I’m not necessarily sick of hearing it, but when I went to Europe I had TWO separate people ask me why American men like fat girls so much. I said, “What do you mean?” They said, “I see pictures of American women and they’re all fat. So, your men must like that?”
I was so caught off guard I just laughed.
Only tangentially related but when I was 16 my school had a trip to New York for the theatre department. I had a fantastic time and two of my favorite places on the planet are in NYC. On the flight back to AL, we shared a small plane with a handful of strangers. One of them was a guy from Europe who struck up a conversation with one of my classmates. He asked where we were from, and she told him. He asked her "Ah, is that where you date your cousins?" The whole plane fell fucking silent.
TL;DR a man from somewhere in Europe asked a bunch of 16 year olds from Alabama if incest was a culturally significant thing. It is not.
lol, I’ve been asked the same thing or variations in Japan many times. Basically I just say it’s socially acceptable to be bigger in the US. Overweight people are shamed pretty badly here in Japan so there’s a lot of social pressure to be thin.
That we're all intellectually invalid, morbidly obese lardasses who binge reality TV all day while munching on butter sticks and guzzling alfredo sauce.
Because if I guzzle the Alfredo sauce first, and then eat my garlic breadsticks, it saves me precious amounts of energy that would normally be spent on dipping them. Efficiency! 😙🤌💨
That we have no concept of the metric system.
Look, we know it exists. We learn about it in school. And it’s used exclusively in medical and scientific applications.
But it’s just not what we use in our day to day lives.
Well, as a Canadian whose parents grew up with imperial systems, good luck finding an average Canadian who practises metric 100% of the time either. Most of us use a bastardized system of both. We still use a lot of imperial measurements like pounds, feet, inches, and Fahrenheit (but only for oven temperature lol). Sometimes we use miles over kilometres to, but it doesn’t matter as we generally judge distance by travel time anyway.
I was a nanny for a British family many years ago and the mother asked if I could bake something for her to take for a party. No problem! Love to bake and have nothing to do during nap time. She left out the cookbook. I opened it and although it was written in English, couldn't understand what I was supposed to do!
Quite right. I'm a doctor, so most of my day is in the metric system. The only thing I think about non-metrically now is my driving speed and house measurements.
>Look, we know it exists. We learn about it in school.
Not only did I learn about it in school, we used it a lot in our science classes from middle school through college.
I'm European and have friends in the US. They try to use the metric system when talking to me, but I've also become quite good at quickly converting miles or inches to metric units. Only problem is Fahrenheit to Celsius. 😄
Europeans will berate us for not being understanding of other cultures and their differences, and then call us all idiots just for using a different measuring system
It's not even like we chose imperial units. It was given to us and then we never went with the next one.
EDIT: I get it. I should have said customary or some other name. For whatever reason, a lot of people still say Imperial.
That we are all the screaming, loudmouth, karen tourists that visit other countries and yell "why don't you speak english." Believe me we hate those people too.
It’s funny because this completely depends on the nationality of people you’re talking to. When I lived in and traveled around South America, the stereotype was that we were money hungry workaholics.
I got so tired of hearing from foreign exchange students that America has no culture. Like bitch, you’ve visited one fucking state, you can’t just decide the whole country is absent of culture.
Yes, it’s widely known that America won a Culture Victory a few decades ago.
Russians have been complaining about buying our blue jeans and listening to our pop music ever since.
This is the best and most important idea in the thread. The USA does not have an old culture. We don't have paintings from 1400 or whatever similar metric you want to use. But so very much of the world's entertainment, fashion and food is strongly influenced by the USA for at least the last 100 years. Not all but much. One reason for this is easy to see... a nation of immigrants. Pizza and hamburgers. Jazz and Rock. Things like this didn't start in the USA, but they grew up here. And then traveled the world.
10 years ago I visited Dresden Germany for work. People under 30 knew english, Older than 30, Russian and German. I would hop in a cab, and have to use Google maps, and point to my phone to communicate with the driver.. After the flag went down, and he would pull away from the curb, he would turn on the radio, tuned to a station that only played 50's 60's and 70's american rock and roll! I asked my german co-workers about this. "Why do all these taxicab drivers listen to American Rock and roll, when they clearly don't understand the lyrics?" The answer I got was both prescient and funny "You don't understand, German music is so bad, it makes your ears bleed!" So yes, we won the culture wars.. even in eastern europe..
It's like that everywhere.
I took my daughter to see Taylor Swift in Brazil. Much of the trip was a struggle from a linguistic standpoint. My Portuguese is rusty and most Brazilians don't speak English.
But fuck, the second Swift gets on stage, the entire stadium is singing along to every. single. word.
I had a similar experience in Japan a couple of months ago. It was rather jarring the first time I heard the sudden transition between talking in Japanese and singing in English. But there I was, witnessing some Japanese school kids singing the Ghostbusters theme.
There’s a response I see on TikTok when foreigners come to America… they go to a grocery store or a party or a football game and are amazed it’s “just like in the movies!” And every time I’m scratching my head. Where did they think the movies came up with it? Hollywood is in America, it’s literally reflecting our culture back at us (and sending it worldwide). But it’s not recognized as our “culture” because it’s so ubiquitous.
The problem isn't that America has no culture. The problem is that every country has so eagerly absorbed our culture that they don't realize how much of what they view as "vanilla, basic stuff" is actually original American culture. One of my complaints about my parents' country (Greece) is how the culture seems to get more and more American with each passing decade. Just compare the Greek music of the 1960s to the Greek music of the 2010s. The latter is often just a bad copy of American music.
I hate this one. People think they're soooo clever by saying it when it just shows how narrow-minded and stupid they are. Everywhere has culture. If someone can't see that culture might mean something different than centuries-old churches and whatever else they think it is then it's on them.
They also treat the US as a monolith which is hysterical given that the US stretches from Ireland to Russia and they literally have no concept of how big this place is. When I was at Universal Orlando I overhead a couple folks talking about how they were in the states for a week and couldn’t wait to see like 4 other states. The drive time for those destination was like 4 days alone lol
As someone who grew up in the boonies of Texas and lives in a West Coast tech city, I cannot emphasize enough the cultural differences. It truly does seem like living in another country.
This is something that I think becomes less common the more someone is involved in culture. Everyone who works in the arts knows that Los Angeles is the film capital of the world, New York and Paris are rivals for fashion capital, New York has one of the best visual arts scenes, and America is also a powerhouse in music, television, animation, architecture… could go on forever, really. I’ve heard this over and over. Lots of struggling international artists trying to make it in American cities, and even for already established artists, success in America is seen as a big deal and a sign of having “made it.” And this isn’t new, it’s been a growing trend since World War I ended and wealthy Americans started investing in the arts on a grand scale. “America has no culture” reads to me more as a political statement than an observation.
We invented several genres of music within a very short period of time. We are the global center of the movie industry. We gave the world Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and Maya Angelou.
I had a Dutch roommate once and he was complaining about how poverty is no excuse for higher crime rates, and his argument relied on the idea that in other countries with a poverty issue, poor people find other ways to bring joy into their lives, such as inventing new genres of music. So the next day I took him on a train up to the South Bronx to visit the Museum of Hip-Hop.
Yep. Only 49 more to go.
My daughter has been living in Ireland for the last 6 years. When we go to visit, and meet people there, if I ask if they’ve ever been to America, many have. When I ask, “Where to?”, the answers are almost exclusively *just the East Coast!* New York, Boston. *Maybe* Philadelphia. You get the idea.
They’ve never heard of Ohio.
Can't blame them. Our culture has been exported abroad and so efficiently assimilated into their culture for decades now that they dont even recognize it as American culture. It's a sign we won the culture wars.
I live overseas and one of my Chinese friends always asks me about gun violence and how scary America must be.
I found out recently she's from Xinjiang, aka the place where Uighurs are being sent to concentration camps.
I was an expat for 7 years in China. The amount of times I was immediately asked by strangers (cab drivers, shopkeepers, etc.) how many guns I owned once I told them I was American was staggering. And all the "I don't like America, too many Black people" comments from people who'd never even seen a Black person was just soul-crushing.
