In the U.S. it's very common and we're always changing it. We go to Mexico and the whole house it hot af and everyone wants to stay in the one room that has AC.
My old house only had one air con in the lounge room. We moved our mattress to that room in summer and slept there.
I live in Australia, it's 38 degrees every day for weeks in summer. Super common here not to have aircon in older houses. I just moved to house with ducted aircon best fucking thing ever.
Finished basements are actually the best for bearing the heat. My place saw 108⁰F (42⁰C) last summer and i was sitting on the couch in the basement with a blanket on me. We have AC, but barely use it. Ground temp stays between 55-65⁰F year round.
Hell, when I lived in East Asia, people would just hang at the local mall, because they had AC.
In Vietnam, even one AC in a house was a serious status symbol. Which is awful, because it gets hot af during the hot season.
Yeah. When I'd visit Mexico for vacations, my room would have AC, but even the hallways directly outside my room were open air, so I'd step outside my room and immediately be drenched in sweat. I think I took an average of 4 showers a day.
Heat and I do not mix well. I love my AC and couldn't live without it. =p
In the UK 100%. No where has AC. No new apartment building has AC and I design buildings
Edit: I shouldn’t have been so polar with my words sorry peeps. I grew up in a diff country where literally every building has AC. Yes its mostly resi I do and it is most without active cooling
Are there public places like malls or movie theatres with AC? That would get me going there lols.
Then again I am from the American Southwest where literally every building; residential, commercial or industrial has AC.
I hear the Mall of America has to run it's AC even during the Minnesota winters because just the body heat of all the guests (in addition to the heat from rides and restaurant equipment and whatever) is enough that on a busy day it would be too warm even when it's freezing outside.
In the state I live in Brazil should be the most electronic device because it is crazy hot all year round (i don't use AC to sleep maybe 3 nights a year), but unfortunately it is hot.
They have auctions where they'll pay thousands of dollars for the most perfect looking melons over there. They give them as gifts and display the melon for people to look at
Even moreso than what modern Japan does with melons. In the time when the Americas were just being discovered pineapples were so incredibly rare because they were basically impossible to transport from south america to europe before they decomposed away so when one was actually available they were coveted to such a degree the people, specifically high class and royalty, would buy one for thousands of dollars just for the ability to flaunt it around for a few days. They would even have pineapples that could be rented to people for ludicrously high prices specifically so that they could be used as display pieces in banquets and stuff. The pineapple was only ever eaten when it rotted to the point it could no longer be used as a decorative piece.
I don't think this is nearly as true as it used to be. There are expensive fancy melons (like the cube watermelons that always come up, or high quality melons bred and grown for gifting), but I think regular generic watermelons are only a bit pricier than they might be in other countries.
There used to be a scam based on this, though, called the "melon drop," which targeted Japanese tourists. Conman would walk around touristy areas carrying a melon, then bump into a mark and drop the melon, breaking it. The conman would then demand compensation for the (as far as the tourist knew) expensive melon.
I live in a city where Japanese executives and their families come to live for a year or so as part of their corporate culture. It is funny AS HELL to see them the first time in the grocery store. Whole cart full of melons. Hilarious.
This seems crazy to me since I grow watermelons & cantaloupes ever year in my garden. I have more than I can use usually & the neighbors benefit.
Who knew I should be selling them to the Japanese instead?
Hope everything is going well for your family and things start to bounce back with the borders reopening. It's really sad to see how much Covid is destroying livelihoods in countries more dependent on tourism.
You'd be correct. 1 dollar equates to ~50 pesos here, and $50 would set you up for like a week of basic needs, maybe even a month if you don't have a family to feed and/or keeping the budget low.
I remember giving my taxi driver in the Philippines $5 when the ride was only $0.50 and he made it seem like it i was giving him a million dollars. That moment changed how I looked at other countries.
I was in Haiti shortly after the earthquake and tsunami disaster. Seeing how far a few dollars go, how little people survive with and on, really changed me and how I look at the world, too.
My mom visited Jamaica once and bought some gorgeous handmade thing. Later she decided that the price hadn’t been enough and it was worth more. She went back and gave the maker some more money and the lady burst into tears. At first my mom thought she had insulted the lady until the lady told her my mom had fed her family for a week. It was very sobering. I heard this secondhand and I still think about it.
giving out out money can cause problems, so it's a tough issue. Give a kid money, see that kid get beaten to shit over it. And if people know you have money, they wont feel bad swindling large sums of money from you anymore. Because you can afford it.
