Going out in public in your pajamas.
How difficult it is to find fresh produce in small shops (food deserts)
How much fat is in all the meat.
How old and badly maintained many of the roads and bridges are (I am from Africa, so that says something)
The levels of national arrogance.
Going out in public in your pajamas.
I have seen this on very few occasions, and each time, the pajama-wearing individual is very obviously only out in public so they can either stock up at the liquor store or meet their meth dealer. I don’t think this is common.
This was in early 2000 New York and Washington DC. Spent about a month there and saw it daily.
Once upon a time not long ago
when people wore pyjamas and lived life slow…checks out.
It’s common at the high school level. It’s a byproduct of pandemic lockdowns.
I see that with adults, and WAY before the pandemic. First time I saw that, Bush Jr. was in his first term
I had coworkers in the early 2000s who would do this, working in a white collar profession, and pretty sure they weren’t alcoholics or doing (hard) drugs.
That’s crazy. We couldn’t even wear polo shirts then and before 9/11 we had to wear ties.
They didn’t wear pyjama’s to work, but they did wear them out of the house to go buy snacks or such. Also, a number of us didn’t normally wear suits or ties to work, especially if we were technical and not sales or administrative. This might have been due to
notbeing in Canada. I did a few weeks in Toronto, and a number of guys followed the same rule.Edit: the most frustrating programming error.
I used to see it in the States maybe 15 years ago but I also saw it in the UK (Liverpool) about a decade ago.
Ive done it before because im ill as fuck and need to go get food so I survive, I dont hate it.
I do it regularly because it’s comfortable and I do not give a single shit about what anyone thinks.
Go to Walmart (not the neighborhood Walmart, the super Walmart) and look around
I have seen thqt zero times.
But tbf I don’t live in a big metropolitan area.
Sometimes it varies by neighborhood.
HOA gaming
I don’t really ever leave my house and I live in loungewear. I ain’t changing just to go to the store. That’s a ridiculous waste of time and energy. I don’t think that most Americans care what other people think about their clothes.
Juxtaposition of pearl-clutching Puritanism w/ a 21 drinking age against beer available in a 7-11.
Pick a fucking lane
You could probably sell Americans on lowering the drinking age in many States, but there’s some big legal hurdles and pretty much everyone agrees we’ve got bigger problems to deal with first.
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.
Guns. Paying for being medically treated / not having a proper healtcare system. Weird relationship to Socialism.
Weird relationship to Socialism
Cold war really messed US up, mentally
Yea, somehow understandable.
Donald Trump. I mean seriously WTF?
See also Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
The fact anyone is down voting this as if Biden, and Kamala aren’t currently funding and supporting a genocide baffles me. TBH tho its not a weird American thing to have Trump since most of europe is going far right nationalist too now. The only weird American part is we have 2 pro-genocide parties and 0 anti-genocide ones.
It’s more like Biden isn’t mentally competent and Harris is running for President with no primary votes.
britain got boris, and the cabbage lady, so… I’d say we’re doing ok
Depends on which kind you’re talking about. Cinnamon raisin breads and similar are sweet because they’re basically deserts (desserts?).
Standard sandwich loaf is sweet because your weak foreign palate cannot handle the background level of high fructose corn syrup in all American food. It gives us the strength and vitality to enforce pax Americana, build our secret space colonies, and invent all new world technology.
2 S’s for dessert - you always want a second helping. How I always remember that one :p
As an American, yeah that’s what gets me. I just don’t understand it and I hate it
Not to be confused with sweetbread (pancreas)
Your public toilets are not private. There should never be a gap around the door. The height should be above what any reasonable person would grow to, and the lower height of the door should hide the person’s feet on the toilet unless you crouch down. It’s weird and very off putting to use one
They say it’s to prevent crime. Same as a lot of the awful things we come to expect. I’m willing to bet it doesn’t do anything noticeable with respect to crime.
It’s to prevent the expectation of privacy. We’ve all been trained to accept that we are being spied on, even when we shit.
I, too, commit most of my crimes from inside of a public toilet.
Hahaha. I think when they say crimes, I think they mean doing drugs and having sex. So largely nothing actually harmful unless the person passes out.
