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.
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.
I got a squirrel took my apple away from my hand!
Jesus how strong was that squirrel
Fake news! That user “CatDogL0ver” is just is a dog and a cat using a keyboard. They’re just trying to discredit squirrels.
It was also absurdly obese.
Hey, just like many of our people! Yay, America!
Those poor lil things… I feel sad for them. :(
Had the same experience in Ann Arbor, MI. The next day I learned they have a squirrel feeding club and a kid walked around in the morning with granola bars throwing them out to a circle of 20 chubby squirrels
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.
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.
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
I wonder where you visited! Grey squirrels are rare where I’m from in the US, 90% brown in midwest
NYC and surroundings
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 :)
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.
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.
My wife is from the Philippines. Squirrels are a thing you have to visit the zoo the see.
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’d guess people from monkey countries feel the same way about them impressing us. They’re in similar niches and everything.
No squirrels? You from Greenland? Antarctica?
Israel
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…
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.
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.)
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.
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
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.
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Marble is expensive in places where there isn’t already a lot of it simply because it’s HEAVY.
But it also isn’t used in the fancy rich places simply because it’s expensive, it’s also because it’s beautiful.
I feel like it’s 80% the expense. If most rock was like that everybody would be looking for boring sandstone.
Do rich people in Greece import sandstone?
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.
It wouldn’t surprise me if fancy people in Greece would use granite instead.
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.
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.
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!
They probably have foliage that always stays green until it dies.
So I can kinda understand where that sentiment is coming from.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.
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 rake them up etc.
To be fair it’s very pretty. I get that one
Michigan, or New York?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 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/.
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
Sudbury, Ontario?
Yup. Geographically not north, but we get labelled north anyway.
Sudbury is my closest costco location. Lol
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
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?”
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
To answer OP’s question, I’m American but spent a few years in the UK. Things that fascinated me included:
- How green it is (being from Texas this was the first thing that stood out to me)
- The shear amount of history that is just everywhere (I remember eat lunch at a park and reading a sign about how it was the site of a huge battle during the war of the roses)
- Pubs (man I miss going to my local. We really don’t have 3rd places in the US anymore)
Yes, the amount of ancient history anywhere across the pond is fascinating. You’re walking in the same place as people from books and movies. I guess that we’re writing somewhere near the beginning of the local historical record is interesting in it’s own way, but there’s just not as much to say about it.
When I was a kid I got in the local library and looked at their copies of the maps of our city going back maybe 2000 years. A few things had been there that long, the high street and the cathedral, couple of other places. You could see how the town had grown, and sometimes contracted - it got hit hard a few times by plague, fire, and war. The maps didn’t go back further but the place had been occupied much longer, way before the Romans came.
Hmm, cathedral contemporaneous with the New Testament happening in the first place. Nimes?
It could be Greece too, I guess. Or maybe you’re rounding up, there’s more options then.
Another option is I’m full of shit! I just looked it up, it is Worcester cathedral and was founded in 680. I think what I put in my comment was a childhood memory that I somehow never questioned.
That’s still pretty good, Europe was yet to really recover from the collapse of Rome at that point. I’ll just call it rounding up.
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.
I’ve eaten armadillo (yes, it tastes like chicken). This was before I found out they can apparently spread leprosy to humans.
Only the nine banded ones. I had to do some research on dillos when I had to trap a couple under my house. Now they are the more common ones in the southern US, but there are so many more types. Like check out this cute little fucker named the pink fairie armadillo
Completely leprosy free!
Edit to add: But please don’t eat it!
But please don’t eat it!
In my defense, in addition to finding out after the fact that armadillos carry leprosy, I found out that the one I ate was roadkill.
Omg that sounds foul! I to Uber in a small town and some rider saw a road kill whitetail with it’s legs starting to create an obtuse angle it was so bloated, and seriously said we should pick it up.
First, I’ve been hunting before and cleaned my own deer once (but don’t plan on doing it again unless it’s the collapse of the food supply chain)
Second, that being said I’m not opposed to it cause I understand a healthy population needs occasional culling of the weak and/or diseased.(I know that may sound heartless, but it’s legit how nature works)
And lastly, who the fuck looks at a animal that’s been dead for an unknown amount of time and thinks “dinner”‽
same, but I already knew
Fuck these things! I moved into an old wood cabin on the edge of town with a small crawl space. Two of these little fuckers got underneath the house and sounded like they were carrying a heavy rock, scraping against other rocks(r as one fever dream showed me, a tiny coffin). Also you can’t bait them cause they only dig up and eat live grubs. So you have to study their movements and set up some 2x4 walls to guide them into a trap. And they can jump like you wouldn’t believe! When I released one of them out in the boondocks near a creek, the little fucker reared back and launched itself four feet straight up in the air to clear a fence.
I thought you were talking about ravens and got thoroughly confused.
There’s a place in San Antonio called Cowboys Dance Hall that occasionally has live armadillo races. They’re adorable when they run.
I want to hug it. Would it be wise to hug it? I don’t care I still want to hug it.
Does he have a tail or am I seeing the armadillo’s dick there?
I live in the Canadian prairies.
One time I was flyin’ down the highway and I noticed a man with car parked on the shoulder, staring out into a farmer’s field of flowering Canola.
I stopped because I could think of no reason other than he’s had car trouble, and is staring off into the distance trying to figure out WTF he’s gonna do now.
He explained to me that he wasn’t having car troubles, that he was on a visit from Hong Kong and it’s the first time he’s ever traveled outside. He told me that from the structure of the city and sky rise density, he’d basically never seen a patch of sky or open land. The biggest patch of sky that he’d ever seen would be about the size of a 2 packs of cigarettes held at arms length.
Woah.
And here we have the joke that the terrain is so flat and monotone that you can watch your dog run away for 7 hours.
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.”
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.