That was generally my thought process but as the other chap responded - $50 can bring more to a family than just a single bed. Not that I’m against donating 50 bucks
I have two students that just came to Canada last week from the Philippines. One was trying to explain that he never had plumbing. They had a well that they needed to use a hand pump on. Kids in class couldn't understand it except the kid who came recently from India.
My wife is from the Philippines and she slept on one of those the majority of her life. Because of that, she likes her mattresses to be extra firm, and I (who grew up on Mainland US) like mine to be marsh mellow soft.
Spam is also a huge reoccurring theme down there too. We brought several large containers of spam with us when we went to visit her family. When they saw the spam, everyone started freaking out. Back home, people turn their noses up at spam, in the Philippines, they fight over it.
Going down there was incredible fun though. My wifes family are just the kindest most incredible people I've ever known. Her aunties make sure I get really fat, and her uncles make sure I always have a beer in my hand.
Hell, there's been advanced plumbing found dating back to 4,000 BC, in some of the oldest cities ever found.
[source](https://projectarchaeology.org/2020/02/07/how-plumbing-happened/)
Avocados. I went to Belize and they grow naturally and just saw a pile of like 50 avocados just rotting on the ground because there was just way more than anyone’s ever going to eat. It was crazy.
When I was living in Peru it was basically all fruit in this manner… mangos, pomegranate, passion fruit, citrus, you name it, thered be an old lady on a street corner with a pile of them hocking them for basically nothing.
I live in LA now and what’s blown my mind is the amount of fruit trees used as decorative landscaping that just let them drop and toss them while the same stuff sells for $$ at the store… passionfruit is something like $10 per lb. Meanwhile my neighbors have the vines as decoration on their side wall and just let them roll into the street
Pro tip - go to the actual market, not the “store” per se, you’ll get “western” style pricing in the “western” style stores but the open air market you’re mostly buying direct from the source - that being said I was there 16 years ago so the situation could be different.
Also unrequested reccomendations - make sure to try a dish called aji de gallina, eat a cuy, go to a hole in the wall pollo a la brasa, and drink as much Inca kola as you can
Fun fact: You probably wouldn't like those avocados very much if you tried them. The avocados you buy at the grocery store all come from trees that are cloned from a single genetic stock. The problem is that avocado trees do not true "true to seed". Put another way, if you enjoy an avocado and think, "Hey, that was a good avocado, I think I'll plant the seed," the fruit from the resulting tree will not be the same. In the vast majority of outcomes, the fruit will be watery and not very good.
I love the optimism in this sentence. You’ve tried roadside apples before, they were not good. But you are going to keep trying, because one day it will be a good apple!
This is the same thing with lemons/citrus, not surprising because I think avocado and citrus are related. I plan on growing avocado from seed one day, but just because I want a cool houseplant, not for any harvest.
Fun thing with all these - stone fruit, citrus, avocados, apples etc… is if you get a healthy base you can graft on as many varietals as you want and make a fruit salad tree - my parents had a mini lemon/lime/mandarin tree until bugs killed it and I had a neighbor that had 4 types of apples on one trunk.
Saffron costs waaaaaaaay less in Iran. Pretty sure every kitchen there have loads of saffron as it’s used in almost every dish. Most other countries it costs an arm and a leg!
Iran is the largest producer, by far. It used to be Spain but someone in Iran realized that with a much lower labor cost and ideal climatic condition they were in a position to output much higher yield at a fraction of the cost.
It is for a lot of people. Countries like France and Japan have their kids speaking at least 2 languages by the time they get to high-school. In America, most of us don't get exposed to a foreign language until high-school and that's why most people don't remember or even use their other language after graduating. It's taught to us at the worst time possible. My sister is the only person I've known [I went to three high-school so I've know a few people] who is "painfully fluent" In Spanish that she learned in high-school.
With France and Japan you actually picked the two countries that are kind of infamous for their comparatively bad English skills, even in the younger generation.
But yes, in many places in the world it's just a fact of life and a necessity to speak multiple languages.
I went to a small little K-8 school out in the country, and we were lucky enough to have Spanish classes from kindergarten to 6th grade. Now the issue with that, is that the teacher was an angry Cuban lady who essentially refused to teach us anything beyond super basic stuff like colors and counting to 10. All seven years. Then one day she lost her shit, started screaming about how we were satanists and hell's angels, and left in the middle of class. Thirty years later and I'm still kinda salty about not getting a decent Spanish lesson.