My favorite internet video on the subject: https://youtu.be/WlP9aJnzyZw
Right?! A country that’s so prudish and worried about nudity, and yet they observe each other on the toilet? I feel like the whole transgender-bathroom discussion would be mostly gone if they had normal toilets with privacy.
This is changing! More and more places in the western US are going to euro-style stalls, or fully gender neutral bathrooms that are entirely walled in. Much, much better. I can’t speak for the other parts of the US.
I was fascinated by glass stalls in Greece. I’ve never seen those before (opaque glass, but still, you could make out shapes). Lots of glass in general, such as highway soundproof barriers, balconies, etc. Much more so than I’m used to seeing. We tend to use a lot more metal or sculpted concrete.
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.
- 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.
This might be dependent on state but any place I’ve ever lived has had 3 kinds, state police, county “sherrifs department” police and town/city police. To hear theres a part of the US with sherrifs department police is odd to me, usually the state police would take that role in rural areas without their own police department in my experience.
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?
you guys are out there buying NULL milk??
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.
american cheese or cheese more generically? I assume more generically but i’ve seen this mentioned a few times and not specified lol.
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.
“So what’s the deal with washing and refrigeration? Soon after eggs pop out of the chicken, American producers put them straight to a machine that shampoos them with soap and hot water. The steamy shower leaves the shells squeaky clean. But it also compromises them, by washing away a barely visible sheen that naturally envelops each egg.”
huh, basically just seems like a different approach to solving the problem. Prevention of disease and what not.
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.
schools are run locally, though they all adhere to state standards. Sometimes it depends on the schools, some of them are run by the state directly, with a local school board, others are private.
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.
is this true? there are a lot of non profit hospitals, i can’t think of any “for profit” hospitals off the top of my head though. https://www.aha.org/statistics/fast-facts-us-hospitals
i did find this stat, which appears to show that there are more non profit hospitals.
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?
the obvious answer here is that it’s not for 18 million people. Public transit is almost never intended to get 100% of society from one place to another. It’s just to relocate mass traffic from the roads to something more efficient.
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.
in our defense, Britain is basically the size of a small state… So with local politics alone we’re basically dealing with the entirety of the EU, and probably more. Also, we don’t really live next to anywhere exciting, so world news isn’t really super relevant to us. We have canada up north, they exist, we’re friendly. Mexico to the south, we’re relatively friendly too, but they have an organized crime problem, and beyond that it’s sort of just outside of our bounds.
Canada and mexico are considered “domestic” policy for us lol.
Eggs look like this:
They don’t need to be washed with hot water and soap, they’re perfectly good as they are.
Sorry about the hospital thing. By “for-profit”, I meant you had to pay to go there. That’s completely alien to everyone in the first world. We have private hospitals as well, and yep: lots of them are (or claim to be) non-profit also.
Actually you’re not wrong about for profit hospitals here. Many of them are getting acquired by private equity firms(look into PE acquisitions across this country it will make you sick) and those are for profit hospitals.
from what i saw when i looked into the egg washing thing. It’s two different solutions to the same problem. The same problem ultimately being unsafe eggs. From what i can recall the europeans generally treat chickens against them, whereas the US generally treats eggs against them (by washing them)
presumably the US does it because either, we started doing it, and it worked, or it’s just more flexible. I know japan ended adopting it after they got a particularly bad batch of infected eggs causing a pretty bad health spook. Other than that i don’t think it’s happened anywhere else.
Sorry about the hospital thing. By “for-profit”, I meant you had to pay to go there. That’s completely alien to everyone in the first world. We have private hospitals as well, and yep: lots of them are (or claim to be) non-profit also.
yeah fair enough, it just bothers me when people say for profit when it’s literally not lol. It’s getting money in either scenario, it’s just taxes from one, and people who pay for insurance and operations directly in the other so.
it turns out, I wanted “4% milk”
As a lifelong American, I don’t think we have 4% milk (reliably). Growing up we had Skim, 2% and Whole. Looking it up Whole is defined as 3.5%
I did look up a local store online and I was able to find it, but not universally at every store.
