.
Now those wouldn’t actually be exciting to me as a German, that’s the type of bus I rode to school on. :)
i NORCAL they are basically on the most of the lines that travel the longest routes.
Also, urban foxes. I saw foxes maybe three times in my life before going to London, where they’re basically seen as a nuisance.
I didn’t know they were common in London but I also saw a fox when I was there. It just went through people‘s yards and stopped in the middle of the street to look at us.
Urban foxes are in every city. Foxes and coyotes. You just dont see them often.
Anecdotally I would say that London specifically, rather than the UK as a whole, has either an unusually high population of foxes or a unusually bold one. I’ve never seen so many out in the open as there
Coyotes are only a thing in the Americas, I’m pretty sure.
Forgive an old bushcrafter. I default to my known region.
When I visited the US I was excited to see squirrels running around. We don’t have squirrels where I’m from. We took pictures.
It must have looked like we were excited to witness a cloud in the sky.
I saw my first chipmunk last week and I totally screamed oh shit there’s Alvin! in my heart.
Don’t let your inner child die!
I still remember my first chipmunk encounter. I heard the little guys before I saw them and wondered “who the f is out here playing laser tag in the woods? ”
I was a bit excited that the US squirrels are gray and large, we have smaller red ones in Germany.
If you really want to see huge squirrels check out a US college campus. They’re so fat!
Noted
A squirrel in a public park near me climbed up on me to get to the peanuts I was holding, no fear. It was also absurdly obese.
It was also absurdly obese.
Hey, just like many of our people! Yay, America!
Those poor lil things… I feel sad for them. :(
I got a squirrel took my apple away from my hand!
Jesus how strong was that squirrel
We have different colored squirrels in some regions.
https://wildlifeinformer.com/types-of-squirrels/
You’ll need and extra SD card next time you visit.
Ah, very cool. Maybe I’ll visit again once the current presidency ends. If that’s ever going to be the case.
We have grey squirrels in the UK, although they’re not native. They’re responsible for the decline in native red squirrels, you rarely see them now unless you go to particular areas.
Not only UK. As far as I know the same problem is spreading around all of mainland Europe. US squirrels have a better immune system and a more varied diet, they are also more aggressive and territorial. They are slowly replacing indigenous red squirrels.
Dammit. :( Us humans are so talented at selfishly fucking over indigenous populations and animals in general. Ugh.
In this case, it was just randomness. Some grey squirrels got randomly transported with cargo between North America and Europe and they found a good spot. There was no human intent behind it… (does it make it better?)
and the german ones are really skittish too.
Those i saw on the canadian campus just lay next to the side walk, chilling. Fat and grey
American squirrels can be aggressive. I was eating an apple one day and I kid you not, a squirrel jumped at me and took it from my hand.
I love when people see deer here in North America. You’d think they’re seeing a unicorn, when it’s just some plain ol’ mule deer.
Forest rats.
Totally me in the US! Deers in Europe are stuff for natural parks!
I’ve seen deer just wander through my yard in town
We also get turkeys.
I always lived in states where deer hunting was a pretty common pastime. The first time I went to a zoo in South America, I cracked up when we got to the display of white-tailed deer.
I understand Australians have a similar reaction to zoo kangaroos
When I visited Canada from the US, my extended family and I drove in separate cars, thereby arriving at separate times spread out over a few hours.
Every group of us took basically the same picture when we arrived because we’d previously only seen brown squirrels and there was a solid, dark black one running around in the back yard.
My parents’ neighborhood is ALL black squirrels. I thought they were rare until they moved (only 30 minutes from where I group up) so I was quite surprised to see dozens in their yard
It’s funny what people notice. I have a friend who grew up in the American Southwest, and her wildlife culture shock when she moved away from there came from wild rabbits.
The Southwest is populated by jackrabbits, so after they encountered an eastern cottontail, they were genuinely concerned some malady had befallen it to cause it to have such small ears. She thought maybe someone was torturing the local wildlife and cutting off its ears.
Chipmunks did it for me. They look and act so much like cartoon critters I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
I love chipmunks! Such a big squeak from such a tiny body, plus I love their pointy tails :)
I love this and was about to post something similar because my family met a family from Australia at Disney World and the little girl was SO excited about the squirrels. It was adorable.
I live in the Midwest, so squirrels are just always there.
Used to work at Disney World. Can confirm the squirrel amazement. (And I worked at Animal Kingdom, the squirrels occasionally got more attention than the actual zoo animals. Although the local ibises hanging out with the spoonbills were still cool.)
I grew up in rural US, squirrels everywhere. Still fascinated by them! Moved to the southwest, was sad there weren’t trees and squirrels out here. Then saw my first (closely followed by like a dozen more out in the area) ground squirrel! Some touristy areas they will line up all cute doing tricks for scraps of food. They’ve learned our oohs and aahs generate treats.