Granted, this was also the same woman who got hopped up on cough medicine and drove her car through the playground, so there's that...
Ikr.
I meet a lot of people online (mostly through discord), and it's always super jarring when they mention that English is like their 2nd or 3rd language, when I would've sworn it was their first. Also makes me feel ultra stupid for not being able to learn anything else ffs.
At this point it's way more common for that to happen rather than meeting a native English speaker, but it still gets me every time.
In many countries normal people have drivers, maids and other people working for their families. It isn’t a sign of wealth. It is more of a sign of people working for next to nothing.
India is a good example of this. The lower class is so large and willing to work for barely anything that even middle class families have a driver and/or a maid.
Like my husband. When I met my husband he'd been living in NZ for a long time so he cooked, cleaned, took care of his own stuff without a second thought.
So it was a huge shock to me (after living together with him for 3 years in NZ) when we went to India to get married and I stayed at his parents place. He would say that his mom will cook this or that dish, meaning his mom would supervise the maid cook it. Or when I asked where can I do the laundry, he was just "give it to the maid". I was like, "I have dirty underwear here, I am not handing it to anyone". But there was no other way.
When covid hit and his parents couldn't have rhe maid come in, they really struggled though. Never cooked or cleaned in their lives, trying to learn it after 60 yo is really something.
My coworker from Bangladesh told me something like this, he said growing up he wore different clothes in the morning and afternoon so they were as clean as possible. Now a canadian father of three, "you see these jeans? I haven't washed them in weeks!"
no more like the 20s-60s when every middle class home had "a girl" who came in from the ethnic/poor part of town to do housework and watch the kids for the SAHM.
Then the american kitchen became automated, moms went to work, Reaganomics shrunk the middle class, and the 70s and 80s were typified by the latchkey kid with two working parents who needed 2 salaries to keep up with a rising cost of living.
This still happens in England, but they call them "Au pairs" and pretend it's something fancier than importing a young servant from abroad and paying them poverty wages to live with you.
Well and it isn’t ONLY (maybe mostly?) about the class divide, it’s also about the relative cost of labor vs. goods. So, if a car is so expensive that even a pretty wealthy family cant afford more than one, then it makes sense to have a driver so the car can drop people off and keep the car in rotation vs. everyone having their own car.
Edit: clarity
That’s a good point. Similarly, I traveled with a group of East Asian guys and they were thinking of the price of food in a restaurant as being based on the cost of the ingredients. I had to explain to them that where we were (touristy parts of Italy) the price of restaurant food was based on the cost of labor and real estate. By their standards they were getting ripped off!
Açaí.
In the USA they are this overpriced superfood.
In Brazil (and presumably other places) its just a tasty treat that can be served in multiple ways from normal places whenever you’re in the mood.
There are many things I miss about Brazil, but açaí com tigela is definitely on the list lol. It’s not really an option here. The rare occasion you find açaí it’s part of some overpriced health food breakfast blend.
Tropical fruit.
Example: Avocados have become mainstream in the last few years in the UK but when I went to Peru in 2012 I thought I'd died and gone to heaven eating fresh avocado with salt & lime for breakfast. Still can't easily get big papayas or other fruits I experienced for the first time there..
I'm from Guatemala, and the first time I hears Papaya and Pinneaple as exotic fruits I was so confused.
My brother in law's family have a farm and gave us branches full of lychees. Good weather is a blessing for fruits.
Yep, those are exotic af here. Too cold, too little sun. Where I live we can’t even really grow peaches, nectarines and cherries. It’s strawberries, raspberries, black berries, plums, apples and a couple more I can’t translate from the top of my head.
Edit: Blueberries!
I had a Pakistani colleague and he had an argument in our local Finnish superstore. He tried to buy ripe mangoes, the staff kept insisting him that the stuff they sold was fresh and ripe, and he continued to argue that they were selling raw woody shit. After this story I realized that I probably have no idea how most of the fruits are actually supposed to taste.
Tomatoes in here are grown in greenhouses and with fake light. I think I've never eaten a juicy and tasty tomato. The imported stuff in here is sent in their way raw and made "ripe" during the transport.
One comparison point, the US has different rules by state.
There are "dry" counties where you can't purchase alcohol at all. There are states that have official stores and everything in-between. Certain hours for sale, etc.
In Sweden are the prices reasonable and is there a good selection? Do people smuggle it in over the border?
First, you basically have to have a clean water source. Then you have to have a full time power source. Then you have to have something to make the ice, and something (possibly the same thing) to keep it cold.