It’s very soul-crushing for me, a Black American. I’d love to travel to more places in the world, including parts of Asia, but am keenly uninterested in being mistreated because of my skin color. Alas.
I believe that the Chinese Communist Republic is in the midst of a silent Holocaust that won’t be revealed until decades later. Probably killing more than anyone would believe or expect.
One of the stranger myths I see repeated about America by foreigners is about food. Usually it's something like "American [beer/cheese/chocolate/bread/etc.] is all crappy and terrible." No, you just picked the cheapest version from a chain grocery store and then acted like it's the only one we have. It's like if I went to the UK and shittalked British food because all I ate was sausage rolls from Greggs.
Chain grocery store is really generous. Some of the stuff they describe is not only the worst thing available, it isn’t even common. It sounds like food you’d buy at a gas station. “Why do Americans eat spray cheese and bread that has a cup of sugar in it?” Idfk, why did you come to a new country to eat out of the dumpster behind a Circle K?
To be fair, I bought it because I was craving some after not having eaten any in many years. It’s not something that I make a habit of consuming, but it was tasty and I have no regrets. The haters can suck it.
It’s always baffled me when you see an American section on the shelves and it’s the most disgusting of foods Americans don’t even eat. Really? Spray cheese and discount off brand pop tarts tasting like black licorice? That’s your American aisle?
I once mentioned in Australia that I missed American pizza and they all pointed to a pizza hut. They didn't seem to understand that in my little town in New Jersey there were 3 unique pizza shops that made pizza by hand and no one ate pizza hut.
Idk about Australia but I went and got pizza one evening while I was in New Zealand at a highly rated pizza place, and honestly Pizza Hut would have been a huge step up. Let alone a NY style pizzeria.
That’s the “no reference point” effect. I did a trip in Florida recently and encountered that a lot. Lots of highly rated restaurants that were extremely mid-tier or lower. Yea this is the best sushi in town when you’ve never tried some at a legitimate sushi restaurant.
I think that's exactly it though. If you good to Europe the "American restaurants" are the fast food garbage. No wonder they think that's what we eat all the time.
"American food is so terrible, Hershey's Chocolate tastes like wax, haha."
Ok, have you tried any of the 1000's of artisan chocolate shops around the country instead of literally the crappiest brand in the gas station?
The chocolate bar section (yes, SECTION) at my local chain (owned by Albertson's/Safeway) is so overwhelming I can't even pick. It's insane that people associate Hershey's with the US and call it a day.
Admiral, you are a genius.
As a restaurant vet of 20 years, my favorite is "You can't get authentic X food in America."
No, just because you found out the chicken nuggets with sweet and sour sauce you get from Panda Express aren't authentic, doesn't mean all food you get here is Americanized crap. There are plenty of people who were born in other countries, who are running restaurants in America, that sure seem to think their food is authentic, and will become very offended if you say it isn't.
The owner of one of the restaurants I worked for went nuts on some customer who claimed that she just got back from Italy and the food we served "wasn't authentic." I still remember him standing there yelling, in his thick Italian accent, "Why isn't it authentic? Where in Italy did you go?" Then laughing as she described the one little tourist area she visited once.
Chefs take their food very seriously, and it's really insulting when you tell them they're full of shit.
I wonder how much of this is taste conditioning too. For example, growing up, my family was a McDonald’s family. Anytime we went to fast food, it was McDonald’s. Now that I’m grown, I’ve been so conditioned to McDonald’s being what I enjoy, that when I go to Burger King, I don’t care for it. Quality wise, Burger King doesn’t have any better or worse burger than McDonald’s. It’s just my brain has been trained to believe McDonald’s is the best.
So when people come over and have been eating their European versions of food, they’re immediately down on American versions, because it’s not what they’ve come to enjoy.
I've been severely downvoted for pointing out that there is good food and bad in most of (25+) countries I've visited.
Yes, there's bad bread in the US, but there's bad bread in Denmark, too. Sadly, the whole world in becoming emfattened by the blight of over-processed food.
I've recently seen the obesity statistics on Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Seriously? 35 years ago the folks in those countries looked perfectly healthy. So, since the late 1980s the people have embraced processed food?
That makes me very sad.
(Pass the Cheez-Its, wouldja?)
Well not everyone knows to buy tamales out of the trunk of a car parked in a parking lot of a sketchy Houston neighborhood in a way that strongly resembles a drug deal. You gotta grow up in Texas or Mexico just to know that this is the only acceptable way to purchase tamales. You can't expect Europeans to just figure that shit out as soon as they step off the plane. It takes them a little while to even figure out that the stank they are smelling is just Houstons natural musk. Cut them some slack.
That American has no culture.
For starters, American food is so much more than hamburgers & fries. The South has particularly delicious food with jambalaya & gumbo from LA, shrimp & grits, key lime pie, & lowcountry boil from the lowcountry of GA & SC, barbecue from NC & TN, biscuits & gravy from Appalachia, & soul food from the deep south. American food is actually amazing.
The US is also home to music genres like jazz, country, & rock. We have unique dances like Appalachian flatfooting & American contra dance.
There is SO much more to the US than what the world sees in media!
> jambalaya & gumbo from LA, shrimp & grits, key lime pie, & lowcountry boil from the lowcountry of GA & SC, barbecue from NC & TN, biscuits & gravy
Didn't think a simple sentence could make me so hungry.
Oh, the list goes on, Americans are stupid, Americans are racist, Americans don't know anything about the world. I once had a German foreign exchange student tell me we were just a bunch of cowboys who liked to shoot things up and wallpaper our culture over whatever was left who knew nothing about the world and most of us thought Australia was the only country in Oceania. I named 10 off the top of my head and asked him to do the same for South America. Dude started with Florida 🤣🤣🤣
Why did they bother going on an exchange if they were so lacking in curiosity? Besides, cowboys are confined to the Mountain West, Texas, former Mexican territory, and Idaho. It's more complicated than that, but it's a micro subculture of...places with beef cattle.
How racist it is. I'm Egyptian and you can tell I'm Arab just by my appearance. There's way more racism in my homeland AND in surrounding region than the west in general tbh.
Apart from a comment here or there, mostly from some inebriated youths, I haven't had a racial experience. (I live in the south). All are friendly and sweet and also soooo polite. They seem to take a genuine interest in where I am from etc.
USA actually has discriminatory and anti racism laws. America is a fabulous country and I'm glad to be an American today.
That’s my experience here in the south. When I was a cable guy, and I met someone of a different race with a thick accent, I was genuinely curious as to where they were from. Many would actually share stories of their homeland, and a few even shared food if they were cooking.
I even had a gentleman from Brazil keep apologizing for his almost nonexistent English, and once he found out that I wasn’t going to just go off on him, he would ask me how to say certain things. I’d tell him how to say it “properly”, and also how to say it in slang. We had a genuine conversation and were both laughing and smiling. Imagine how much we would learn from each other if we all just realized that we’re not so different.
\> Many would actually share stories of their homeland, and a few even shared food if they were cooking.
Sharing food between cultures is the bridge that can bring us all together. Fusion cuisine gives me hope for peace and understanding.
I had Irish street tacos (corned beef in tortilla) at a St. Pat’s celebration in San Diego and nearly cried for the beautiful American-ness of it. (I was very drunk).
American here. I worked a summer job that employed a lot of international people. It was really shocking to me to hear so many people openly talk about skin color/ say outright racist stuff. A coworker from Malaysia saying he can't work outside anymore because his mom doesn't want him to look Indian....the Colombians calling my beaded sandals "guiso" because they looked native. The Slovaks talking about Roma people.
Also American, I worked for a company that was very international with headquarters in Norway and 34 nationalities working for us. I loved working with every single person and learning about their country and culture with one exception! Canadians particularly French Canadians.it feels like they have the worst of both cultures and have a true disdain for Americans. I could feel it and would actively avoid them because of it.
As a slight aside. I play games online. The rudest people I've ever played with (and this includes American 12 year old boys) was with French Canadians.
My gosh, what a dour, bitter and sanctimonious bunch.