You’re right, of course - I heard the same stuff referred to as “whole milk”. But the only thing you’re correcting about the wider point is the appropriate adjective. Which I find very funny. 😀
It’s interesting that you picked this one out. I thought the money one in particular was going to be a controversial take.
is the appropriate adjective
I just found it interesting that the thing you were looking for, most Americans wouldn’t have heard of. It makes me wonder why America has at least 3 milks.
If we ignore the 3.5% v 4% distinction and assume what we call Whole Milk, you just call Milk; what do you call Skim Milk? Or 2% Milk? And if you don’t have them, why do we?
As for the money question, I was curious to see if other non-Americans felt the same. I agree that there is a subset of people who believe that. That subset may be quite large, but I’m not sure how it’s perceived from an outsiders perspective. If you ask me, I don’t think it’s common, but I imagine some loud folks may make it appear that way. But I also acknowledge I’m an American in America, so maybe I don’t notice it.
Low/no fat milk, which is not healthier but is marketed as being so, is quintessentially American
There’s a health food craze in the US that stemmed out of rampant body shaming. Which might be largely because of American portion sizes. And they think that nutritional fat makes you fat. It doesn’t. Excessive calories make you fat. And even that has caveats, but it’s the best rule of thumb.
When did we start splitting milk? I know part of it is to make cream and high fat stuff while repurposing the skimmed off grass water. ::Googles:: WWII as a means of selling the byproduct of butter. Okay. Then in the 50s physicians started calling it health food despite the fact that the fat is used in your body during the digestion of many fat soluble vitamins such as A, D, E, and K, and thus skim milk is pretty close to the opposite of health food.
And the money thing is kind of rampant. It’s a big reason why things with larger price tags, like Rolex watches, are thought to more impressive by Americans than equivalent or better watches. Rolexes do have a very high quality, but then the mark up on top makes it strictly something I do not respect, and others do not share that opinion with me. Same for a lot of things.
In Australia and New Zealand: we have skim milk, and call 2% milk “Hi-Lo” - sometimes I see it branded “lite milk”. Then there’s regular milk. It has 4% fat, but you need to read the fine print on the side of the bottle to learn that. I’ve heard it called “full cream milk”, but usually in a cafe setting when ordering coffee.
My brother in the USA had something called half-and-half in his fridge. I think that one was 8%? You guys would know better than I. We don’t have whatever it is.
Half-and-half is supposed to be “half milk, half cream” and is used primarily in coffee instead of heavy cream.
Use it for cheese sauces as well! They come out creamy and silky.
If you want a sauce that just won’t break, add a single slice of the singles cheese, or 1/8 tsp of sodium citrate if you can find it, to 8 cups of cheese sauce. It won’t change the flavor or color, but will create a silky smooth sauce that doesn’t break like nacho cheese sauce.
Sodium citrate is an absolute game changer for cheese sauces.
Huh, I’m Australian and have never heard of hi-lo milk.
Full cream and light are the two most popular kinds where I am.
Also, you can’t have a milk discussion in Australia without mentioning extra dollop
3,5% milk is also the standard milk here in central europe and it says so on the packaging. People call it simply “milk”, but it clearly says 3,5% milk on the branding.
Whole milk also often called “Vitamin D Milk”
You got something against vitamin D, buddy??
We’re not neighbors with 43 countries, so we don’t have as much immediate exposure to everything going on around those countries. For one, because it’s not going on around us, like it is for you. That said, I thought I had you with the Prime Minister comment. Of course it’s Boris Johnson. Doh! It seems you’ve had 4 prime ministers in 2 years? What’s going on with that? Like I said, we don’t really get exposure to what is happening over there, so unless we specifically go looking for it, I guess we’re out of the loop. We know what’s going on in Mexico and Canada though.
I just sort of assume my instance gives away my location - I’m in Australia, not the UK. Not that we can talk, we also churned through about 5 prime ministers in five years a while back.
But I could still talk about any number of issues going on around the world, because our news covers topics around the world. Yours doesn’t. It’s too busy talking about your election and recently a hurricane. Which I know about as it was in our news.
That’s not a criticism, I actually sought out world news while I was there, and there just weren’t any local sources of it.
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.
