WEARING SHOES INDOORS
It’s not the healthcare that bothered me most, although it did.
It’s the cognitive dissonance around the unavailability of healthcare in order to avoid anxiety over the fact that a traffic accident can bankrupt you with no relief. Ignoring the risk takes some serious mental gymnastics and basic math failure to get there, but when brought up in this environment - where a TV show about a teacher who has to cook and sell meth to get hospital money is actually a plausible plot where no one actually examines the mercenary care at all and the main character just pays it - it’s just a part of their existence.
Not understanding that few other people love like this - cubans don’t live like this - is absurd.
Tipping
Crocs
The flags on the cars.
In many of the responses I can tell which part of the US they visited by the things they list as weird. It’s funny that they think the entire country is like some particular city or area.
Juxtaposition of pearl-clutching Puritanism w/ a 21 drinking age against beer available in a 7-11.
Pick a fucking lane
Seems to have deliberately taken the opposite path of anything British:
- Drive on the wrong side of the road
- The light and power switches are upside down
- Weights & measures. Imperial? Ha!
- Screw your English dictionary. Ima put z’s everywhere, drop the letter u and randomly pronounce words like buoy so you think there’s an animal in the water over there
It kinda makes me laugh to think about it as just anti-British 🤣
Well I’ve just read every comment on this thread and I’m relieved to realize that our recitation of our National Pledge of Allegience at every opportunity is in-fact seen as totally normal.
I’ll try to avoid stuff you know is weird.
- Adjectives. You can’t just have a thing. It has to have an adjective. For example: Milk. I wanted to buy milk. I get to the milk section, and there’s no such thing. There’s x milk and y milk and about a dozen other variants. Where is the basic milk (it turns out, I wanted “4% milk”) in this damned place?
- Fresh produce. In fairness you’ve gotten loads better on this one after subsequent visits, but beyond some basic staples like potatoes, carrots, corn etc it was really limiting what fruit and vegetables you could get in the supermarket. Also: baby carrots are weird.
- Your cheese is radioactive yellow. Cheese is not supposed to be that colour - but you seem expect it to be for some reason, so your producers add yellow colouring to their cheese.
- Your eggs are weird. I’m not sure what yous guys do to to them, but it’s like you blast away half the shell and are left with a porous super-white textured inner shell. They need to be refrigerated and last a fraction of the time they’d last if you just left them alone and sold them as they are laid.
- Your bread tastes weird. Maybe it’s sugar or preservatives in it, I don’t know. Bread is meant to have a really short ingredients list like flour, water, salt yeast and maybe a touch of oil and sugar. Take a look at the ingredients on your bread and it’s 5 lines long.
- Portions! Your food portions are ludicrous. I’d much rather pay half the price for half as much food as they offer on the menu.
- Money. You have this weird unconscious pecking order thing in your culture where you value people more based on their bank balance. You show a weird unconscious level of respect to someone who is rich. And similarly, unconsciously look down on someone poorer than you. Not in a mean way - just as a “I’m better than this person” way that is hard to quantify. You are aware at some level roughly how rich everyone you deal with is. I see this trait far less in people under 20. I hope there’s a cultural shift on this one, because money on its own is a weird way to measure someone’s worth.
- Your police are run by the local counties. I think your schools also? I know you have state and federal police also, but most places only have police and schools at those levels.
- I’ll mostly stay clear of health, because you know your health system is weird. But I will say that it’s weird that very few of your hospitals are run by government. They’re mostly run for profit. Health is meant to be a government service.
- Outside a few cities, you barely have public transport of any sort. LA is a mega metropolis, and it’s train network is a joke for that level of population - something like 100 stations for 18 million people?
- You have no idea what’s going on. Most of you couldn’t name the UK Prime Minister (this one has been hard to keep track of, in fairness), the German Chancellor or any of the G20 leaders aside from USA and maybe Canada/China. You don’t know about geopolitics beyond whatever you guys are doing. Your world news is literally stuff USA is involved in.
- I’ll finish on a weird one: you guys are lovely. This may because I’m white and have an exotic accent to you guys, but almost everyone I’ve ever encountered from the USA in or out of the country has been wonderful. You don’t seem to think of your fellow countrymen you meet as ‘good’ by default. There’s a lot less connection and respect to each other than other nations I’ve been to.
Shoes. Indoors, in your own house, on your furniture?!
First thing I (another Canadian) noticed when we switched from the car to a shuttle to the airport (crossed the border by car to take a flight to Florida) was that there were multiple people on that shuttle that were at least as big as the most obese person I’d ever seen in person up to that point.
Even though our cultures overlap quite a bit, there’s something different in that aspect.
Shoes in the house
Only place I’ve live where this is taboo is Chicagoland. And that’s to be expected with the muddy snow.
Here in the South we usually don’t have carpets, no reason to take our shoes off.
Ever walked into a public toilet? Well, that piss is now all over your floor at home.
