Posted on 11/13/2013 9:34:38 AM PST by Responsibility2nd
A lot of people around the world have ideas of what America is like, possibly thanks to Hollywood, or their local news channels, and maybe from what they’ve heard from families and friends. But then, they came here, to the grand old United States and their minds exploded. Taken from Quora.
I am originally from Bangladesh and here are a few things that I find hard to explain to peeps back home.
- Fruits and vegetables are way more expensive than meat and poultry.
- That, generally speaking, the poor is more obese than the rich.
- A lot of couples adopt children, sometimes in spite of having their own, and treat them exactly like their own. (To me, this alone is a marker of a great people)
- By and large, people do not carry cash.
- That you address your boss (and some of your professors) by some abbreviated variation of their first name. And that applies to pretty much everyone, regardless of how much older they are than you.
- Parents can get arrested for physically punishing their children.
- Severe poverty, homelessness, etc, no matter how limited, actually exist. Even in America.
- A name as common and as easy to pronounce as mine is almost invariably incomprehensible to most Americans.
- America is literally HUGE. My home country is roughly the size of Florida, one of the fifty states.
- In spite of the society being openly hedonistic and liberal, the social norms and standards still have very strong conservative religious influences.
- People don’t really care about the FIFA World Cup even though USA qualifies.
- The importance of credit rating/ credit score.
- Return policy.
- The history behind Thanksgiving.
- Black Friday and the frenzy associated with it.
- Amazingly friendly, hospitable and helpful people. Yet, a very conveniently private lifestyle.
- That, American foreign policy is a very inaccurate reflector of public consensus.
- Grinding. The dance form.
- That you cannot purchase alcohol unless you are 21 but can purchase a gun if you are 18.
Met some folks in Britain that were planning a vacation here. They were going to start in New York and see all of he sights, national parks, other cities, etc. on the way to California ... in a week.
In a week? Boy,are they in for a big surprise.
I’ve always done quite a bit of research before I traveled and it always amazes me when people don’t.
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Interesting, too, that this foreign person knows there are “fifty states”, when our own president believes there are 58 (he said he had visited 57, and only had one more to visit).
The trip only spanned three states (Idaho, Nevada, and Arizona), but covered 1,100 miles, and it took us two days with the sight-seeing they wanted to do. We didn't even stop in Las Vegas, as I had to be back too soon to allow for it. We hit Phoenix, and the temperature there read 112 degrees. They didn't blink until the sign changed to 44 celsius. Then their jaws dropped.
I had a similar conversation, but it was with a gal that just got back from a trip to europe...she commented on how many languages people spoke. I just reminded her that if every state was a different country, we would speak many different languages also...she laughed and said “I never thought of it that way...”
Europeans were not kind to their horses, I guess.
It’s three very long days of hard driving straight through, lol.
I wasn’t even aware that there WAS a big tourist shopping mall in Boston.
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LOL.
Responsiblity2d just mentioned Walmart. I could add Target and many others. Without our extraordinary freedom of movement this homogenization would have been impossible. Indeed, with all that freedom of movement, IMHO, it probably would have been impossible not to have it.
Well, we're not as densely packed as in Europe, so you HAVE to have a car.
One of my medical students from Germany kept talking about how "ridiculous and huge" my Olds Delta 88 was.
Course he couldn't keep his big yapper shut about how "great" socialism was, either.
Responsiblity2d just mentioned Walmart. I could add Target and many others. Without our extraordinary freedom of movement this homogenization would have been impossible. Indeed, with all that freedom of movement, IMHO, it probably would have been impossible not to have it.
ROTFLMAO!
Many of those observations seem to be dated. America has changed and the expats’ home countries have changed. For example, just about everyone in the cities of India now carries web-enabled cell phones and/or tablets, even the moderately poor.
Europe has Auchan Hypermart. Every bit as ginormous as Target or Wal-Mart. Their “surprise” is short sighted.
Soccer will never be a major sport in America unless the average worker talks about it in the breakroom at work. In my close to forty years of full time work, I never heard soccer mentioned once by anybody at work. Or out of work for that matter. Their kids might play it in high school, and they might show the scores and videos on tv, but from my experience nobody really cares.
My wife and I took one of her sisters and bro-in-laws from England on a trip out west this year. They asked me approx. how many miles we’d be doing. When I told them about 6,000 they both gasped. The whole trip out and back came up to about 5,900.
From talking to by very liberal Brit in-laws I got the impression they think socialism is people caring for one another. They have a difficult time grasping that socialism, no matter how well intentioned, invariably leads to more and more control of government over individuals. Socialism basically infantilizes people. It takes away the ability of people to run their own lives and makes them more children than adults.
One thing that stuns by Brit in-laws is how orderly traffic is in the U.S. At least in most areas...I'm sure there are exceptions. I have the impression they get from American movies that every other driver is a psychopathic killer with an assault rifle on the passenger seat.
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