“The Whole Place Smelled Like Hot Garbage”: 50 People Reveal The Biggest Culture Shock They’ve Ever Encountered

As a Canadian, your comment made me laugh harder than I probably should have. :)

I am genuinely bewildered as to why the idea of socialised medicine is so vigorously opposed. And the gun violence is equally impossible to understand-the thought that you'd rather teach your children shooter drills from age 5, have armed guards in schools, even think about arming teachers than bring in proper legislation against guns that no normal person needs to have access to is beyond me. The fact your politicians are happy to accept the mass slaughter of innocents is frightening.

Nah, not really

Same!! My grandparents are all from Europe, my parents first generation Americans and I noticed from a very early age that we were being brought up very differently than our friends were.

I'm from the US. Never been out of the country cause I'm terrified of flying and boats. I've never thought that way. It's all in how you're raised. OPs parents raised them to think like that. It's not a US thing

It's good that even at a young age you recognise that this is happening but also scary that it's happening and many many other young people won't realise that isn't the case.

Yes but isn't that clever? Make sure American people think their country is amazing, that everyone wants to live there, don't go anywhere else, you don't need anywhere else etc? That way American people hardly ever question what they DON'T have but focus and appreciate what they do have? It's like dangling a million cash in your faces and all the food etc you could possibly want, meanwhile in the background, fat cat pharmaceutical companies, the health care system and gun makers get super super rich off of your hardworking backs. It's a clever way of suppressing the populace. Just glad that at least you can travel and see the rest of the world for what it is ( or isn't, there's far far worse countries than the USA!)

For the "better social services and healthcare"?? 😂. Were you able to keep a straight face? Lmao

I tried to explain maternity leave to a friend of mine-I'm in the UK, she's in USA but we do the same sort of work and met at a conference. We get a years maternity leave-6 months is at full pay, 6 months at half-pay. You can extend that to 2 years, but after the 6 months half-pay, you don't get paid, although the organisation has to keep your job open for you until the end of that 2nd year if you choose to take it. We can also change our pattern of work if the organisation can facilitate that-one of my colleagues did "term time working." That meant she didn't work during school holidays, but her salary was divided equally between the calendar months, so even when she wasn't at work in July/August for school holidays, she had an income. They also offer "compressed hours". You can choose to do your weekly hours squashed into fewer days, so instead of 5 8-hour days, you do 4 10 hour days. We have far more employment security and workers rights.

OMG. Thanks for the laugh!

Yes! Glad someone pointed that out! I’ve been to a few of the Greek islands and it looks exactly like this, so I was confused when I saw this picture.

How do you know?

I totally agree with you on this one. I regularly remove the weeds and moss from in front of my wall next to the pavement, but my neighbours don't and it looks so unsightly, only a few houses on my street keep theirs cleared too. Same goes for any rubbish that lies in front of my house, usually dropped by the refuse collectors, I'll pick it up and put it in my bin.

Some? We need a lot!

OOC is "the physio" a place (a gym) or is it a general word for exercise?

I'm happy that I got almost all of it as someone from USA. Some basic media consumption and being a bit well-read for context clues even if you aren't sure is probably key before you actually learn the lingo.

What a special place!

They do in Australia. But not in Mexico. Strange, that.

They have breakfast burritos in the U.S.

I love that that's what you got from that haha

In California they have breakfast burritos.

While some of the sentence is over the top, much of it is quite normal in Australia. Maccas, physio, brekky, ute, petrol, servo, lollies and aggro are all common words which everyone understands and most people will use, but they will stump many Americans (and 'stump' might be another one).