As is spit from the street. Remnant dog poo, bird poo, etc etc.
Take your shoes off. Please.
Thinking that there is no reason to take your shoes off is the most American thing in the world. There is poop, pee, puke, pollen, pollution, parvo and prions out there, among other things.
In Japan the entryway of a house is usually a step lower than the rest of the house. It is considered part of the outside, where the shoes stay, as well as all of the dirty things from the outside that are on the shoes. And symbolically, your troubles from the outside world are not brought into the house either. It’s a major faux pas to wear your shoes in the house past this step and bring all that shit inside. Interesting contrast
yep, living in San Francisco made me a shoes off indoors guy, for every p you listed*
*except for prions. mmmm, delicious prions
It’s not carpets that I take my shoes off for - it’s so I don’t track public bathroom and outside street debris into my house.
Yeah. No carpets, dogs coming in and out. I only take mine off if they are legit muddy, it’s a lost cause, I am not going to make everyone take off their shoes. We aren’t eating off the floor. I am also willing to sit on the ground outside, turn cartwheels, etc. Really just not that paranoid about dirt.
Up north I understand everyone has carpets.
Some places there is much more sitting on the floor.
It seems situational to me.
Nobody is putting their shoes on the furniture though, they are putting them on the floor.
I’ve been wearing moccasins indoors for decades.
Sooooo comfortable!
As soon as I get home, all of my outside items are exchanged for comfy inside items. It’s like a physical form of masking.
Yeah, I just got home and switched to loose running shorts (it’s hot here at the moment). Why would I wanna stay wearing jeans when I can relax?
As an American this is gross to me too
I grew up in a home where we just never thought about wearing, or not wearing, shoes in the house. Like, we obviously didn’t track mud all over the place if our shoes were that dirty, but if we were wearing our shoes inside, nobody said anything or cared, it was just whatever. Married a Kenyan who put her foot down and was like, “Are you crazy?” It’s apparently a big thing elsewhere in the world. In Kenya alot of roads aren’t paved, things get dusty, and it’s just common sense that you don’t walk all over the house with dirty shoes, so I get it from that perspective.
Yeah that’s a huge part of it. Few Americans (me included) frequently walk outdoors on anything but sidewalks or paved roads in their normal day to day travels. When I go hiking I take those shoes off before I get back into the car, but my daily driver boat shoes which rarely touch actual dirt? I don’t have a problem leaving those on in most places, my house included. Same I imagine for Americans where their job is construction or something where your shoes are dirtied, talk the work shoes off when you get home, but it’s fine to wear more casual shoes
Do I just live in a weird bubble? I live in the US and I am rarely at someone’s house who doesn’t remove their shoes nowadays. I certainly grew up wearing shoes at home, but that’s changed significantly over the past 20 years or so.
Anecdotally this is also my experience. I grew up with shoes off in the house, but even up to the early 00’s it seemed to be a cultural outlier in the US.
These days I think the majority of people who I go over to visit have a shoes off rule. Seems like the split is between the older half of millennials and up shoes on, and younger half and down shoes off for the most part.
Oh man YES
That is always a weird one for my brain to work around.
As an American, it drives me crazy. Then there’s those heathens who lay on the bed with shoes on!
I wear my street shoes inside except winter. Both my work boots come off regardless. Also have house slippers. But I’ll be damned if me or someone put their shoes on a bed, or even a couch for that matter.
Both my work boots come off regardless.
No one asked, but now I need to know: when would you only take ONE work boot off?
I have two sets, one summer and one winter. Though not sure why put it that way lol
What shoes are those? Those are dope
Thanks!!
urp….i think I may vomit…
American of asian descent, absolutely ludicrous! It would perhaps be more forgiviable if all of the floors were furnished in hardwood and tile, but they’ll wear shoes even on carpet! Immediately after entering one of these heathen’s houses, I long for the soft, lucious, kempt, carpets of my own abode, compared to the repuslive, stiff, flat and even crunchy carpets of my white friends. Frankly it offends me, deeply. I must slap my friends silly before entering my home to remove their filthy clogs.
That was a joy to read.
I’m sorry to tell you I am one of those people, as is my family. Every so often I have a moment of clarity about it, but it doesn’t last long.
Your existence is nauseating
Your bread is sweet. Like, all of it. And not just like, pleasantly so like a French brioche, but almost candy-like. Wonder Bread is one of the worst offenders, coming in at 5g added sugars per 100g: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Wonder-Bread-Classic-White-Sandwich-Bread-Sliced-White-Bread-20-oz/37858875?classType=REGULAR&athbdg=L1600
From Austria:
The amount of plastic waste you produce.
Every shopping trip you get (single use) plastic bags, every food item is packaged individually. Even your plates are often times made from plastic, as is the cutlery (sometimes).
All those plastic cups in every restaurant - it’s disgusting.
It’s insanity.
Also: general waste is labeled “landfill” in some places.