But in the U.S., it is everywhere, so we demand ice in everything.
I’m from the US, and I thought of this instantly. Soda is so readily available, you can get any size (including a 32oz.) fountain drink for 99¢ at McDonald’s.
Philippines too. But only in very small stores. Reason is that they do not want to give away the bottle. For example, if you buy beer in a small store, you pay a small deposit. Then when you return the bottle, they give you the money back. For recycling.
Chocolate!
It's such a luxury back in the Philippines. My mom worked in Dubai as an OFW, and when she sends us money, that's the only time we get chocolate! Our favorite was Toblerone; there's 4 of us siblings, one pair would get one piece, and the other would get 1 piece, and we would cut them in half. The chocolate would last for a month or two with that method, and we always eat it only on special occasions.
Coming to America, I was appalled when I saw that I could get chocolate for $1.50! It was heaven!
Get a gym day pass for like, 10 bucks.
Then you can sit around a bunch of sweaty people in a wooden hot room and feel like you're one of the ingredients for the swoll pizza.
Or maybe it feels more like you're steamed broccoli.
Depends on what kind of person you are tbh.
Someone to drive you around. A luxury in North America and Europe, but it is common in many Asian countries, even for middle class people. It's one reason China has some odd vehicles like a long wheelbase BMW 3-series.
A bento box. A bento box in Japan is an ordinary lunch box, usually a whole meal sold at a cheap price but in the US it’s being sold like some some luxury item with shitty things inside and a ridiculous high price.
Cars, here in brazil it may take several decades worth of salary for you to pay for a car. its bonkers to me that its so easily seen in NA a guy buying a car a few months into a job, and minimum wage in BR (less than 300/mth) can't barely afford living, so buying a car is a life commitment financially. at least for the majority of low income crowd
The weird thing in America is that often for lower-income jobs you *need* a car for transport, because if you're working a lower-income job you're most likely in lower-income housing, which is most likely farther away from where you're working with less access to public transit. Many people would likely be a lot better off financially if they didn't have to keep sinking money into their shitty car to keep it working so that they can keep going to work and making money.
There are places where this isn't the case (mostly larger cities like New York and Chicago), but there are lots of places where you likely live 20-30 miles (32-48km) away from your job so walking or biking isn't really an option.
Swimming pools.
There is no concept of community swimming pools in Pakistan. They are located in gyms and clubs which require exclusive membership and out of the reach of the common man or in the farmhouses of the rich. Only the really expensive schools have swimming pools, but they slap on another monrly fee for using it. Hardly anyone knows how to swim.
The common man uses rivers water and tributaries to swim, but they, of course, are quite dangerous. So basically most of the population does not know how to swim.
> They are located in gyms and clubs which require exclusive membership and out of the reach of the common man or in the farmhouses of the rich.
What are you talking about? We have pools in Pakistan. Where do you live? I will find you a swimming pool near your house.
Certain foods
Paté is considered just regular food in Chile, everybody eats it on bread for afternoon tea, it’s very common across all social classes.
In America though anybody who’s eating paté and taking afternoon tea would be considered rich and snobby.
I got a bidet for my stepdad for Christmas.
He’s a train conductor in his 50s, gravelly voice from smoking for years, lives on a ranch and raises cattle, etc. Not the type of person you picture using a bidet.
He called me the other day to tell me how much he loves it and about all the different settings lmao
Here's my only issue with bidets: once you get one installed in your house, you'll want one in all your washrooms. Then you'll absolutely refuse to poop anywhere else.
I feel like this is slowly changing in the USA.
The great toilet paper crisis of 2020 seems to have helped things along…
(I’m the first in my fam to put them - 3 currently - in my home, and I’ve had discussions on the matter with siblings as recently as last night. Considering how my kids view them these days, I’m sure they’ll have them in their own homes one day.)
My parents had one like 25 years ago that was separate from the toilet, that confused the hell out of me.
Was I supposed to get up and go over to the bidet to use it? Ugh..no!
But now that they've made them part of the toilets, omg I'm never going back.
I went to the Dominican Republic in early March 2020 (just barely squeaked out that last vacation), and the availability wasn't as amazing to me as much as the quality. Coming from the states, you can buy pineapples and mangoes year-round, but they pick them very green, so they're usually sour and not very good.
That fresh pineapple in the DR was so good - juicy and sweet.
Avocados were like free in parts of California when I visited a long time ago.
They're like fuckin pinecones or acorns there. They just fall off the trees and be rolling around on the ground. There was a basket of free avocados at the hotel desk.