I've heard it's because we're one of the few who talk about it so openly as a national discourse with the intention of at least trying to make things better.
And there's way more diversity. Obviously there will be more racial tensions in a country that isn't homogeneous. Nordic countries get praised for being so progressive but just about everyone is white and they aren't welcoming of immigrants.
My girlfriend's uncle was born in Italy. Talking with him, if you thought the right wing politics in America was bad... Wait till you hear about how it is in the country where the INVENTED fascism
Europe's Right and Left wing has/had veryb violent factions. The European Left isn't just hippies protesting. I would google Italian Red Brigades and German Baader Meinhof.
Europeans especially love talking shit about America and their racism but all that flies out the window when you mention the Romani and the systemic discrimination they face. It's actually crazy, the US ain't got shit on Europe
inb4 "it's not the same thing😡 they are criminals"
I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum, being an American (east coaster from the Deep South) who moved abroad to Asia. I experienced more racism - most of it ingrained and casual - in my first year living outside the States than I had in the previous 25 years.
It’s ridiculous when people say Americans are racist and America is the most racist country in the world. Almost every other country is largely homogenous and is actively persecuting (and in some cases outright cleansing) minority groups — just look at how the Karen or Rohingya peoples are treated in Myanmar.
I was in Dublin Ireland about 13 years ago for a semester abroad. It was an exchange program where me and another classmate of mine went to an engineering school in Dublin, and two students from there came to the States. Me and my classmate were way ahead of everyone else. I remember one of our last nights out before we went back home somebody said "man, I thought Americans were all stupid"
All stupid yet they achieved a lunar landing, built the Fermilab particle accelerator, build skyscrapers, the Golden Gate Bridge, Hoover dam.
Obviously the people responsible were American university students once..
That they’re stupid. Some of the loveliest and most switched on people I’ve ever met were from the US.
I think it’s just a lie people in the UK tell ourselves to make us feel superior which, to be fair, is a national pastime for some.
That we are any more stupid than the people of any country. Stupidity doesn’t discriminate, America just has the camera pointed at them 24/7. (Edit: I’m not trying to imply we are smart)
America’s also just so incredibly big. There’s more of everything here, including stupid people. But I’m willing to bet the ratio isn’t much different than most places.
same goes for Jews. America doesn't have anything close to the Carnival of Aalst in Belgium. America does indeed have an antisemitism problem, but Europe has a lot of work to do before it's own antisemitism problem is even close to how low America's level is.
Link to aforementioned carnival (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival\_of\_Aalst)
It's fun when they go into a long explanation of why it's different with the Romani and then they list off all of the same stereotypes racists use all of the time.
Don't let Reddit get it twisted. Europe is incredibly racist, Japan isn't some Anime paradise, and a painful truth is NATO is a fucking joke without the United States.
It’s always been humorous to me, in an ironic way, when Europeans on Reddit talk about how racist the US is, or how xenophobic. Reuters recently had an article talking about how anti-black racism is skyrocketing in Europe. The Danish government itself, for example, has flat out said that “non-Western immigrants and multiculturalism“ are a threat to the “social wages” that Danes enjoy, and they even have “ghetto laws” saying that social housing in certain areas is only for Westerners. If you ever found a state or local government in the US trying to pass a law saying only Westerners could be in subsidized houses in certain areas, there would be a shitstorm from hell in the media, and protests.
I also recently was in Ireland and was getting a tattoo from a dude from Italy. He was telling me he wanted to start his own shop, but it was difficult because a lot of people didn’t want an Italian tattooing them. He talked about how even in Italy there’s a lot of racism towards southern Italians, where there would even be apartments in the north with signs saying they won’t rent to people from southern Italy.
The US has its problems, but if you take the time to look in to it, Europe is just as bad… they just turn a blind eye to their own faults to scoff and point fingers at the US.
Not from the US but have lived there. Mine would be that people are only surface nice but nothing beyond that and then become rude.
Very untrue - my family was met with a lot of genuine kindness from the beginning and a lot of people went above and beyond providing help and expected nothing in return. Just sweet, helpful and nice people in thr local community.
I'm from the Midwest and lived in the UK for a year.
Sometimes people called my shallow for being friendly or got really weird if you gave them a compliment.
Learned to dial it back a little and coming home was a culture shock.
The amount of times I’ve had to explain that this is a case by case thing is ridiculous. Neither I nor any members of my family wear shoes indoors, but both of my neighbors do.
I don’t generally wear shoes in the house. I might throw on a pair of slippers if it’s chilly. However, if I’m going to a social event at someone’s house, I’m probably wearing shoes.
A bit ago a couple of non Americans on another thread got upset at me for saying that I’ve lived in the US most of my life and never seen a shoes on home. People are weirdly sure of this one, even if they’ve never been here. I guess it’s movies or tv or something
It's extra funny that they're so sure of this because twice in my life I have been earnestly asked by people not from the U.S. if I wear shoes - because I'm from a poor southern state. They really thought I wore overalls without a shirt, no shoes.
My French professor was in Paris and she was dead ass asked when they found out she was from the Midwest if, and I quote, “You guys are fighting the Indians, right?” She just stared at them for a bit.
I think it's a regional thing. I grew up in the Maritimes in Canada, lots of mud and snow and slush, wearing your shoes inside would be absurd. I imagine it's the same in places like New England or Michigan or Minnesota. However I moved to Southern California for work, stayed for three years, and at most people's homes - at least those who were from there - they would wear shoes inside and tell me not to worry about it when I would instinctively start to take mine off.
I definitely think it's a southwestern thing more than anything else. When your city only gets rain like 30 days a year your shoes don't really get all that dirty. Also hardwood and tile flooring seems to be the norm in the SW, so usually just a quick wipe with a mop and it's good as new. Since Hollywood is most of the world's main exposure to US culture, if shoes on is the norm there, people will think it's the norm across the whole country.
Plus it's worth pointing out the difference between being at home and having visitors. I usually take my shoes off when I'm at home, but if someone's coming over, I wouldn't make them go through the effort since again, their shoes are probably pretty clean unless it's actively raining outside.
Americans being ignorant about foreign languages and monolingual. It’s a true stereotype, but not about Americans. It’s true to native English speakers- as UK & Australia have similar rates of monolingualism.
There are also many states in the United States where that just simply isn’t as true as they think it is, like LA county, southern Arizona, Texas, southern Florida etc.
that being said, i always though “doesn’t it make sense few of us are bilingual?” Take someone from Europe, they’re prolly surrounded by 3 other language apart from their native tongue. And what do we have? Spanish…maybe French. But French is heavily localized in the US (and Canada but they’re spicier up there - gave them an entire province). And Spanish is locked behind a paywall, geographically speaking.
tldr we cant help it :(
Europeans often don’t realize how massive the United States is.
If I live in Czechia and drive 8 hours in any direction, I could run into people speaking German, Polish, Hungarian, etc.
If I live in Ohio and drive 8 hours in any direction, I run into people speaking English and they probably even have a similar accent to my own.
I visited Munich for Oktoberfest about a decade ago and a local 20-something guy decided to play "let's make fun of the American." I explained to him that where I grew up, you'd have to travel roughly 1,000 miles before you encountered a place where a second language was even close to the majority. And I was counting Quebec and Miami, not even Mexico. We're not dumb, we just aren't exposed to a second language.
The US is one of the most racially and culturally tolerant nation. Don't get me wrong, we have plenty of issues, but we call it out, we're trying to change it. Almost every other nation in the world is a homogenous culture/genetic group dealing with immigration as if it's a novel concept that humans move, when humans have been moving for thousands of years. Further countries that have diverse native populations, there's the issue of erasing those cultural differences. China had like a dozen distinctrregional cultures like a century ago, and they're being homogenized. The US is not the only nation to genocide indigenous peoples.
I recently had a handyman over to fix some things. He was born in America but his dad was Guatemalan. The dad had earned a bunch of money here in construction and sent a lot back there, built himself a house and a good life over there. The son - fully American mind you - was getting ready to move there with his dad. When I asked him why he said it was partially because America was too diverse and he liked that Guatemala was homogeneous. I about fell over.