Others have written on this far more eloquently than I have, and so I will use their words to help explain this.
‘It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but might as well be.’ It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: ‘if you’re so smart why ain’t you rich?’ There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.
- Kin Hubbard
Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
In fairness for number 11, many Americans can’t even name their own government officials, expecting to know about other countries is a tall order.
#8: Police
State police enforce state level laws, and Federal agencies enforce federal laws.
The whole semi-autonomous thing. If a state and the Feds both have their own laws against something they could each try to arrest somebody, but there could also be a situation where one might not have a law while the other one does. For example , weed is still illegal under Federal law. The Federal government has mostly chosen not to enforce these laws, but it could. Many states have legalized weed to varying degrees.
So there could be a situation where somebody is smoking weed in a state that has legalized it. The state police have no power to arrest that person, but the Feds do.
I’m sure this has all made it more confusing.
I’ll try to address some of this, as I’m able. 🙂
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Yes, many many milks, we can’t agree on what is best. Personally I like a quality almond milk, for its nutrients & no sugars and huge bonus it’s shelf stable. Great for emergencies.
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I think the dearth of fresh produce is related to Americans not doing a lot of cooking. Most Americans have a simpler diet, and the stores need to concentrate on a number of things they know will sell. Baby carrots are actually awesome, you’re going to appreciate this – IIRC baby carrots are an innovative way to reduce food waste, sell crop. A farmer had ugly, misshapen, perhaps slightly molded or otherwise undesirable carrots. But most of it was good! So they cut off the bad parts & whittle it down to a nice, uniform, attractive shape & size. Baby carrots were born! Kids like them, they’re ‘snackable’…idk, I like them & I like the green effort.
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Yes, food dyes are thrown into everything. RFK recently did a little rant about the yellow dye, some coal runoff chemical. He’s absolutely right, it’s not cool. I always say you go back 200 years & some people were starving, food of any kind was great. Now we throw red dye into ketchup solely because the ketchup isn’t red enough. Disgusting.
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Natural eggs have some waxy layer on it, a protective layer. So your eggs look dirtier but are actually healthier, can withstand low/no refrigeration. IIRC. Our eggs have that layer removed, they’re required by law to be ‘washed’. Yes, I also think it’s bullshit.
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It is definitely the sugar & preservatives.
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As our bellies have grown, so has everything else. If you find old houses with old cabinets & old plates, you’ll find the dinner plates are much smaller than we have today! We have been programmed to consume. Search ‘dinner plates have gotten bigger’ and read for yourself.
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Yes, our police forces get down to counties. Towns. Idk, I would say that this should provide a more personal & immediate presence. Also in the American spirit, keeping these matters fractured & separate (but also working together, and deferring to increasing levels of authority as needed) allows for the most freedom. You don’t like how things are run in this town? Well move to another one. Same with the states. I see people moving towns because they want a better school for their kids. It allows for choice.
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Yeah, pretty much. TBF, though, our brains can only process so much. And what can we do about the European stuff, anyway?? We’ve got our jobs, maybe our families, our homes, 334M fucking people of our own with various beliefs scattered across 50 diverse states, heavy taxation without representation (hint, hint), our own problems…then somebody comes up to you…“Did you hear what happened in Fuckistan this morning? 🥺” NO! 😂🙃
Thankfully, with the internet, we can look into any world events we want to & educate ourselves that way. I do, I am politically more involved than most. But no, I cannot name current ministers, chancellors, presidents… I hear their position & that’s enough for me. Not my monkeys, not my circus, you handle yours & I’ll handle mine.
12 . Thanks! I think at heart we’re very cordial people generally speaking. But onto that second, contradictory part: I absolutely agree. I live in a generally good area, but I also see a lot of…other…people. There’s a saying, people were a lot more polite & considerate when duelling was legal. Looking around, I think things have become far too ‘civilized’, the people too soft & dumb, our food as you’ve pointed out is poisoned, mental & physical illnesses abound, the people haven’t seen real hard times, there is no clear & present danger to unite & fight so they make up stupid things to get offended by & fight each other, they’re protected from the natural consequences of their actions…I see it. Often. This & more culminates in disrespect & disconnects. Unlike other nations, partly because of our freedoms & partially because our legal system lacks balls, we tolerate a lot of bullshit behavior. As they say, if you tolerate something, expect more of it.