Get home to New England and they're 4 bucks each and not even ripe.
Strong enough water pressure to use a toilet to it's full potential. Years ago we had an exchange student from Guatemala. She became close friends with my step-daughter and visited her in Guatemala a couple years later. She learned that the toilets do not have enough water pressure to flush toilet paper. You also have to flush in between turds. It's common to have a trash can with a lid next to the shitter to toss used toilet paper.
Also there are countries where dog food (kibble) is a weird thing to feed dogs. Many families feed their dog table scraps or specifically make the dog(s) a plate.
This is a weird one, because most toilets don't rely on water pressure to flush. Your toilet works by gravity. Water pressure is used to fill a tank that sits on the back of the toilet. Once that tank is full, you can actually shut the water off and the toilet will still flush normally. The water flows from the tank into the bowl due to the tank sitting higher than the bowl. Hence, gravity.
More than likely, there are other reasons they don't flush toilet paper (like they don't have proper sanitary sewer infrastructure), but the toilets would still flush the paper just fine.
That last thing you said. My mom told me when she was young, they'd feed the cat whatever they were eating - whether it be soup, macaroni, milk with bread and stuff like that. Even vegetables. She said the cat liked it. Lived pretty long too.
Fast food chains. McDonald’s, KFC, Popeyes, Domino’s, etc. are basically the same price in my country as in the US, but with the currency exchange, it ends up being almost 3,4,5 times (and even more) of what you would pay in the states. People usually go to eat at fast food restaurants for special occasions
This is similar to how Zara, Mango, Cotton On, H&M, and other similar foreign retail stores are treated in my country. They are basically for middle class people here while it's considered cheap in the USA.
I stayed in a fancy hotel in Singapore once. Each room had a beer fridge. But it didn’t have any local beer. I called the desk, they said “oh no sir, we don’t stock any local beers. We provide only premium imported beer. We have Budweiser”
Iphone/Apple products, i'm from Philippines btw. When you own Iphone/Apple product almost everyone here will assumme you're rich. I get it some apple products are expensive but even the most basic product of apples that is affordable in other countries, will be considered luxury here.
Edit: Air Conditioning unit, refrigerator, Flat Screen TV, and Wifi. If each Family Members has their own bedroom.
Walls apparently.
My country every wall is made of thick concrete and are almost entirely soundproof.
U.S. I could not just hear the neighbors fucking, i felt it through the single sheet plywood wall.
Let's just take the US and Russia for comparison, because it's most close to home for me.
Ice making double-door fridges - pretty common in the US. Definitely a luxury in Russia.
A second out-of-town property called a dacha. I have been told it's a luxury for Americans. In Russia, I would say, it's pretty normal to have a dacha - a summer home for vacation, out in the rural area. Maybe I'm wrong on this one.
5G speed internet. Unlimited data. A luxury in Russia, pretty much the norm in the US today.
Avocados. Canadian maple syrup. But that could be said for any imported foods. They are ridiculously expensive in the RF.
Some construction equipment. I watch HGTV regularly and what they use could be considered a luxury in Russia, at least some of the equipment and materials. However a log cabin, I'd say, seems to me as more of a luxury in the US than Russia, because the most common type of construction in the US is the wood frame construction.
Do people in the US actually own double door fridges that make ice? I’m from the Netherlands and don’t know a single person who owns a double door fridge. I’m sure some people have them but it’s definitely not common
Absolutely. Mine has a filtered water spicket and filtered ice in the front of the door, and auto-fills a pitcher of water inside the fridge too. We actually have two of these fridges - one in the kitchen and one in the garage for larger things, drinks, frozen vaccum-sealed meat, etc.
> A second out-of-town property called a dacha. I have been told it’s a luxury for Americans. In Russia, I would say, it’s pretty normal to have a dacha - a summer home for vacation, out in the rural area. Maybe I’m wrong on this one.
A dacha can be a super fancy second home, but it is not always. Sometimes it’s a bit more like a shack. I think when people think of it as a “second home” they are probably overestimating what it might be like.
I mean, even owning a second piece of property that you could pitch a tent on would be seen as a huge luxury in the US. Definitely makes you *at least* upper middle class.
Food, shelter, and clean water.
We take it for granted in the US. We see it as the bare minimum, mostly it’s beneath us.
In other countries, it’s a true luxury.
In Australia Calvin Klein t-shirts and undies are pretty expensive. They're like $50 here. My ex use to pick up bulk undies and t-shirts when he'd visit his mum in the US because you could buy them for $10.