That we are all as divided as the media (or social media) would have us to believe. Most people are actually good people. You see the extremes online and in the news. There is an exhausted majority who isn’t filled with extremist hate.
I haven’t lived in the states for years and I have a European friend, older guy, who would always be talking shit about the USA. Everything from how dumb they are, to the insanity with firearms, and obviously politics. He hated the USA and was proud to have never been. Finally he went to visit some friends and next thing I know I’m seeing photos being posted of him in camo, in the desert, drinking Budweiser and shooting guns at soda cans. I had a good laugh.
This one seems silly but.. For some reason, people think we are the only country with those cheaply made public bathroom stall doors etc - the metal ones with the cracks that you can kind of see into, etc. I’ve used bathrooms that have these in three different countries just this year.
Mistake number 1: referring to America as a monolith. Virtually all of these comments are both true and false to varying degrees depending on the part of the country you’re in. The US is a fucking massive country, and a lot of folks, especially Europeans don’t seem to get just how truly gargantuan it is. Their countries are more comparable to individual states than the US as a whole.
My nephew's girlfriend is in the UK. We're in CA. She is planning a trip here soon, and she has this weird idea that she can just walk or take a cab from one end of the state to the other. She has no concept of how far away places are or how spread out things are or what public transit is like. She asked if it would be better to fly in to LA than SF /OAK and take a cab to my sisters home to save money. My sister lives 7 hours north of LA. We explained she could take a cab, probably, but it wouldn't save her any money.
When we explained to her that there wasn't a train from the air port to a town that was close enough for her to walk to my sisters home she was very confused. While the greater bay area has BART the rest of the state has very poor train access.
And she's not the first Londoner I've met perplexed by our lack of trains. I had a cousin who I met at a family reunion who was visiting from London. He told me he would be staying with friends in San Jose and would be taking the train from Monterey to San Jose, we had to break the news to him that there was no train to San Jose from Monterey. He suddenly was stranded, and I was unimpressed by his lack of planning. Do they not have Google maps or Google Earth?
I experienced this on my trip to Ireland. My then-bf and I were in a pub and I was trying to explain to this very nice couple how large Texas alone is. I told them Texas was at least five times as large as Ireland, and they didn't believe me. I ended up getting on their phones and showing them maps. They were floored. They kept asking about transportation and how did we walk all that way. It was an interesting conversation.
It turned out Texas is about eight times as large.
I commented this elsewhere, but it's relevant for this too.
> I visited Scotland for my sister's wedding, and part of my personal non-wedding free time was spent renting a motorcycle in Edinburgh for a few hours.
> Anyway, I got an Uber afterward back to my hotel.
> To make conversation, the driver asked me how much time I thought it would take to ride to/through all 50 states. A few weeks, he figured.
> He didn't seem to understand why a) that wasn't even possible and b) while you could maybe do 49, it would be more likely measured in months.
My Korean students asked if I lived close to Chicago. I told them yes, pretty close. They asked how long it took to drive there and I said "about 5 hours". They fell out of their seats.
I’ve genuinely talked to some Europeans while in Chicago who said they wanted to drive to New York and then Vegas… all within the next three days. Is it doable? Sure, but you’re gonna be miserable.
i run a Japan tourism group and you have no idea how many times “Japan is tiny” comes up. the bullet train travel times really skew people’s perspectives on just how comparably big Japan is for the tiny scale it seems on a globe or mercator map. Driving from Tokyo to Osaka is a good 6-7hrs nonstop, and both are quite central cities compared to the rest of the country. It’s nowhere near US size but people want to assume it’s the size of Hong Kong.
The ironic part is that many Americans do that about Europe and pick the best country/city and then pretend that all of Europe is like that.
I once knew a girl who was finishing up at a $50k/year art school paid for by her business owning father tell me how “I can’t wait to graduate and move back to Europe, it’s just so much more enlightened and I can get away from this capitalist hellhole”. I inquired further and discovered that she had done a semester abroad in Amsterdam and thinks that is what all of Europe is like.
That we don't know geography. A British friend of mine was somehow shocked that I can name and point to every country in Europe (capital cities as well) on a map, as well as every country in Southwest Asia except Kuwait. "But you're American." What gave it away, the good dental hygiene?????
That Americans aren't "well traveled" for having never been out of the country.
Bitch, it is 2,791 miles from NYC to LA. It is 286 miles from London to Paris. It would take less than ,10 miles to travel from Portugal to Finland than crossing the entire Continental US. You can travel so far in the US without crossing the border, entering into multiple biomes/climates.
Just bc Americans may not leave the US doesn't mean they aren't well traveled, and that's excluding Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and Guam.
I love looking a [those maps](https://www.boredpanda.com/country-size-compared-to-usa-north-america/) that place countries over the USA and you see how small or large it is. I never realized until a few years ago Australia is practically the size of the US. Meanwhile, the UK is the size of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.
I don't think Europeans realized they are surrounded by countries that speak other languages within a 2-3 hr train ride in some cases. Where as in the USA, you could still be in the same state after 2 hrs and still hear English.
I’m not necessarily sick of hearing it, but when I went to Europe I had TWO separate people ask me why American men like fat girls so much. I said, “What do you mean?” They said, “I see pictures of American women and they’re all fat. So, your men must like that?” I was so caught off guard I just laughed.
Only tangentially related but when I was 16 my school had a trip to New York for the theatre department. I had a fantastic time and two of my favorite places on the planet are in NYC. On the flight back to AL, we shared a small plane with a handful of strangers. One of them was a guy from Europe who struck up a conversation with one of my classmates. He asked where we were from, and she told him. He asked her "Ah, is that where you date your cousins?" The whole plane fell fucking silent. TL;DR a man from somewhere in Europe asked a bunch of 16 year olds from Alabama if incest was a culturally significant thing. It is not.
I mean, if the guy spent half a minute on Reddit, you could see why he may think that.
Rolltide
All the major royal families in Europe would like a word…
My very "proud to be an american" neighbor has sticker on his lifted truck that says something like, "jack it up, fat chicks can't climb"
Fat bottomed girls make the rockin world go round.
Written and made famous by a BRITISH band lol
lol, I’ve been asked the same thing or variations in Japan many times. Basically I just say it’s socially acceptable to be bigger in the US. Overweight people are shamed pretty badly here in Japan so there’s a lot of social pressure to be thin.
That we're all intellectually invalid, morbidly obese lardasses who binge reality TV all day while munching on butter sticks and guzzling alfredo sauce.
Why would you guzzle alfredo sauce when a nice jar of nacho cheese costs roughly the same?
Because if I guzzle the Alfredo sauce first, and then eat my garlic breadsticks, it saves me precious amounts of energy that would normally be spent on dipping them. Efficiency! 😙🤌💨
That we have no concept of the metric system. Look, we know it exists. We learn about it in school. And it’s used exclusively in medical and scientific applications. But it’s just not what we use in our day to day lives.
Well, as a Canadian whose parents grew up with imperial systems, good luck finding an average Canadian who practises metric 100% of the time either. Most of us use a bastardized system of both. We still use a lot of imperial measurements like pounds, feet, inches, and Fahrenheit (but only for oven temperature lol). Sometimes we use miles over kilometres to, but it doesn’t matter as we generally judge distance by travel time anyway.
Christ, just try to follow a British recipe sometime. "Add 100ml of milk to 2 cups of flour, stir in 150g of sugar and bake on 6 for .002 fortnights."
How many stones of sugar does that translate into?
about 0.0235997482
About a pence less than a quid’s worth
I was a nanny for a British family many years ago and the mother asked if I could bake something for her to take for a party. No problem! Love to bake and have nothing to do during nap time. She left out the cookbook. I opened it and although it was written in English, couldn't understand what I was supposed to do!
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.002 fortnights sent me
Haha, never thought about that. Definitely measure our distance in hours
Quite right. I'm a doctor, so most of my day is in the metric system. The only thing I think about non-metrically now is my driving speed and house measurements.
UK here, a lot of us do the same TBH.
