Europeans think 100 miles is a long way, Americans think 100 years is a long time
"We've redecorated this building to how it looked over 50 years ago!"
One thing that came as a culture shock for me is that I'm used to driving like 4 hours to see relatives. And this is usually several times a year. Then I heard from some Britons that they have rarely visit their relatives who are only like a hour drive away. Really messed me up the first time.
Years ago I bought a used drum set from eBay for my daughter's Christmas present. The eBay auction was pick up only.
No big deal. It was only three hours drive each way. I did it on a Saturday. Drove there, picked it up, then drove home. All done in less than seven hours.
Wrapping it was the tricky part.
I've heard similar things. Like, I've had work commutes that are an hour long before. (Not that that's healthy or ideal, but it's far from rare)
I worked on a session in the nearest big metro to my small Texas town of 200,000 - daily commute of 2 hours and 25 minutes to get there in the morning, then 2 hours 25 minutes home (closer to 4 hours to get home on traffic heavy days). Not really unheard of.
Then, a few months ago - took a vacation on the beach island of South Padre, Texas then had to rush to a client in north Texas that next day. 12 hours of driving, all without leaving the state.
UK drivers know nothing of the true road trip life.
I'd say the 2 1/2 hour commute is pretty unheard of. I've never heard of it before. That sounds like hell. My boss's is 90 mins and he's always complaining.
And they say we should all just switch to electric bikes like in the Netherlands. I tried showing them a comparison of the states using a map but turns out "I am just being difficult"
The "map" is not the problem, you just completely fucked up your city planning. Size of a country has zero impact on your daily commute.
I get that from other people in the US sometimes, too. I live in Los Angeles county, and when people come from other places to visit they often think they can see way more things in one day than is reasonably feasible. Santa Barbara and San Diego are like 200 miles apart and it's going to take 5 or 6 hours from one to the other. The Hollywood sign and Disneyland are 30+ miles apart and a good hour separate.
I would make the point (not necessarily for an hour's drive) that the roads are often more tiring to drive on in the UK -- that is, they're not as flat, wide or straight as freeways often are, so require more concentration. Driving for an hour along Welsh country lanes doesn't feel the same as hitting the freeway for an hour. Just my two cents/tuppence
There is a story of a guy in England who sent a letter to his friend in Los Angeles. He asked him to "pop in" to New York City to see how his daughter is doing.
The LA guy wrote back and said it would be faster if he went himself.
I really don't think Euros have a solid grasp of the scale of the US.
In the US, 100 years is a long time.
In England, 100 miles is a long distance.
Here in Australia, during the 80's, 90's before widespread internet. There would be several European's who needed rescuing each year as they decided to try and walk between major cities, because it looks close on a map.
I remember one German guy who needed rescuing while trying to walk from Sydney to Adelaide...that's 1200km away...in a straight line.
Shit if you're in Los Angeles, you could spend 4 hours just to move 10 feet.
I once drove for 10 hours in the UK and was still in the same town! That magic roundabout is very confusing.
Pff in Australia I can travel over 2000km in a straight line and never leave my state, and it's not even the biggest.
Traveling across the US is like switching to an alternate dimension where everything is pretty much the same, but a few things are off. Like, Congress is the same, but suddenly there are dunkin' donuts everywhere and the land is weirdly flat
I hate that people treat the US as if it doesn’t have a wide variety of accents. I can drive an hour in any direction and the people sound different than where I live. A lot of states have their own accents, and there are regional accents within them. I live in Illinois and people from No. IL and Central IL sound completely different from people in So. IL.
Accents get even more differentiated the further North or South you go. PNW sounds different than NE. Etc. The real difference is that a lot of the accents in the US aren’t based on indigenous languages spoken in that region (even though some are), they’re largely based on the group of Europeans that settled in the region.
Americans are very very good at code switching, which is why I think a lot of people think there are only one or two accents.
Man, in my neck of the woods, you can tell which town someone is from by accent. I'm not even joking or exaggerating. This is a rural area, with towns that are close in terms of driving distance, but that were originally formed by distinct immigrant groups. Even with TV amd radio kinda smoothing out accents in general, there's still plenty of difference.
As an example, there's a town maybe twenty minutes away where when they say yes and it's "yay-us". My town it's more yeah-s as a single syllable. Two towns the other direction, it's yeah-us. And that kind of difference is across everything, not just one or two words. The degree of drawl, whether or not you get elisions at specific places in words, it's all part of it.
I remember this as, "Europeans think 100 miles is far away, Americans think 100 years is a long time."
You can drive for four hours and still be on I-5 in LA.
Yeah, define 'driving' lol
Try in Italy, you drive 2 hours and you need subtitles for understanding the tv series filmed in that city
Nothing like driving for 10 hours and still not leaving California or Texas!
Yesterday I drove 4 hours and went from northern Minnesota to slightly-less-northern Minnesota.
My wife and I drove from North Carolina, to Wisconsin, to South Dakota, and back to North Carolina again as a cross country road trip. We drove over four thousand miles.
It was fucking bizarre.
There comes a point where your mind can barely conceive that people are still speaking the same language. I think your monkey brain must assume that once you're far enough away from home, then surely everything and everyone must be a foreigner.
And for sure, there are parts of the United States that seem to be literally foreign to one another, and there are parts of the Midwest that are such titanically empty swathes of corn fields and wind turbines that it seems like one has dropped into a parallel dimension.
But there's something kind of awesome, in the awe-inspiring sense of the word, that it's all one big country, one big union of people who have (more or less) decided to engage in one big human project all together.
I think everyone should have a chance to make such a journey. It really crams the concept of the scale of this country into your consciousness in a way that can't be done without actually covering the mileage, on the ground, for yourself.
If you’re originally from the Midwest you get the opposite experience:
There are places that you can’t tell what town you’re in, for miles and miles, because buildings are everywhere, and there are no cornfields or empty areas to separate cities. Cities are just allowed to grow into each other in some places.
In LA you have just completed your commute to and from work on a tuesday
Lol try Belgium, where driving 20 minutes is a different dialect and 1-2 hours is a different language.
In Australia, you can FLY for 4 hours and still be in the same state.
I'm a Canadian living in Korea and sometimes have to explain to locals that the reason I've never been to Vancouver is because I lived on the opposite coast and it would take a week to drive there. In Korea, aside from a few outlying islands, you can never be more than four hours away from anywhere else in the country.
Things were better back when you could sail around the world for years and never leave the Kingdom.
I can drive 8 hours and still be in the same state. It’s weird, man.
(e: I mean no cities, avg 60mph the whole way. So weird.
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