Oh wow. I saw a squirrel once in Catalonia. Wonderful sight.
I’d guess people from monkey countries feel the same way about them impressing us. They’re in similar niches and everything.
My wife is from the Philippines. Squirrels are a thing you have to visit the zoo the see.
No squirrels? You from Greenland? Antarctica?
Israel
Mirroring what others have said - at a nearby university that has (had? sigh) a large foreign student population, some folks actively feed the squirrels. For several weeks at the beginning of the school year, you could very easily spot new students by who was out taking photos and getting mobbed by these squirrels that are way, way too comfortable getting close to humans.
I was visiting my friends in centrall europe and one if them wanted to show me the local speciality. We travelled 45 minutes by car and other 45 minutes by foot to look teeny tiny swamp. It was line 4m² and It was protectect area. My friend was really proud to show it to me.
I live in country where 26% of our landmass is swamps and wetlands…
These fellas
On the flipside, when I was in Japan some old guy mocked me for taking a photo of a no littering sign.
Hahaha that sign is so charming though
And it’s another example of “if you don’t want me to do it, don’t make it look so fun”.
Cheeky little guy, he can’t even keep his ear and trunk behind the red line. That elephant truly does not care for our silly human rules.
Someone Japanese said you were taking too many pictures? Haha, that’s ironic given what they’re like abroad.
Bikes! I live in Copenhagen and they’re everywhere of course. I love seeing people at a big train station taking pics of cycle parking being overfull
At a train station in Amsterdam, there were so many bikes parked you couldn’t count them. And it wasn’t a major hub. I just stared in wonder.
Same, im in The Netherlands.
Depositing bottles.
Put them into a machine, and it gives you money back 🤯
Honestly this needs to be more of things in the States. And the deposit cost needs to go up.
If companies were forced to retake their garbage, we’d see far less pollution.
It’s not just that, they wash and reuse the bottles (without melting them down or anything)! Amazing stuff.
They’re finally starting to put more stuff in them here opposed to plastic bottles, and I’m so glad for it.
The US used to do that before the plastics industry (oil company derivatives) squashed it.
they wash and reuse the bottles (without melting them down or anything)
Idk where you’re talking about, but in Finland… That used to be the system, and the bottles which were actually washable were far sturdier than what we have now. Now it’s all flimsy PET bottles which just get shredded and “recycled”.
I used to work in a bottle room back when most deposits were glass bottles and sturdy plastics and only the cans got crushed not reused.
I was the guy in the backroom piling the bottles from a huge conveyor belt (glass bottles) to be organised in pallets. Could manage like 7 beers bottles in one hand, but that was pushing it and the most effective speed was 3-4 bottles per hand per move.
I liked the job but the employer was a massive cunt.
This was because PalPa, the company responsible for maintaining Finland’s recycling system was (and is) a corrupt heap of shit.
It’s owned by the largest breweries and they used it for keeping smaller and foreign companies out if business. You couldn’t get a right to use Finnish bottles –> You had to pay a steep punishment tax for using non-recyclable bottles.
They successfully argued that washing bottles from that many sources would be impossible to organize, so the EU required PalPa to start accepting crushable PET bottles, which are easy to produce without any active coöperation by PalPa.
PalPa(…tine?) was hoping that they could still somehow block this from happening, so they framed the change as Evil EU forcing Finland to stop washing bottles. And when the PET bottles were indeed accepted in the end, they dismantled the whole bottle washing system in Finland so that they wouldn’t be held accountable for their lies.
So, it’s the same thing that happened to our regional bus network (vakiovuorot), basically. And what’s currently happening to our railways.
Where is here?
Oops, sorr. Austria
Happens in multiple countries. Germany, Netherlands, Belgium I know for sure. Probably elsewhere too.
Putting more stuff in washable bottles than before happens in many places? Are you sure?
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In Finland the deposit for bottles of one litre or more have a deposit of 0,40 €.
(And what many foreigners don’t understand is that we are not anti-recycling, so it’s not a problem that the deposit is inside the prices you see in the shop. So, if you see 1,59 € as the price of a bottle of lemonade, 1,59 € is what you pay. Many countries have a system where the deposit is added to the price so that people would think more negatively about it and they’d sell more of the bottles with the text “NO DEPOSIT!!” on them, so people coming from those countries are easily confused by not having to add anything to the prices in their heads.)
Nun weiß ganz Deutschland, dass du hier bist
I’m in this picture and I don’t like it.
But, yeah, seems like such an obviously good idea and it works so well. Why can’t we do that?
The first time my cousins from FL visited Canada, it was July. They were surprised there was no snow. So, we took them over to the rec centre and they saw a small pile of snow out back. They were thrilled.