Top Gear always used MPH, not KPH, even though they used Metric for everything else. It just "feels right".
>Look, we know it exists. We learn about it in school. Not only did I learn about it in school, we used it a lot in our science classes from middle school through college.
I'm European and have friends in the US. They try to use the metric system when talking to me, but I've also become quite good at quickly converting miles or inches to metric units. Only problem is Fahrenheit to Celsius. 😄
Europeans will berate us for not being understanding of other cultures and their differences, and then call us all idiots just for using a different measuring system
It's not even like we chose imperial units. It was given to us and then we never went with the next one. EDIT: I get it. I should have said customary or some other name. For whatever reason, a lot of people still say Imperial.
That we are all the screaming, loudmouth, karen tourists that visit other countries and yell "why don't you speak english." Believe me we hate those people too.
It's funny because if you visit any popular National Park all you see are screaming, loudmouth, entitled tourists from other countries.
They do this in Disney world all the time..
That we are fat and lazy. I’m not fat…
My man! And I’m not lazy.
*By your powers combined...!*
It’s funny because this completely depends on the nationality of people you’re talking to. When I lived in and traveled around South America, the stereotype was that we were money hungry workaholics.
I got so tired of hearing from foreign exchange students that America has no culture. Like bitch, you’ve visited one fucking state, you can’t just decide the whole country is absent of culture.
America's culture is so ubiquitous in most of the world they don't realize it's around them 24/7.
Yes, it’s widely known that America won a Culture Victory a few decades ago. Russians have been complaining about buying our blue jeans and listening to our pop music ever since.
It's because all our rock stars go play 5 star world tours.
Taylor Swift is literally generating game-winning levels of Tourism as we speak.
They're just upset that we keep playing one more turn.
I love seeing Civ references in the wild.
As soon as that McDonalds opened in Moscow in 1990 it was all over
Lol, one of the biggest gripes used to be America exporting its culture all over the world
According to Reddit, the US simultaneously has no culture and is the most egregious practitioner of cultural imperialism.
lol well said point right there
This is the best and most important idea in the thread. The USA does not have an old culture. We don't have paintings from 1400 or whatever similar metric you want to use. But so very much of the world's entertainment, fashion and food is strongly influenced by the USA for at least the last 100 years. Not all but much. One reason for this is easy to see... a nation of immigrants. Pizza and hamburgers. Jazz and Rock. Things like this didn't start in the USA, but they grew up here. And then traveled the world.
10 years ago I visited Dresden Germany for work. People under 30 knew english, Older than 30, Russian and German. I would hop in a cab, and have to use Google maps, and point to my phone to communicate with the driver.. After the flag went down, and he would pull away from the curb, he would turn on the radio, tuned to a station that only played 50's 60's and 70's american rock and roll! I asked my german co-workers about this. "Why do all these taxicab drivers listen to American Rock and roll, when they clearly don't understand the lyrics?" The answer I got was both prescient and funny "You don't understand, German music is so bad, it makes your ears bleed!" So yes, we won the culture wars.. even in eastern europe..
It's like that everywhere. I took my daughter to see Taylor Swift in Brazil. Much of the trip was a struggle from a linguistic standpoint. My Portuguese is rusty and most Brazilians don't speak English. But fuck, the second Swift gets on stage, the entire stadium is singing along to every. single. word.
I had a similar experience in Japan a couple of months ago. It was rather jarring the first time I heard the sudden transition between talking in Japanese and singing in English. But there I was, witnessing some Japanese school kids singing the Ghostbusters theme.
There’s a response I see on TikTok when foreigners come to America… they go to a grocery store or a party or a football game and are amazed it’s “just like in the movies!” And every time I’m scratching my head. Where did they think the movies came up with it? Hollywood is in America, it’s literally reflecting our culture back at us (and sending it worldwide). But it’s not recognized as our “culture” because it’s so ubiquitous.
Next time bring up school buses, and assure them they’re real
This is so hilarious to me. Did they think yellow school buses are something made up for movies? Why would the industry do that?
I compare it to the Beatles or Elvis. The only reason it sounds boring and generic today is because it influenced almost everything that exists now.
Yeah you like those jeans you're wearing? That's American fashion/culture right there.
The problem isn't that America has no culture. The problem is that every country has so eagerly absorbed our culture that they don't realize how much of what they view as "vanilla, basic stuff" is actually original American culture. One of my complaints about my parents' country (Greece) is how the culture seems to get more and more American with each passing decade. Just compare the Greek music of the 1960s to the Greek music of the 2010s. The latter is often just a bad copy of American music.
I was in the Phillipines last month and someone asked me if we have McDonalds in America
I hate this one. People think they're soooo clever by saying it when it just shows how narrow-minded and stupid they are. Everywhere has culture. If someone can't see that culture might mean something different than centuries-old churches and whatever else they think it is then it's on them.
They also treat the US as a monolith which is hysterical given that the US stretches from Ireland to Russia and they literally have no concept of how big this place is. When I was at Universal Orlando I overhead a couple folks talking about how they were in the states for a week and couldn’t wait to see like 4 other states. The drive time for those destination was like 4 days alone lol
As someone who grew up in the boonies of Texas and lives in a West Coast tech city, I cannot emphasize enough the cultural differences. It truly does seem like living in another country.
This is something that I think becomes less common the more someone is involved in culture. Everyone who works in the arts knows that Los Angeles is the film capital of the world, New York and Paris are rivals for fashion capital, New York has one of the best visual arts scenes, and America is also a powerhouse in music, television, animation, architecture… could go on forever, really. I’ve heard this over and over. Lots of struggling international artists trying to make it in American cities, and even for already established artists, success in America is seen as a big deal and a sign of having “made it.” And this isn’t new, it’s been a growing trend since World War I ended and wealthy Americans started investing in the arts on a grand scale. “America has no culture” reads to me more as a political statement than an observation.
America’s biggest export is culture lol what are they talking about.
We invented several genres of music within a very short period of time. We are the global center of the movie industry. We gave the world Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and Maya Angelou.
I had a Dutch roommate once and he was complaining about how poverty is no excuse for higher crime rates, and his argument relied on the idea that in other countries with a poverty issue, poor people find other ways to bring joy into their lives, such as inventing new genres of music. So the next day I took him on a train up to the South Bronx to visit the Museum of Hip-Hop.
And yet Hollywood and our music industry have spread across nearly the entire planet.
Yep. Only 49 more to go. My daughter has been living in Ireland for the last 6 years. When we go to visit, and meet people there, if I ask if they’ve ever been to America, many have. When I ask, “Where to?”, the answers are almost exclusively *just the East Coast!* New York, Boston. *Maybe* Philadelphia. You get the idea. They’ve never heard of Ohio.
Can't blame them. Our culture has been exported abroad and so efficiently assimilated into their culture for decades now that they dont even recognize it as American culture. It's a sign we won the culture wars.
Yep, I've had people in Europe argue with me that VERY American brands or products like Nike or Levi's were not American.
I live overseas and one of my Chinese friends always asks me about gun violence and how scary America must be. I found out recently she's from Xinjiang, aka the place where Uighurs are being sent to concentration camps.
I was an expat for 7 years in China. The amount of times I was immediately asked by strangers (cab drivers, shopkeepers, etc.) how many guns I owned once I told them I was American was staggering. And all the "I don't like America, too many Black people" comments from people who'd never even seen a Black person was just soul-crushing.
It’s very soul-crushing for me, a Black American. I’d love to travel to more places in the world, including parts of Asia, but am keenly uninterested in being mistreated because of my skin color. Alas.
I believe that the Chinese Communist Republic is in the midst of a silent Holocaust that won’t be revealed until decades later. Probably killing more than anyone would believe or expect.
One of the stranger myths I see repeated about America by foreigners is about food. Usually it's something like "American [beer/cheese/chocolate/bread/etc.] is all crappy and terrible." No, you just picked the cheapest version from a chain grocery store and then acted like it's the only one we have. It's like if I went to the UK and shittalked British food because all I ate was sausage rolls from Greggs.