As an American, I kinda assumed that subconscious rich/poor thing comes into play with tourists. We “know” how much it costs to come visit this country and we really do want to make it as pleasant as possible, partially because most of us really do love the place even though it has problems, and partially because we want to be a “good value” for their money.
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Being overly fake nice because you want a tip. Tbh I’d be more inclined to tip you if you left me alone and stopped talking to me.
The whole tipping thing in USA is weird. Everyone wants a tip, it’s entirely random (as a non-American) how much tip to give. Just pay your staff a wage they can actually live on ffs.
As an American I agree it’s fucking weird. Tips should be for exceptional service and not an obligation.
Parts of Greece apparently also do tips. Is that new? Seems like it’s leeching into Europe :/
There’s actually a loose set of rules to it. Im not sure where the specific numbers came from, but 22% of the bill as a tip is considered “excellent service”, 18% or so is considered “mid” or “acceptable” service, and anything below that is a sliding scale of how bad you think they did. 0% is either you being rude and/or saying “i dont believe in tips”, but giving a $0.01 tip is basically saying “fuck you, you piece of shit,” (because fishing out a penny or writing it in takes more effort than opting out).
Yeah but how do you consult those rules? How often are they updated? How do you get notified of updates?
The fact that there are no answers to these questions and therefore everyone is working with mismatching rule sets makes the whole thing useless. You can be totally well meaning and still piss off a server because somehow you don’t know what the currently acceptable magic number is.
I recently visited the states for the first time in a decade and didn’t find out until afterwards that 15% is now considered by some people to be “low”. Sorry everyone who I tipped, I shafted you without realizing it. 🤷♂️
We don’t even get this memo. I thought it was still 15, 18, and 20. And I’m wholey against mandatory tipping, but always do so because I don’t want the underpaid staff to starve. I have enough friends in food service who can barely pay their rent with multiple roommates.
Those numbers used to be 12, 15 and 18. They’ve increased, but I’m not sure why, since they’re percentages. They keep up with increased food prices automatically. Not sure why tip growth has outpaced food prices.
It may also be my region. Its always been this way for me for at least the last 15 years or so.
Now, those squarepay terminals that suggest 30% tips or similar can eat rocks.
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.
It is not, but it’s also hard to notice as a tourist. I’ve learnt that from here
I can’t tell you how much humor I found in this response to that comment. 😁
Well… not my culture, I guess 🤷♀️
It was made to sell flags
Yeees, totally normal and culty at all…
Living in Florida I feel it’s more common to see publicly. Recently join a “Walk for Heart Health” type event and it started with the national anthem and pledge. Local army ROTC high schoolers also came by a did… some form of rifle performance. This all was to “kick off” the event and most people had hands on their heart type stuff the whole time. Not to mention the city has “Land of the Free” flags on all the light polls in that plaza and it was interesting just HOW MANY people in florida wear those 1776 shirts or the “F around and find out” shirts still.
Do you ?
At a point I was travelling a lot to the US, the only time I heard the national anthem was before a Rodeo in Texas, and I never saw someone reciting the "pledge of allegience
Mostly in schools, so not something a traveller is likely to see
I only really saw that in grade school. And it was a Red Scare thing. Super culty, but so is all the McCarthy stuff.
Sizes for clothes, drinks and fries are all bigger than in Brazil. A medium size shirt in the US is easily as big as a large in Brazil. For drinks I would usually groan every time I forgot to buy a small drink since I literally can’t drink a medium soda in the US in less than an hour and I hate wasting food.
Do you mean fluoridated? Was the drinking water really chlorinated?
our tap water IS chlorinated, but it’s very minimal, some people pretend that they can taste it, idk if i believe them on that one. But it’s safe to drink and doesn’t cause harm to most people, unless for example, you’re allergic to it.
Yes public/city water systems often do use chlorine in the sanitation process: https://www.safewater.org/fact-sheets-1/2017/1/23/what-is-chlorination
And you can really smell and taste it when you’re used to rural well water.
