"What was something that shocked you when you visited a foreign country?"
Reddit top answers...
How truly polite the Japanese are. And how unbelievably clean the cities of Japan are.
How corrupt the police force is in Mexico.
Trains in India. Furious fighting, shoving, scratching, and clawing to get on, then for the rest of the eight hour journey scrupulous "I'm so sorry I brushed your foot with mine" politeness.
Don't take this the wrong way, but as an innocent Irish lad going to San Francisco for the first time, I walked out the airport and I thought I landed in Asia or something.
27 comments:
I visited the People's Republic of San Francisco and was amazed to find that the cops have real guns. I don't understand why they need those.
""What was something that shocked you when you visited a foreign country?"
A taser... at 1am. It seemed surprisingly early and uncivilized for such a thing.
Unisex squat toilets in Italy. Basically a hole with ribbed, no-slip treads on each side to guide you into the correct hovering position. They were easy to clean with a hose which was part of my job over there.
Those squat toilets seem primitive, but they do work for both sexes and all needs except the reading, which I never do in there and disapprove of - it's not the place for that.
Women in public toilets are always hovering above the seat anyway, and frankly the toilet just gets in the way for men too. Maybe we should move to those, especially in public restrooms. The ease of cleaning is a big plus. I'd like to hear what women think.
Incoming.
"Long Drop" toilets avoiding sitting your butt on a dirty toilet seat.
I remember visiting the Soviet Union and how all the first floors of buildings were (mostly) boarded up and abandoned, and how major streets had hardly any traffic. Who want's a first floor when there were no businesses? And there was no traffic because so few people had cars.
That of course has completely changed.
I was also amazed how lovely the old buildings were and how ugly the new were (that is true many places, but especially there).
I remember a restroom at a bus station in Mexico. There was dried, crusted shit everywhere. I think people had just given up on using the toilet and decided it was ok to do their thing in the vicinity of the toilet. It was really horrible. I think many people emigrate from Mexico because the restrooms are so horrible there.
I'd like to hear what women think.
@Bagho
I think if women just sat down on the damned toilet seat there wouldn't be urine splashed all over the place. Do you hover at home? No. Then sit down!
Those unisex squat toilets are all fun and fine until you get old knees and have a hard time getting back up from the squat position....or worse....lose your balance and ...well...you know.
A Vietnamese family of six can all ride on one little motorcycle.
I remember boarding a high speed train in Paris (going to Avignon) with Mrs. Tank. There is no one to take your ticket or help you. We just found the right track, got onto the train with our luggage and waited. We did not pass through any type of metal detector and neither did our luggage. An HOUR into the trip the conductor came around to check tickets.
I could have brought anything onto that train. Any thing.
Line dancing to country music in the square in St. Remy, France.
Yeah, that was weird. And they had the outfits, the cowboy/girl hats, the boots, the whole thing going on.
We got lost at 2 AM in Kilkenny, Ireland (on way home from a put, of course). We asked a guy in a car (waiting to pick up his daughter) for directions. He insisted on driving us right to our B&B. And did.
Kilkenny, home of Smithwicks and one great castle.
Squat toilets? No, no, and NO!
In Syria, 2001, we traveled by public buses all over the country to visit the historical sites. Almost all public toilets were simply holes in the floor with a hose. The floors were usually slippery with water all over the damn place. Even though we had prepared for the trip with a thorough reading of the state of the country, the toilet situation was an awful experience. In the hotel rooms, there were western toilets, but always signs telling us to NOT flush toilet paper. All TP was to be placed in the wastebasket. The Syrian plumbing system could not handle toilet paper.
The Syrian people, however, were wonderful. Very kind and helpful. Everywhere we went, we were invited to join picnics, or take tea with families.
ADA toilets and grab-bars are the best.
Walking out the door of Kimpo airport in Seoul, South Korea in 1988 and getting slapped in the face by the smell of Kimchi (or was it a local sewage plant?)
I was surprised how tiny the native people of Yucatan. It's like your black and white house crashes into a colorful suburb of Oz where all the people are tiny. And you go, "Holy shit! You guys are the direct descendants of Mayas, Incas and Aztecs, Mixtec and Meztecs and what Whathaveyoutecs. If you were all wrapped in bath towels you would look exactly like figures in a museum diorama. And there you are whipping out your electronics and calculating our rentals. It's all so incongruent.
Tokyo was complete culture shock and living there took adjustment. Most notable, immediately is their ideas of beauty are different. Unpainted naturally wearing wood is more beautiful to them. Incomplete fencing that doesn't contain anything. Old trees branches held up with outlandish rigging. Construction scaffolding of bamboo. Package wrapping that doesn't conceal anything. Old people bent over from farming rice all day long scuttling around like abused dressed up question marks. A Taoist form of traffic management at the edges of Tokyo pulsing like capillaries activated by pressure and not by electronic light signal. Grabbing a flag from a can and holding it out to stop traffic and depositing the flag in a can on the opposite side. And, of course, cockroaches.
In Miami South Beach at 4:00 am I walked into a brightly lit cafe on the way back to the hotel. A bug the size of a cat pulled through a crack in the wall and boldly drew up beside me as if reading the menu.
JRoberts said...
Walking out the door of Kimpo airport in Seoul, South Korea in 1988 and getting slapped in the face by the smell of Kimchi (or was it a local sewage plant?)
Nope, it was the smell of shit.
The dog carcasses in china. I don't think I've ever been that enraged since that day. My utter distaste for the Chinese and their decrepit country hasn't waned since.
-Starving stray dogs and cats hanging about in public, even in Yurp.
-The Dukes of Hazzard in French. Ha!
-Get all the excitement about trains because The Tube and the Paris Metro are awesome! Ditto railways in Europe. The breakdown in logic comes with the fact that there's so much less ground to cover than here.
-Massive protest in Athens and nothing on the news about it. (We're not the only country where the revolution is only sporadically and selectively televised.)
-Food selection not wholesome and delicious everywhere but in the United States of McDonalds. (Though saw a vending machine with apples in it in Canada once. Oh, Canada.)
-Teeny tiny cars.
-Everyone in England is not a skinny rock star who quotes from Shakespeare. (They LIED to me!)
-Bora BORING.
-Pacific Ocean is very large. Worth flying across to meet Taiwanese people!
For about a half hour in a train station in Italy, it was some provincial town I can't even remember, I lived la dolce vita. I had about forty five minutes to kill between trains so on a whim I walked into La Ristorante at the station. Well! Not only was everything I ordered brought to the white cloth table under silver or on silver or in silver but at the end of the meal I figured I'd go totally elegant so I ordered Frutta for dessert. Five or six different fruits, the same number of cheeses and four or five types of crackers to carry the cheese to the mouth. It's been all downhill since.
I was surprised I could rest my beer on the top of a Vietnamese hooker when I was getting a blow job. Nice touch.
ricpic, No one can imagine what it's really like to eat until they've been to Italy. But, as chick pointed out, those squat toilets suck. I shit all over my sneakers.
I was in Japan after being wounded in the leg in VN, and having to use to the squat toilets when I could hardly bend my left leg.
I did not shit on my jump boots. So there.
I've only been just over the border in Canada and Mexico. Don't recall any shocks.
Maybe I like the idea of squat toilets because I never used one. I mostly think about cleaning them with the hose as being my kind of thing.
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