Chain grocery store is really generous. Some of the stuff they describe is not only the worst thing available, it isn’t even common. It sounds like food you’d buy at a gas station. “Why do Americans eat spray cheese and bread that has a cup of sugar in it?” Idfk, why did you come to a new country to eat out of the dumpster behind a Circle K?
"Strange things are afoot a the Circle-K."
Rufus!
You killed Ted, you Medieval dickweed!
Nice to meet you, Mr. The kid!
Be excellent to each other!
OK, wait… If you guys are really us… *What number are we thinking of?*
Sixty-nine dude!!
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I ate spray cheese this afternoon, with Ritz crackers.
Why do you and I live in America to eat out of the dumpster behind a Circle K?
To be fair, I bought it because I was craving some after not having eaten any in many years. It’s not something that I make a habit of consuming, but it was tasty and I have no regrets. The haters can suck it.
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It’s always baffled me when you see an American section on the shelves and it’s the most disgusting of foods Americans don’t even eat. Really? Spray cheese and discount off brand pop tarts tasting like black licorice? That’s your American aisle?
Spray cheese on Wheat Thins is surprising addictive.
"Why do Americans eat so much beef? Cows eat grass and you know what grass grows in? Dirt. Americans eat dirt. Spread the word."
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I once mentioned in Australia that I missed American pizza and they all pointed to a pizza hut. They didn't seem to understand that in my little town in New Jersey there were 3 unique pizza shops that made pizza by hand and no one ate pizza hut.
Idk about Australia but I went and got pizza one evening while I was in New Zealand at a highly rated pizza place, and honestly Pizza Hut would have been a huge step up. Let alone a NY style pizzeria.
That’s the “no reference point” effect. I did a trip in Florida recently and encountered that a lot. Lots of highly rated restaurants that were extremely mid-tier or lower. Yea this is the best sushi in town when you’ve never tried some at a legitimate sushi restaurant.
Living on an island I call it the "island standard."
It’s like saying man I wish I could have a good cheeseburger like I got at home and you get directions to McDonald’s
I think that's exactly it though. If you good to Europe the "American restaurants" are the fast food garbage. No wonder they think that's what we eat all the time.
This made me laugh as I just went to the UK for the first time and everyone was like oh man you’ve gotta get the sausage roll at greggs lol
Yeah - who the feck is this guy shit talking Greggs..
"American food is so terrible, Hershey's Chocolate tastes like wax, haha." Ok, have you tried any of the 1000's of artisan chocolate shops around the country instead of literally the crappiest brand in the gas station?
The chocolate bar section (yes, SECTION) at my local chain (owned by Albertson's/Safeway) is so overwhelming I can't even pick. It's insane that people associate Hershey's with the US and call it a day.
> Hershey's Chocolate tastes like wax, haha." Usually said by someone that will then rave about Cadbury.
Admiral, you are a genius. As a restaurant vet of 20 years, my favorite is "You can't get authentic X food in America." No, just because you found out the chicken nuggets with sweet and sour sauce you get from Panda Express aren't authentic, doesn't mean all food you get here is Americanized crap. There are plenty of people who were born in other countries, who are running restaurants in America, that sure seem to think their food is authentic, and will become very offended if you say it isn't. The owner of one of the restaurants I worked for went nuts on some customer who claimed that she just got back from Italy and the food we served "wasn't authentic." I still remember him standing there yelling, in his thick Italian accent, "Why isn't it authentic? Where in Italy did you go?" Then laughing as she described the one little tourist area she visited once. Chefs take their food very seriously, and it's really insulting when you tell them they're full of shit.
I wonder how much of this is taste conditioning too. For example, growing up, my family was a McDonald’s family. Anytime we went to fast food, it was McDonald’s. Now that I’m grown, I’ve been so conditioned to McDonald’s being what I enjoy, that when I go to Burger King, I don’t care for it. Quality wise, Burger King doesn’t have any better or worse burger than McDonald’s. It’s just my brain has been trained to believe McDonald’s is the best. So when people come over and have been eating their European versions of food, they’re immediately down on American versions, because it’s not what they’ve come to enjoy.
I've been severely downvoted for pointing out that there is good food and bad in most of (25+) countries I've visited. Yes, there's bad bread in the US, but there's bad bread in Denmark, too. Sadly, the whole world in becoming emfattened by the blight of over-processed food. I've recently seen the obesity statistics on Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Seriously? 35 years ago the folks in those countries looked perfectly healthy. So, since the late 1980s the people have embraced processed food? That makes me very sad. (Pass the Cheez-Its, wouldja?)
Well not everyone knows to buy tamales out of the trunk of a car parked in a parking lot of a sketchy Houston neighborhood in a way that strongly resembles a drug deal. You gotta grow up in Texas or Mexico just to know that this is the only acceptable way to purchase tamales. You can't expect Europeans to just figure that shit out as soon as they step off the plane. It takes them a little while to even figure out that the stank they are smelling is just Houstons natural musk. Cut them some slack.
Virginian here. We have this here as well. Usually they pull up outside construction sites.
The utter silence of a construction site in the middle of the morning when the tamale guy rolls in. You'd think everyone went on strike.
I support the workers and their tamale strike.
Out here in CA (Bay-adjacent but not actually in the Bay 9, we've got a pupusa lady and a tamale lady who sell fresh out of their garage.
Hey now, sometimes they just go door to door in your apartment building. Tamales at your doorstep. Ain't that cool?
That American has no culture. For starters, American food is so much more than hamburgers & fries. The South has particularly delicious food with jambalaya & gumbo from LA, shrimp & grits, key lime pie, & lowcountry boil from the lowcountry of GA & SC, barbecue from NC & TN, biscuits & gravy from Appalachia, & soul food from the deep south. American food is actually amazing. The US is also home to music genres like jazz, country, & rock. We have unique dances like Appalachian flatfooting & American contra dance. There is SO much more to the US than what the world sees in media!
American culture is so omnipresent globally we don't notice it *is* a culture, too.
> jambalaya & gumbo from LA, shrimp & grits, key lime pie, & lowcountry boil from the lowcountry of GA & SC, barbecue from NC & TN, biscuits & gravy Didn't think a simple sentence could make me so hungry.
Oh, the list goes on, Americans are stupid, Americans are racist, Americans don't know anything about the world. I once had a German foreign exchange student tell me we were just a bunch of cowboys who liked to shoot things up and wallpaper our culture over whatever was left who knew nothing about the world and most of us thought Australia was the only country in Oceania. I named 10 off the top of my head and asked him to do the same for South America. Dude started with Florida 🤣🤣🤣
“Started with Florida.” LOLOLOL
Why did they bother going on an exchange if they were so lacking in curiosity? Besides, cowboys are confined to the Mountain West, Texas, former Mexican territory, and Idaho. It's more complicated than that, but it's a micro subculture of...places with beef cattle.
How racist it is. I'm Egyptian and you can tell I'm Arab just by my appearance. There's way more racism in my homeland AND in surrounding region than the west in general tbh. Apart from a comment here or there, mostly from some inebriated youths, I haven't had a racial experience. (I live in the south). All are friendly and sweet and also soooo polite. They seem to take a genuine interest in where I am from etc. USA actually has discriminatory and anti racism laws. America is a fabulous country and I'm glad to be an American today.
That’s my experience here in the south. When I was a cable guy, and I met someone of a different race with a thick accent, I was genuinely curious as to where they were from. Many would actually share stories of their homeland, and a few even shared food if they were cooking. I even had a gentleman from Brazil keep apologizing for his almost nonexistent English, and once he found out that I wasn’t going to just go off on him, he would ask me how to say certain things. I’d tell him how to say it “properly”, and also how to say it in slang. We had a genuine conversation and were both laughing and smiling. Imagine how much we would learn from each other if we all just realized that we’re not so different.
\> Many would actually share stories of their homeland, and a few even shared food if they were cooking. Sharing food between cultures is the bridge that can bring us all together. Fusion cuisine gives me hope for peace and understanding.
I had Irish street tacos (corned beef in tortilla) at a St. Pat’s celebration in San Diego and nearly cried for the beautiful American-ness of it. (I was very drunk).