In north america, yes. i have municipal water, i’ve stayed in hotels all over europe, and i’ve never had the feeling of drowning in a pool when drinking tap water before going over there. the worst thing i’ve encountered in europe is filtered tap water, which tastes like charcoal but is drinkable. the chlorinated water just made my throat close instinctively.
Typically yes water is chlorinated. By the time it hits your cup, most of it’s gone and is save to drink. If you let the water sit out longer, all the chlorine should dissipate.
I think it might depend. Chlorine should, but chloramine doesn’t (which I only know because the latter can really mess up home aquariums). Since our water just has chlorine, I leave it out overnight before doing water changes.
It’s typically both. So little chlorine you won’t notice unless you have a particular condition like op or you’re doing something weird like growing algae. You can also just leave a glass of water out for a while and the chlorine will evaporate out of it.
The firearm culture, and how normalised it is.
I went into a Walgreens in Chicago, and waited in line behind two other people. There was a cashier free but the person in front of the line was waiting to be called. The guy behind the person in front politely said, “ma’am, the cashier is free” ‘I’m waiting to be called” was the response.
So the guy behind her just walked past her, and she pushed him and said, “Careful buddy, you’ll get shot for doing something like that”
I was taken aback at how quickly a simple discourtesy escalated to shooting someone. It just blew my mind that shooting someone over queue jumping was verbalised, and seemingly normal to each other.
That’s not gun culture per se, but gang culture. Gun “culture” in the US is something that trends far more right wing in general, and tends to be mostly white, mostly (nominally) christian.
I can’t speak to other cities, but the south side and west side of Chicago (esp. around Garfield Park, Douglas Park, and all of Austin) have a serious gang problem. If you aren’t willing and able to engage in violence at the slightest perceived provocation, then you tend to be victimized. The net result is that someone that jumps a line can end up getting a beat down, or killed. (And, BTW, the gang problem is a result of a century of institutionalized racism, combined with a few decades when CPD was exceptionally effective at jailing gang leaders; instead of just two or three major gangs in Chicago, you have hundreds of small ones, all constantly fighting over tiny patches of turf.)
I get what you mean, but this was in the central loop, in a business district, between a white woman in her 50’s and a black man in his 30’s. Very much gun culture by your definition.
Gang culture I can somewhat understand, but this was just wild to me.
Not saying it’s right or wrong… not my circus. But at a chemist?
I think that most people that have lived in Chicago for a while are pretty aware that, due to this kind of culture of violence, that kind of action in Chicago carries a degree of risk that wouldn’t be present in many other places. So I don’t think that it would be that out of line to make that kind of comment in general. It’s just kind of pervasive.
I would be much more surprised to hear that kind of statement in, say, Phoenix, AZ, where you almost certainly have far, far more people carrying concealed firearms legally, but don’t seem to see the same kind of gang/violence problems.
Btw, it’s illegal to kill someone for checks notes cutting you in line. Had he wanted to waste the next three hours he could have reported her and if the cops decided to do their job it is a crime (communicating threats and assault for the push). I don’t think that criminal acts gun owners aren’t allowed to do are really part of the “culture” just because criminals sometimes do crime, like, people steal but theft isn’t part of “shopping culture,” y’know?
Careful buddy, you’ll get shot for doing something like that”
i guarantee you this is a joke.
Not that it can’t happen, but i am willing 100% to bet that this was a joke.
I’ve never seen an interaction like that and I’ve lived in this country 40 years
That is not a normal interaction anywhere that I’ve been in the States and not in Chicago. Despite what the press says Chicago is a very beautiful and relatively safe city. The people tend to be civil.
Thats mostly just Chicago to be real
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Yeah, that is definitely not normal. Never heard anyone say anything like that (western US)
Where I’m from, the hyperbole would go “You’ll get punched.”
Around me, the threat would be “That’s how you get fucked up,” leaving the level of violence ambiguous.
yeah that’s equivalent to getting shot here in the US lol.
I would probably argue if someone said “i’m going to punch you” would be more of a threat than “you’ll get shot for that”
Sugar in everything
That’s not sugar, buddy, that’s 100% American grown High Fructose Corn Syrup!