It was dumped out of a Zamboni.
Grew up in Ontario and it was always fun as a kid to grab some of the shaved ice behind rec centres to throw at your friends when it was like 33C out
My aunt is a teacher at one of the poorer schools in LA. She says every once in a while they’ll arrange a plow to bring a load of snow down from the mountains and dump it in the parking lot for the kids to play in it for the afternoon until it melts
Leaves.
Yes, tree leaves.
Each fall when they start changing color flocks of tourists come up to gawk at them.
This is what I was going to say.
In the late 1800s when Jasper Cropsey was exhibiting landscape paintings in the UK, folks didn’t believe that his colour palette was accurate
https://collections.brandywine.org/objects/2656/autumn-on-the-brandywine-river
Wait hang on, the UK has heaps of trees that go that colour every year
Painting is of a river in Pennsylvania. The artist painted it while there, then displayed it in the UK. Many who saw it, not being familiar with the fall colors of the northeast US, thought it was fake.
I know, I’m saying that the UK gets the same colours at the same time of year. It should not have been weird to that audience
You forget that the world was B/W until the sixties, give or take.
North American trees species have evolved to have more vibrant fall colors than European species.
So you’re basically proving that British guy’s point that yes, they are a different color but no-one believes it because they think they know what fall looks like in temperate climates.
Yup I live right near the Brandywine. PA gets beautiful fall colors! They’re also great along the Delaware up near the Water Gap (but I’m biased because the Delaware is my favorite river) :)
When I was a kid we hosted two Trinidadians as part of an exchange in the Autumn and they’d never seen the leaves falling - they were worried that all the trees were dying off. This isn’t a “stupid foreigner” gag, it was probably just the thing that shocked them the most. They loved the trains and the narrowboats.
They probably have foliage that always stays green until it dies.
So I can kinda understand where that sentiment is coming from.I had a similar experience with an exchange student who visited in february. She very worriedly asked why our trees didn’t have any leaves and was amazed when I said that just happens in winter and they come back.
I just made much the same comment!
One of the guys that came for our February wedding was truly alarmed at all the dead tress. I couldn’t figure out why he was saying that, but he was a tree guy so I went with it.
10 years later I figured it out. He assumed none of the trees dropped leaves because Florida. Some do, some don’t, some stay yellow all winter and drop in the spring. It’s not even consistent within species.
We visited DC in the fall last year. It took us close to 2 hours to walk from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial statue because my wife was taking pictures of all the trees along the way.
To be fair it’s very pretty. I get that one
Every region is different in that regard.
Maybe youre just numb to the view.Told a lady I had just moved here (NW Florida).
“Oh honey you’ll love it here! We have four seasons; green, green, green and brown.”
Man… I’m in east Tennessee.
Folks just roll up to look at the leaves… and I’m like.
Eh. Not much rain this year so they are pretty drab looking currently…
But you still see tons of people taking photos on their phones that they’ll never look at again. Haha
I just moved to New England and this will be my first fall here. My property is completely surrounded by 50’+ trees. I’m sure it will get old quick.
Especially if you need to take them up etc.
I grew up in Portsmouth, England. Some my friends would come to school from the Isle of Wight on the hovercraft service. We all thought the hovercraft was pretty cool, but I only recently found out that it’s the only commercially operated hovercraft in the whole world.
Is it still operating? For some reason I thought it stopped quite a while ago. Or maybe that’s the one that used to cross the channel.
Yeah, still running like normal: https://www.hovertravel.co.uk/.
Yes it is! Costs £20 if i remember correctly
I was in pompy 2 years ago and yes i found the hovercrafts cool. I didnt know that fact! Thanks! I wonder if my boyfriend from pompy knows that fact too.
Fratton is quite scary though ngl
I grew up in Gosport and enjoy the looks I get when describing that we needed to get a ferry across the harbour if we wanted to go to a club like Walkabout. I hear the overnight ferry stopped running so you’re screwed trying to get home late now.
There used to be one across the channel but it was discontinued some time ago. I took it once. It was cramped and noisy, but fast.
Lakes. My small city has 330 lakes. There are more lakes in Canada than the rest of the world combined.
Ontario has lakes bigger than some countries
I moved to the midwest USA 15 years ago and I still can’t get over the trees screaming at me. It’s deafening but no one seems to care.