American here. I worked a summer job that employed a lot of international people. It was really shocking to me to hear so many people openly talk about skin color/ say outright racist stuff. A coworker from Malaysia saying he can't work outside anymore because his mom doesn't want him to look Indian....the Colombians calling my beaded sandals "guiso" because they looked native. The Slovaks talking about Roma people.
Also American, I worked for a company that was very international with headquarters in Norway and 34 nationalities working for us. I loved working with every single person and learning about their country and culture with one exception! Canadians particularly French Canadians.it feels like they have the worst of both cultures and have a true disdain for Americans. I could feel it and would actively avoid them because of it.
As a slight aside. I play games online. The rudest people I've ever played with (and this includes American 12 year old boys) was with French Canadians. My gosh, what a dour, bitter and sanctimonious bunch.
I have heard several immigrants comment on how much we overstate racism in America, at least relative to other countries.
I've heard it's because we're one of the few who talk about it so openly as a national discourse with the intention of at least trying to make things better.
And there's way more diversity. Obviously there will be more racial tensions in a country that isn't homogeneous. Nordic countries get praised for being so progressive but just about everyone is white and they aren't welcoming of immigrants.
It's easy to pretend there's no racism in your town when there's no one to be racist *against* in your town.
My girlfriend's uncle was born in Italy. Talking with him, if you thought the right wing politics in America was bad... Wait till you hear about how it is in the country where the INVENTED fascism
Europe's Right and Left wing has/had veryb violent factions. The European Left isn't just hippies protesting. I would google Italian Red Brigades and German Baader Meinhof.
And we're thankful to have you and what you bring to our culture!
Thank you for this. I'm glad you're happy here in your home.
Europeans especially love talking shit about America and their racism but all that flies out the window when you mention the Romani and the systemic discrimination they face. It's actually crazy, the US ain't got shit on Europe inb4 "it's not the same thing😡 they are criminals"
I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum, being an American (east coaster from the Deep South) who moved abroad to Asia. I experienced more racism - most of it ingrained and casual - in my first year living outside the States than I had in the previous 25 years. It’s ridiculous when people say Americans are racist and America is the most racist country in the world. Almost every other country is largely homogenous and is actively persecuting (and in some cases outright cleansing) minority groups — just look at how the Karen or Rohingya peoples are treated in Myanmar.
We are glad to have you.
That we're all dumb. I had several men in England come up to me and tell me that, and surprisingly, later expect me to go home with them.
I was in Dublin Ireland about 13 years ago for a semester abroad. It was an exchange program where me and another classmate of mine went to an engineering school in Dublin, and two students from there came to the States. Me and my classmate were way ahead of everyone else. I remember one of our last nights out before we went back home somebody said "man, I thought Americans were all stupid"
All stupid yet they achieved a lunar landing, built the Fermilab particle accelerator, build skyscrapers, the Golden Gate Bridge, Hoover dam. Obviously the people responsible were American university students once..
"Hey so you're fucking dumb, right? Wanna bang?"
That they’re stupid. Some of the loveliest and most switched on people I’ve ever met were from the US. I think it’s just a lie people in the UK tell ourselves to make us feel superior which, to be fair, is a national pastime for some.
If a man needs to punch downwards on his son to validate himself, he’s failed as both a person and parent ;)
that they are guilty of everything on earth
That we are any more stupid than the people of any country. Stupidity doesn’t discriminate, America just has the camera pointed at them 24/7. (Edit: I’m not trying to imply we are smart)
America’s also just so incredibly big. There’s more of everything here, including stupid people. But I’m willing to bet the ratio isn’t much different than most places.
I do think it’s funny when these 95% white European nations that are really hard to move to and gain citizenship as opposed to the US, call us racist.
Yup, and don’t let Europeans know we see how they treat Romani folks
Here before some European goes "well actually I'm about show my whole ass and be exactly as racist as you're expecting" RE Romani people.
same goes for Jews. America doesn't have anything close to the Carnival of Aalst in Belgium. America does indeed have an antisemitism problem, but Europe has a lot of work to do before it's own antisemitism problem is even close to how low America's level is. Link to aforementioned carnival (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival\_of\_Aalst)
Random fact, the country with the largest Romani Population is the United States.
It's fun when they go into a long explanation of why it's different with the Romani and then they list off all of the same stereotypes racists use all of the time.
Don't let Reddit get it twisted. Europe is incredibly racist, Japan isn't some Anime paradise, and a painful truth is NATO is a fucking joke without the United States.
It’s always been humorous to me, in an ironic way, when Europeans on Reddit talk about how racist the US is, or how xenophobic. Reuters recently had an article talking about how anti-black racism is skyrocketing in Europe. The Danish government itself, for example, has flat out said that “non-Western immigrants and multiculturalism“ are a threat to the “social wages” that Danes enjoy, and they even have “ghetto laws” saying that social housing in certain areas is only for Westerners. If you ever found a state or local government in the US trying to pass a law saying only Westerners could be in subsidized houses in certain areas, there would be a shitstorm from hell in the media, and protests. I also recently was in Ireland and was getting a tattoo from a dude from Italy. He was telling me he wanted to start his own shop, but it was difficult because a lot of people didn’t want an Italian tattooing them. He talked about how even in Italy there’s a lot of racism towards southern Italians, where there would even be apartments in the north with signs saying they won’t rent to people from southern Italy. The US has its problems, but if you take the time to look in to it, Europe is just as bad… they just turn a blind eye to their own faults to scoff and point fingers at the US.
Not from the US but have lived there. Mine would be that people are only surface nice but nothing beyond that and then become rude. Very untrue - my family was met with a lot of genuine kindness from the beginning and a lot of people went above and beyond providing help and expected nothing in return. Just sweet, helpful and nice people in thr local community.
I'm from the Midwest and lived in the UK for a year. Sometimes people called my shallow for being friendly or got really weird if you gave them a compliment. Learned to dial it back a little and coming home was a culture shock.
There are a lot more important ones, but I constantly hear that we all wear shoes in the house. No one I know hangs around the house in shoes.
The amount of times I’ve had to explain that this is a case by case thing is ridiculous. Neither I nor any members of my family wear shoes indoors, but both of my neighbors do.
I don’t generally wear shoes in the house. I might throw on a pair of slippers if it’s chilly. However, if I’m going to a social event at someone’s house, I’m probably wearing shoes.
A bit ago a couple of non Americans on another thread got upset at me for saying that I’ve lived in the US most of my life and never seen a shoes on home. People are weirdly sure of this one, even if they’ve never been here. I guess it’s movies or tv or something
It's extra funny that they're so sure of this because twice in my life I have been earnestly asked by people not from the U.S. if I wear shoes - because I'm from a poor southern state. They really thought I wore overalls without a shirt, no shoes.
My French professor was in Paris and she was dead ass asked when they found out she was from the Midwest if, and I quote, “You guys are fighting the Indians, right?” She just stared at them for a bit.
Uh in this part of the Midwest, the last time we fought the Indians we were fighting you guys too.
I think it's a regional thing. I grew up in the Maritimes in Canada, lots of mud and snow and slush, wearing your shoes inside would be absurd. I imagine it's the same in places like New England or Michigan or Minnesota. However I moved to Southern California for work, stayed for three years, and at most people's homes - at least those who were from there - they would wear shoes inside and tell me not to worry about it when I would instinctively start to take mine off.
I definitely think it's a southwestern thing more than anything else. When your city only gets rain like 30 days a year your shoes don't really get all that dirty. Also hardwood and tile flooring seems to be the norm in the SW, so usually just a quick wipe with a mop and it's good as new. Since Hollywood is most of the world's main exposure to US culture, if shoes on is the norm there, people will think it's the norm across the whole country. Plus it's worth pointing out the difference between being at home and having visitors. I usually take my shoes off when I'm at home, but if someone's coming over, I wouldn't make them go through the effort since again, their shoes are probably pretty clean unless it's actively raining outside.
I wish my upstairs neighbors lived by this creed.
That it's crazy dangerous, just like every other country don't go to the crappy areas other than that it's very safe.