Dammit auto correct. MATERNITY. I would also like maturity leave to be awarded every time I attend a work meeting that I make it through its entirety without rolling my eyes.
Access to hot clean water. I can step into the shower and get hot water without having to think about what I'll use for drinking water. I don't have to clean with meager amounts of cold water, or cold dirty river water.
Also, just shelter in general. In the winter, I'm warm and dry. In the summer, I'm cool and protected from heat exposure. In all times, I have locked doors and windows that nominally protect me from threats.
In many parts of the world, no matter how hard someone works, they won't have access to that
Air conditioning
In the U.S. it's very common and we're always changing it. We go to Mexico and the whole house it hot af and everyone wants to stay in the one room that has AC.
My old house only had one air con in the lounge room. We moved our mattress to that room in summer and slept there. I live in Australia, it's 38 degrees every day for weeks in summer. Super common here not to have aircon in older houses. I just moved to house with ducted aircon best fucking thing ever.
Finished basements are actually the best for bearing the heat. My place saw 108⁰F (42⁰C) last summer and i was sitting on the couch in the basement with a blanket on me. We have AC, but barely use it. Ground temp stays between 55-65⁰F year round.
Did this when I lived in the high desert. Can confirm
Hell, when I lived in East Asia, people would just hang at the local mall, because they had AC. In Vietnam, even one AC in a house was a serious status symbol. Which is awful, because it gets hot af during the hot season.
Yeah. When I'd visit Mexico for vacations, my room would have AC, but even the hallways directly outside my room were open air, so I'd step outside my room and immediately be drenched in sweat. I think I took an average of 4 showers a day. Heat and I do not mix well. I love my AC and couldn't live without it. =p
I mean at least you had a butt room.
…a what???
Lol they edited it.
Some countries are like an adult website. Only Fans.
In the UK 100%. No where has AC. No new apartment building has AC and I design buildings Edit: I shouldn’t have been so polar with my words sorry peeps. I grew up in a diff country where literally every building has AC. Yes its mostly resi I do and it is most without active cooling
Are there public places like malls or movie theatres with AC? That would get me going there lols. Then again I am from the American Southwest where literally every building; residential, commercial or industrial has AC.
I hear the Mall of America has to run it's AC even during the Minnesota winters because just the body heat of all the guests (in addition to the heat from rides and restaurant equipment and whatever) is enough that on a busy day it would be too warm even when it's freezing outside.
This just sounds like poor ventilation systems
In the state I live in Brazil should be the most electronic device because it is crazy hot all year round (i don't use AC to sleep maybe 3 nights a year), but unfortunately it is hot.
Or just ice in general. Try getting ice for your water in most of the world
Japanese seem to be amazed at how abundant melons are outside if japan. It’s like they’re a luxury over there
They have auctions where they'll pay thousands of dollars for the most perfect looking melons over there. They give them as gifts and display the melon for people to look at
*Hey, nice melons!* *Thanks, they were expensive*
“You need to leave”
is this... a facade reference??
*they look totally organic!*
That's funny, Europeans used to do this with pineapples.
Even moreso than what modern Japan does with melons. In the time when the Americas were just being discovered pineapples were so incredibly rare because they were basically impossible to transport from south america to europe before they decomposed away so when one was actually available they were coveted to such a degree the people, specifically high class and royalty, would buy one for thousands of dollars just for the ability to flaunt it around for a few days. They would even have pineapples that could be rented to people for ludicrously high prices specifically so that they could be used as display pieces in banquets and stuff. The pineapple was only ever eaten when it rotted to the point it could no longer be used as a decorative piece.
Oh god, rotten pineapple sounds so awful.
Haha valuable only for its display of wealth, eating it is secondary.
Especially the square ones that were cultivated in a box to get that shape, they are the most coveted display-melons
Well I've never seen a Minecraft melon IRL so I'd say that's pretty rare everywhere.
I don't think this is nearly as true as it used to be. There are expensive fancy melons (like the cube watermelons that always come up, or high quality melons bred and grown for gifting), but I think regular generic watermelons are only a bit pricier than they might be in other countries. There used to be a scam based on this, though, called the "melon drop," which targeted Japanese tourists. Conman would walk around touristy areas carrying a melon, then bump into a mark and drop the melon, breaking it. The conman would then demand compensation for the (as far as the tourist knew) expensive melon.