The trees are silent where I come from
We have cicadas in Provence, but only when I moved to southern Japan did I understand the meaning of the adjective deafening. They must be a different species. I had to actually scream to my partner to be heard.
must be a different species
They are! Japanese cicadas are more shrill than the ones found in other parts of the world, and even the different subspecies within Japan have different frequencies they shrill at. I swear the cicadas in Okinawa were more ear piercing than the ones around Tokyo when we visited, but my family didn’t believe me :')
Sweet, appreciate the info
I live in Cincinnati and I care. I find the cicadas incredibly annoying. Not only the noise, they also leave their shells all over the place and walking down the sidewalk creeps me out. crunch crunch crunch
Em, what?
oh, riiiiiight. Did you know someone who moved from CA complained to the town hall open mic night in my town about them? As in “what will we do about the noise?”
Raccoons.
The tourists visiting Mount Royal park in Montréal are often charmed by the raccoons. Enough so that they feed them and some even let the raccoons climb on them. The city tries to warn people but they obviously ignore the signs. So now we have gangs of raccoons begging for food near the two most popular view points.
I go camping in provincial parks and the same seems to happen there. It’s obviously also locals doing this but, people feed the raccoons, they come back, they harass you for food, they can carry rabies, and it’s annoying as hell. I watch people hiking and camping in other countries, like the UK, and I’m constantly jealous that they can keep their food and cook near their tents. Doing this here will result in frequent annoying visits from raccoons (if not bigger animals).
For your consideration.
I’ve seen raccoons and white tail deer in a zoo in Mexico. They are both nuisance animals in the PNW. But then again I loved watching Mexican racoons everywhere (coati). Guess we all like seeing new and different animals.
Rabies. Once symptoms appear, the result is virtually always death.[1] The time period between contracting the disease and the start of symptoms is usually one to three months but can vary from less than one week to more than one year.[1]
Symptoms can include:
anxiety seizures confusion hyperactivity hallucinations strange behaviour and general agitation fear of water (hydrophobia) fear of fresh air or drafts of air (aerophobia)Once symptoms appear it’s too late, you are fucked
I hate Trash Pandas. But at least in the West Coast of NA I don’t have to worry about fucking the rabies. That shit scares the ever living shit out of me.
Exceptionally rare case below but still, holy fucking NOPE
Rabies with an incubation period of 19 years and 6 months.
G Iurasog, A Rosenberg, N Opreanu
A woman was bitten on the leg by a rabid dog in September 1945 and was admitted to hospital for antibiotic treatment, details of which were not available. In March 1965 she developed rabies, which began with pains at the site of the original bite. At autopsy no Negri bodies could be found, but there were inclusions in the cytoplasm and nuclei of the neurones of the diencephalon, glial cells and vascular endothelium. Rabies developed in rabbits inoculated with autopsy material. No history of a more recent animal bite could be obtained, and there was no rabies in the latter place of residence of the patient. The authors therefore conclude that this was a case of rabies with an incubation period of 19 years and 6 months. D. J. Bauer.
I’m lucky enough that I see these little guys on a regular basis.
The first time I went to London, the size of the Ravens caught me off guard. I couldn’t get enough of seeing those things. We only really see Grackles in South Texas that regularly and they’re half the size, so I’m sure I was the weird bird guy that day to many people.
Deer. They are so common in this area they practically press the walk button to walk across the street. “hi bob. You gonna eat some more grass today. Yup ok. See ya later.”
I’m originally from the Orlando area and worked for Disney for a while. Tourism folks there pass stories around and have their own folk tales of sorts. Your question reminds me of one of them.
Central Florida has anoles, little lizards, absolutely everywhere. A woman was working the front desk at a hotel, and a couple comes up to check in. She tells them the room number and hands then the key. A few minutes later the husband runs back up to the desk and tells her that “there’s an alligator in our room!” “An alligator?!” She replies and they both rush to the hotel room, where she finds the wife screaming and pointing at the couch. “The alligator is under there!” The front desk worker lifts up one end of the couch and spots a four inch green anole. She catches it and sets it outside.
OP, I’ve never been to the UK, but don’t you have hedgehogs? How common are they?
Not OP, but can confirm we have hedgehogs and they are adorable.
I typically see one about 4 times a week, no clue if its the same one or not, they all look pretty much the same.
Its very very very common to see them flattened in the roads though, which is a shame.
Hedgehogs are far less common than they used to be, unfortunately. I haven’t seen one for years. A friend who lives in a more suburban area has one living under their shed, and she (the hedgehog) is such a creature of routine that my friend’s family will often gather near the window to watch her potter around on her nightly walk
I nearly stepped on one the other day. They only really come out at night, and I was walking home across a dark park. You don’t see them very often, I think I’ve seen maybe 3-4 in my life.
Other wild animals like squirrels are super common. I’ve also seen plenty of foxes and sometimes badgers.
The anoles are one of the few things I miss about living in Florida. There are lizards here in Kentucky, but they’re more elusive.
I visited Tampa many years ago and I was the anole guy for the trip. I like reptiles and was completely elated to see them running around everywhere. My host for the trip didn’t get my excitement.