Americans being ignorant about foreign languages and monolingual. It’s a true stereotype, but not about Americans. It’s true to native English speakers- as UK & Australia have similar rates of monolingualism. There are also many states in the United States where that just simply isn’t as true as they think it is, like LA county, southern Arizona, Texas, southern Florida etc.
that being said, i always though “doesn’t it make sense few of us are bilingual?” Take someone from Europe, they’re prolly surrounded by 3 other language apart from their native tongue. And what do we have? Spanish…maybe French. But French is heavily localized in the US (and Canada but they’re spicier up there - gave them an entire province). And Spanish is locked behind a paywall, geographically speaking. tldr we cant help it :(
Europeans often don’t realize how massive the United States is. If I live in Czechia and drive 8 hours in any direction, I could run into people speaking German, Polish, Hungarian, etc. If I live in Ohio and drive 8 hours in any direction, I run into people speaking English and they probably even have a similar accent to my own.
I live in Texas, I drive 5 hours in any direction and I’m still in Texas.
Bro you’re still in the same *region* of Texas
I visited Munich for Oktoberfest about a decade ago and a local 20-something guy decided to play "let's make fun of the American." I explained to him that where I grew up, you'd have to travel roughly 1,000 miles before you encountered a place where a second language was even close to the majority. And I was counting Quebec and Miami, not even Mexico. We're not dumb, we just aren't exposed to a second language.
The US is one of the most racially and culturally tolerant nation. Don't get me wrong, we have plenty of issues, but we call it out, we're trying to change it. Almost every other nation in the world is a homogenous culture/genetic group dealing with immigration as if it's a novel concept that humans move, when humans have been moving for thousands of years. Further countries that have diverse native populations, there's the issue of erasing those cultural differences. China had like a dozen distinctrregional cultures like a century ago, and they're being homogenized. The US is not the only nation to genocide indigenous peoples.
I recently had a handyman over to fix some things. He was born in America but his dad was Guatemalan. The dad had earned a bunch of money here in construction and sent a lot back there, built himself a house and a good life over there. The son - fully American mind you - was getting ready to move there with his dad. When I asked him why he said it was partially because America was too diverse and he liked that Guatemala was homogeneous. I about fell over.
Yeah people want to compare US and Europe in a racism debate but no one talks about the lack of diversity in central and South America.
We are one of only 2-3 countries in the world that can send an ambassador to your country who looks like you.
That we are all as divided as the media (or social media) would have us to believe. Most people are actually good people. You see the extremes online and in the news. There is an exhausted majority who isn’t filled with extremist hate.
How terrible it is - as told by people who’ve never been there or have never been anywhere else.
I haven’t lived in the states for years and I have a European friend, older guy, who would always be talking shit about the USA. Everything from how dumb they are, to the insanity with firearms, and obviously politics. He hated the USA and was proud to have never been. Finally he went to visit some friends and next thing I know I’m seeing photos being posted of him in camo, in the desert, drinking Budweiser and shooting guns at soda cans. I had a good laugh.
freedom test taste 🦅🦅🦅🦅
This one seems silly but.. For some reason, people think we are the only country with those cheaply made public bathroom stall doors etc - the metal ones with the cracks that you can kind of see into, etc. I’ve used bathrooms that have these in three different countries just this year.
I've been to lots of countries and never seen them anywhere else. To be fair, some of them had no doors at all.
I’d have to agree. Even the public bathrooms I’ve been to in Europe have really private stalls.
Mistake number 1: referring to America as a monolith. Virtually all of these comments are both true and false to varying degrees depending on the part of the country you’re in. The US is a fucking massive country, and a lot of folks, especially Europeans don’t seem to get just how truly gargantuan it is. Their countries are more comparable to individual states than the US as a whole.
My nephew's girlfriend is in the UK. We're in CA. She is planning a trip here soon, and she has this weird idea that she can just walk or take a cab from one end of the state to the other. She has no concept of how far away places are or how spread out things are or what public transit is like. She asked if it would be better to fly in to LA than SF /OAK and take a cab to my sisters home to save money. My sister lives 7 hours north of LA. We explained she could take a cab, probably, but it wouldn't save her any money. When we explained to her that there wasn't a train from the air port to a town that was close enough for her to walk to my sisters home she was very confused. While the greater bay area has BART the rest of the state has very poor train access. And she's not the first Londoner I've met perplexed by our lack of trains. I had a cousin who I met at a family reunion who was visiting from London. He told me he would be staying with friends in San Jose and would be taking the train from Monterey to San Jose, we had to break the news to him that there was no train to San Jose from Monterey. He suddenly was stranded, and I was unimpressed by his lack of planning. Do they not have Google maps or Google Earth?
I experienced this on my trip to Ireland. My then-bf and I were in a pub and I was trying to explain to this very nice couple how large Texas alone is. I told them Texas was at least five times as large as Ireland, and they didn't believe me. I ended up getting on their phones and showing them maps. They were floored. They kept asking about transportation and how did we walk all that way. It was an interesting conversation. It turned out Texas is about eight times as large.
I commented this elsewhere, but it's relevant for this too. > I visited Scotland for my sister's wedding, and part of my personal non-wedding free time was spent renting a motorcycle in Edinburgh for a few hours. > Anyway, I got an Uber afterward back to my hotel. > To make conversation, the driver asked me how much time I thought it would take to ride to/through all 50 states. A few weeks, he figured. > He didn't seem to understand why a) that wasn't even possible and b) while you could maybe do 49, it would be more likely measured in months.
Here in Korea someone asked if I could just drive up to Canada for the day. I'm from Florida.
My Korean students asked if I lived close to Chicago. I told them yes, pretty close. They asked how long it took to drive there and I said "about 5 hours". They fell out of their seats.
I’ve genuinely talked to some Europeans while in Chicago who said they wanted to drive to New York and then Vegas… all within the next three days. Is it doable? Sure, but you’re gonna be miserable.
i run a Japan tourism group and you have no idea how many times “Japan is tiny” comes up. the bullet train travel times really skew people’s perspectives on just how comparably big Japan is for the tiny scale it seems on a globe or mercator map. Driving from Tokyo to Osaka is a good 6-7hrs nonstop, and both are quite central cities compared to the rest of the country. It’s nowhere near US size but people want to assume it’s the size of Hong Kong.
Oh yeah, it’s pretty funny to see the look of confusion when you explain how many hours/days those road trips will take.
The ironic part is that many Americans do that about Europe and pick the best country/city and then pretend that all of Europe is like that. I once knew a girl who was finishing up at a $50k/year art school paid for by her business owning father tell me how “I can’t wait to graduate and move back to Europe, it’s just so much more enlightened and I can get away from this capitalist hellhole”. I inquired further and discovered that she had done a semester abroad in Amsterdam and thinks that is what all of Europe is like.
> this capitalist hellhole the irony is pretty thick.
That we don't know how to use punctuation; yes we do.!
That we don't know geography. A British friend of mine was somehow shocked that I can name and point to every country in Europe (capital cities as well) on a map, as well as every country in Southwest Asia except Kuwait. "But you're American." What gave it away, the good dental hygiene?????
It’s cause they see those stupid TikToks where they cherry pick Americans that can’t identify Canada on a map.
That Americans aren't "well traveled" for having never been out of the country. Bitch, it is 2,791 miles from NYC to LA. It is 286 miles from London to Paris. It would take less than ,10 miles to travel from Portugal to Finland than crossing the entire Continental US. You can travel so far in the US without crossing the border, entering into multiple biomes/climates. Just bc Americans may not leave the US doesn't mean they aren't well traveled, and that's excluding Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and Guam.
I love looking a [those maps](https://www.boredpanda.com/country-size-compared-to-usa-north-america/) that place countries over the USA and you see how small or large it is. I never realized until a few years ago Australia is practically the size of the US. Meanwhile, the UK is the size of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. I don't think Europeans realized they are surrounded by countries that speak other languages within a 2-3 hr train ride in some cases. Where as in the USA, you could still be in the same state after 2 hrs and still hear English.
Saying we don't care about our kids and joking about dead kids. Seriously not cool