Among the bravest feats a North American traveler can perform is to fly all night with little / no sleep, alight blinking and groggy at sunrise at LHR, jump into a left-hand-drive manual-shift car, and take off down the (subjectively) wrong side of the road. Keep muttering to yourselfr, "Keep left, look right. Keep left, look right."

There is certainly culture shock associated with hotel room size in various places. A two-star Microtel room in the US can be enormous; a four-star semi-luxe place in Europe can be like a cruise ship stateroom.

It's a silly one, but the overuse of ice in the US. Sodas come out of the machines cold, but people in the US keep insisting on filling cups with ice, then adding soda, meaning there is very little soda in your cup. I find this particularly bothersome in the movie theater, where I really don't want to interrupt my viewing multiple times to get a refill. Yet when I ask for a, "Diet Coke, no ice," you would think no one had ever made such a request before. Surely, others have noticed that they can get perfectly cold soda dispensed without need of ice?

Ice is very "cheap" in USA. Elsewhere the cost of electricity to produce ice, machines are expensive. So they are very stingy in giving ice! Bear in mind the ice in USA is cheaper than the pop syrup......although the difference in cost factors between a small and a large soda syrup takes the back seat .
US is a country of abundance and no one is taught the costs , consequences of overkill !
I always have wate with my meals ( save pizza) and 99.9 % of the time it is served with a straw!!!!!!

Also, in parts of the Sunbelt USA where the ground never freezes, water lines are sometimes only buried a few inches deep, and during hot summer months, the heat penetrates the ground enough that water comes out of the tap 'room temperature' to somewhat warm, and the soda machines are unable to really get a soda cold with that kind of starting water temperature.

Living overseas for many years with much of my business travel in Europe, I find that when you order liquor it's precisely poured, usually with some kind of measuring cup and absurdly expensive . In a Manhattan dive bar a couple of years ago I ordered a Jameson on the rocks which was something like $7 and the bartender filled the glass to the rim . Made me want to say "God Bless America!"

America:

- As noted, the shabby state of many of our airports.
- The amount of trash and filth on the streets in major cities.
- How poorly dressed everyone is. Athleisure is definitely not the go to choice everywhere else.
- Amount of obese people, although other countries are far from immune.
- How not "American" most of the population seems. You hear every language EXCEPT English on the street.
- Price of certain things.

I've never found this to be the case. Not in the big cities at least.

Amen, they always give you those measured pours from the thing over the bottle. Makes for TINY drinks, takes tons of them to move the needle. Sad!

I live between NYC and Paris and often get this gripe about too much ice from my French friends. I don't get it! Drinks taste better cold, so why not cool them down :D

You seriously want to go there???!!!

Years ago we landed after a flight from Europe and overnighted with relatives near SEA. They were off to work early in the morning and we stopped at a nearby Denny’s for breakfast before driving home. We told the waitress we were looking forward to an American breakfast after a couple of weeks abroad.

I admit we polished it off quickly, many hours after our last meal. The waitress, stopping by to refill our coffee, exclaimed innocently, “Honey, didn’t they feed you over there?”

That Denny's moment qualified as reverse culture shock for us.

The important question for GetSetJetSet is what exactly is not American about the population? And, conversely, what should the American population look like? That was a seriously provocative statement from him -- whether intentional or not -- and I hope fair-minded people on FT won't let that slide by.

Judging by your recent trip report, we're probably not staying at the same places.

Consider that US$70 could get something clean and safe in many places in Japan, whereas in cities in the US or Canada (and perhaps other "Western" countries), that would be abhorrent at best. Regardless, Japan is generally cheap, when coming from where I do.

This thread has taken on too many OMNI-type posts. Therefore, I am locking it.
Obscure2k
TravelBuzz Moderator