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.
School mass shootings. For some reason the rest of the world loses their minds over them.
It's the high concentration of Likes and Prayers.
I knew god was personally responsible for the few thousand children killed every year by gun violence!
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!
Grackles being half the size is a bit of an understate, a common grackle tops out at about 5 oz & 13" with a wingspan up to 18". A raven's common size, on the larger end, is 4½ lbs & 28" with a 60" wingspan.
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.
Kinda the opposite of the question, but I'm a USian and I was super excited when I saw some European countries have public bathroom doors that didn't have tiny slot that you could see through while I was pooping.
What the fuck are we doing over here? Besides the letting fascists take over thing.
Not my country, but something that fascinated me in Greece. Greece is a land of honey...and marble rock. Beautiful, swirling, sparkly rock in all different shades. It is so terribly abundant that they use marble in place of concrete.
To the Greeks, it is normal to use marble literally everywhere. They disrespect the beautiful stone, turning it into a curb on the street & slathering it in yellow paint. I saw a yellow curb that was cracked open - exposing the glittering marble rock inside. I found it so funny & sad that I took a picture. We love marble, we think it's so decadent & fancy, it's flooring in the finest hotels, businesses, and homes. These people just use marble everywhere; it's just a rock to them. 😆
It really puts things into perspective.
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.
When I lived in the US, I lived in cities on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. People who weren't used to river traffic would get excited about riverboats and barges.
And people from other climates always got excited about snow. Even the slightest flurries were cause for celebration.
Now I live in the Andes, and the exciting things here that the locals take for granted (or even count as nuisances) are the volcanoes. I can see one from my apartment. Four years in, and I still admire it every day.
In the UK, the thing I thought was fascinating was just the sheer amount of history literally everywhere. Like, 2000-year-old stone monuments in people's sheep pastures. It made me understand how extraordinarily young my native country and my current home country both are.
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.
Opposite: I (US-ian) was visiting friends in Germany and they took me on a bike ride in the woods.
“Look!!” (Bike sudden halt, stop and point into a tree with full arm) “a squirrel!”
What in your country/area is totally normal but visitors get excited for?
This is so mundane fried chicken for me, just comfort food in the Philippines, but no thanks to some influencers, tourists flock to this specific fast food restaurant expecting it to be some culinary treasure.
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!
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 :)
The lack of a speed limit on our highways. Some people come here just to drive on a boring frigging highway.
Bonus question to anyone who visited the UK - was there anything that fascinated you but I’d be taking for granted?
Double decker buses maybe. I found them pretty cool compared to the boring buses we usually have here.
Edit: Also, urban foxes. I saw foxes maybe three times in my life before going to London, where they're basically seen as a nuisance.
no speed limit is annoying as fuck. there is absolute chaos on the autobahn because of it. everyone drives at different speeds and dangerous manouvres (like tailgating, driving 200 kmh on a full road or in the rain) are common occurances. i hate driving in germany. we are an idiot nation when it comes to driving and cars in general
Cheesesteak sandwiches (Philadelphia area). It's just blocks of low-quality frozen meat fried up on a grill with some onions and cheeze-whiz (or provolone if you're not insane). The bread is good but god damn. I used to live across the street from one of the more famous steak places in center city and the line outside was almost always more than an hour long, even in rain and snow. It just made no sense. WE HAVE FUCKING MUSEUMS AND SHIT!!!
I wonder if the people in that line would have been so keen to get their horsemeat sandwich if they'd walked through the neighborhood at 6 am and seen the clear plastic bags filled with sandwich rolls just dumped on the sidewalk in front of each restaurant (yes, that is how Amoroso's delivers them). I went for a run early one morning and when I came back somebody had ripped open one of the bags and placed a roll under the windshield wipers of every car on South Street.
Lived in the UK for a while - Squirrels, and the fact that the church in the town we lived in was built before ANY humans set foot in New Zealand
It's not very common to see squirrels in Japan but they're all over the place in the states. I was hiking in the woods with a group and one of the Japanese people spotted a squirrel and told everyone so they could have a look. Where I'm from maybe you'd point out a deer or rabbit or something (although those are pretty common too), but it's pretty much impossible to not see a squirrel or chipmunk if you go outside.
Damn, that's an old church, I know there are a few still standing from around the Norman conquest
to be fair it wasn't the complete church, it was rebuilt in part in the mid 1700s
it looks like the church is mostly intact from the very early 1300's (first vicar 1309) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Cuthbert%27s_Church,_Darlington.
NZ was first settled about (current data) 1320-1350 (the earliest date that I've seen is about 1280)
These fellas
On the flipside, when I was in Japan some old guy mocked me for taking a photo of a no littering sign.
Black squirrels. They're very normal to us but I find a lot of people who travel here, especially from the U.S. are shocked to see them lol
Walking to a supermarket, riding your bicycle to work.
When we went to the USA, people believed us that we lived in little huts on mountains without power. (From Austria) They didn't believe us that we would ride our bike to work.
Just to be clear, hardly any Austrian lives without power in their house, even if they live up on mountains. But almost all my coworkers and myself included take their bike to work. (Although we live in a city, hard to get up your little mountain hut with your bike ;) )
I'm originally from the Orlando area and worked for Disney for a while. Tourism folks there pass stories around and have their own folk tales of sorts. Your question reminds me of one of them.
Central Florida has anoles, little lizards, absolutely everywhere. A woman was working the front desk at a hotel, and a couple comes up to check in. She tells them the room number and hands then the key. A few minutes later the husband runs back up to the desk and tells her that "there's an alligator in our room!" "An alligator?!" She replies and they both rush to the hotel room, where she finds the wife screaming and pointing at the couch. "The alligator is under there!" The front desk worker lifts up one end of the couch and spots a four inch green anole. She catches it and sets it outside.
OP, I've never been to the UK, but don't you have hedgehogs? How common are they?
Hedgehogs are far less common than they used to be, unfortunately. I haven't seen one for years. A friend who lives in a more suburban area has one living under their shed, and she (the hedgehog) is such a creature of routine that my friend's family will often gather near the window to watch her potter around on her nightly walk
I typically see one about 4 times a week, no clue if its the same one or not, they all look pretty much the same.
Its very very very common to see them flattened in the roads though, which is a shame.
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
To answer OP's question, I'm American but spent a few years in the UK. Things that fascinated me included:
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...
Practically every house and apartment has (access to) a sauna. If not inside the apartment, there will most often be a shared sauna in the basement.
About the UK, I'm going to go a bit deeper and note that it was somehow eye-opening that there's a whole society that actually just daily drives English. For my whole life before the visits to UK and later US, English was the language of the internet and some specific international situations where it was most people's second language. Until well into my mid-20s, I basically didn't have real life contact with any community that would just speak English natively, despite speaking it myself fairly okay-ish.
Hot air balloons. I see them in the sky most mornings when I go for a walk, weather permitting.
Where are you located? I thought hot air balloons are really rare these days, like less than 200 in the world
Or am I thinking of blimps?
Montreal. I don't understand the people that excitedly wait for the metro to arrive and take pictures. It's a subway.
People that take panoramic shots of downtown of people walking on the sidewalk.
I guess some tourists come from places with no rail or sidewalks.
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