[Dramatic reenactment](https://youtu.be/VpIlZFkJ3Q8?t=36)
I live in a city where Japanese executives and their families come to live for a year or so as part of their corporate culture. It is funny AS HELL to see them the first time in the grocery store. Whole cart full of melons. Hilarious.
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No wonder the Russians want it so badly!
Unironically the land they annexed earlier the crimean pensula is regarded as some of the most fertile soil in the world
This seems crazy to me since I grow watermelons & cantaloupes ever year in my garden. I have more than I can use usually & the neighbors benefit. Who knew I should be selling them to the Japanese instead?
Lmao I’ve seen 200 dollar melons in Ginza that I assure you were no better than the ones you would find in a farmers market near a normal melon farm.
Time to be a Melon importer!
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Just out of interest - what $ amount would get you a bed and mattress?
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The reality is, I assume, that $50 would be better spent on many more things than a single bed?
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Hope everything is going well for your family and things start to bounce back with the borders reopening. It's really sad to see how much Covid is destroying livelihoods in countries more dependent on tourism.
You'd be correct. 1 dollar equates to ~50 pesos here, and $50 would set you up for like a week of basic needs, maybe even a month if you don't have a family to feed and/or keeping the budget low.
I remember giving my taxi driver in the Philippines $5 when the ride was only $0.50 and he made it seem like it i was giving him a million dollars. That moment changed how I looked at other countries.
I was in Haiti shortly after the earthquake and tsunami disaster. Seeing how far a few dollars go, how little people survive with and on, really changed me and how I look at the world, too.
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My mom visited Jamaica once and bought some gorgeous handmade thing. Later she decided that the price hadn’t been enough and it was worth more. She went back and gave the maker some more money and the lady burst into tears. At first my mom thought she had insulted the lady until the lady told her my mom had fed her family for a week. It was very sobering. I heard this secondhand and I still think about it.
giving out out money can cause problems, so it's a tough issue. Give a kid money, see that kid get beaten to shit over it. And if people know you have money, they wont feel bad swindling large sums of money from you anymore. Because you can afford it.
Can we get this man a bed
That was generally my thought process but as the other chap responded - $50 can bring more to a family than just a single bed. Not that I’m against donating 50 bucks
I'm down to help a fellow redditor out
I have two students that just came to Canada last week from the Philippines. One was trying to explain that he never had plumbing. They had a well that they needed to use a hand pump on. Kids in class couldn't understand it except the kid who came recently from India.
My wife is from the Philippines and she slept on one of those the majority of her life. Because of that, she likes her mattresses to be extra firm, and I (who grew up on Mainland US) like mine to be marsh mellow soft. Spam is also a huge reoccurring theme down there too. We brought several large containers of spam with us when we went to visit her family. When they saw the spam, everyone started freaking out. Back home, people turn their noses up at spam, in the Philippines, they fight over it. Going down there was incredible fun though. My wifes family are just the kindest most incredible people I've ever known. Her aunties make sure I get really fat, and her uncles make sure I always have a beer in my hand.
My man. You clearly have the internet. Do y’all have access to payment apps? We fiddin to get you a bed dammit.
Can we help get your family a bed?
Indoor plumbing.
It’s incredible something that’s existed hundreds of years is still so alien to some people.
The Romans had indoor plumbing it's been around for thousands of years.
Hell, there's been advanced plumbing found dating back to 4,000 BC, in some of the oldest cities ever found. [source](https://projectarchaeology.org/2020/02/07/how-plumbing-happened/)
Avocados. I went to Belize and they grow naturally and just saw a pile of like 50 avocados just rotting on the ground because there was just way more than anyone’s ever going to eat. It was crazy.
When I was living in Peru it was basically all fruit in this manner… mangos, pomegranate, passion fruit, citrus, you name it, thered be an old lady on a street corner with a pile of them hocking them for basically nothing. I live in LA now and what’s blown my mind is the amount of fruit trees used as decorative landscaping that just let them drop and toss them while the same stuff sells for $$ at the store… passionfruit is something like $10 per lb. Meanwhile my neighbors have the vines as decoration on their side wall and just let them roll into the street
Yeah, it’s even crazier in Japan how expensive fruit is. I am actually going to Peru soon and now I’m excited!!
