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.

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[–] 109 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (17 children)

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.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 56 points 1 year ago* (9 children)

    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

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    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

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    username checks out!

    how did you get them?

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  • 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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    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

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    Urban foxes are in every city. Foxes and coyotes. You just dont see them often.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    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

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  • [–] 106 points 1 year ago (24 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I've seen deer just wander through my yard in town

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • 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.)

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 94 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    These fellas

    On the flipside, when I was in Japan some old guy mocked me for taking a photo of a no littering sign.

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  • [–] 39 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Hahaha that sign is so charming though

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  • [–] 93 points 1 year ago

    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...

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  • [–] 79 points 1 year ago (15 children)

    Depositing bottles.

    Put them into a machine, and it gives you money back 🤯

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  • [–] 55 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    So, it's the same thing that happened to our regional bus network (vakiovuorot), basically. And what's currently happening to our railways.

    Don't forget healthcare and dental. Kids don't get free dental anymore?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    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.)

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  • [–] 64 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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

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  • [+] 56 points 1 year ago (7 children)
  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Marble is expensive in places where there isn't already a lot of it simply because it's HEAVY.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    But it also isn't used in the fancy rich places simply because it's expensive, it's also because it's beautiful.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    I feel like it's 80% the expense. If most rock was like that everybody would be looking for boring sandstone.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Do rich people in Greece import sandstone?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    Good question!

    I would guess not widely, just because rich people get around, and standards of luxury are more interconnected than that.

    In the past, you have things like spices being worth their weight in gold in Europe, and cheap in India. Or how the Inuit prized wood because it didn't grow anywhere they lived. Aluminum was a luxury metal originally, and there's stories about Napoleon using it for cutlery as a step up from silver.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    I grew up in a place that looks like Greece, but the rocks are red.

    Same thing - amazing mesas and red rock plateaus and craggy mountains? See it every day. Meh. Crystal blue seas? I can't stop starting and being amazed that something that color is real.

    Though, I have noticed that very flat and forested places give me a sense of claustrophobia. When you're used to being able to see 20-50 miles all the time, not being able to see anything more than 200 feet away is strange. It makes the world seem so small and trite.

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  • [–] 49 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 45 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Lakes. My small city has 330 lakes. There are more lakes in Canada than the rest of the world combined.

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