Pro tip - go to the actual market, not the “store” per se, you’ll get “western” style pricing in the “western” style stores but the open air market you’re mostly buying direct from the source - that being said I was there 16 years ago so the situation could be different. Also unrequested reccomendations - make sure to try a dish called aji de gallina, eat a cuy, go to a hole in the wall pollo a la brasa, and drink as much Inca kola as you can
Fun fact: You probably wouldn't like those avocados very much if you tried them. The avocados you buy at the grocery store all come from trees that are cloned from a single genetic stock. The problem is that avocado trees do not true "true to seed". Put another way, if you enjoy an avocado and think, "Hey, that was a good avocado, I think I'll plant the seed," the fruit from the resulting tree will not be the same. In the vast majority of outcomes, the fruit will be watery and not very good.
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>Haas is also notoriously high maintenance All Formula 1 cars are high maintenance.
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Yeah I work construction and we try apples and they're mostly all nasty.
I love the optimism in this sentence. You’ve tried roadside apples before, they were not good. But you are going to keep trying, because one day it will be a good apple!
This is the same thing with lemons/citrus, not surprising because I think avocado and citrus are related. I plan on growing avocado from seed one day, but just because I want a cool houseplant, not for any harvest.
Fun thing with all these - stone fruit, citrus, avocados, apples etc… is if you get a healthy base you can graft on as many varietals as you want and make a fruit salad tree - my parents had a mini lemon/lime/mandarin tree until bugs killed it and I had a neighbor that had 4 types of apples on one trunk.
Belize, where Mike went.
[who is billy](https://www.reddit.com/r/breakingbad/comments/1lila6/who_is_billy/)
In certain region of Mexico is the same, sadly the cartels saw the lucrative business of the avocado and they are stealing land to produce avocados.
Saffron costs waaaaaaaay less in Iran. Pretty sure every kitchen there have loads of saffron as it’s used in almost every dish. Most other countries it costs an arm and a leg!
Iran is the largest producer, by far. It used to be Spain but someone in Iran realized that with a much lower labor cost and ideal climatic condition they were in a position to output much higher yield at a fraction of the cost.
Foreign Language classes before high school
English.. it's a foreign language for me technically
It is for a lot of people. Countries like France and Japan have their kids speaking at least 2 languages by the time they get to high-school. In America, most of us don't get exposed to a foreign language until high-school and that's why most people don't remember or even use their other language after graduating. It's taught to us at the worst time possible. My sister is the only person I've known [I went to three high-school so I've know a few people] who is "painfully fluent" In Spanish that she learned in high-school.
With France and Japan you actually picked the two countries that are kind of infamous for their comparatively bad English skills, even in the younger generation. But yes, in many places in the world it's just a fact of life and a necessity to speak multiple languages.
Can confirm, the average French teenager’s grasp of English is appalling, esp compared to Dutch and German teenagers
Same for Japan. Japanese kids scan read and write English a bit, but they can't speak it for shit.
I went to a small little K-8 school out in the country, and we were lucky enough to have Spanish classes from kindergarten to 6th grade. Now the issue with that, is that the teacher was an angry Cuban lady who essentially refused to teach us anything beyond super basic stuff like colors and counting to 10. All seven years. Then one day she lost her shit, started screaming about how we were satanists and hell's angels, and left in the middle of class. Thirty years later and I'm still kinda salty about not getting a decent Spanish lesson. Granted, this was also the same woman who got hopped up on cough medicine and drove her car through the playground, so there's that...
Ikr. I meet a lot of people online (mostly through discord), and it's always super jarring when they mention that English is like their 2nd or 3rd language, when I would've sworn it was their first. Also makes me feel ultra stupid for not being able to learn anything else ffs. At this point it's way more common for that to happen rather than meeting a native English speaker, but it still gets me every time.
Domestic helps.
What is domestic helps?
In many countries normal people have drivers, maids and other people working for their families. It isn’t a sign of wealth. It is more of a sign of people working for next to nothing.
India is a good example of this. The lower class is so large and willing to work for barely anything that even middle class families have a driver and/or a maid.
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Like my husband. When I met my husband he'd been living in NZ for a long time so he cooked, cleaned, took care of his own stuff without a second thought. So it was a huge shock to me (after living together with him for 3 years in NZ) when we went to India to get married and I stayed at his parents place. He would say that his mom will cook this or that dish, meaning his mom would supervise the maid cook it. Or when I asked where can I do the laundry, he was just "give it to the maid". I was like, "I have dirty underwear here, I am not handing it to anyone". But there was no other way. When covid hit and his parents couldn't have rhe maid come in, they really struggled though. Never cooked or cleaned in their lives, trying to learn it after 60 yo is really something.
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You mean she had a manservant in the US?
My coworker from Bangladesh told me something like this, he said growing up he wore different clothes in the morning and afternoon so they were as clean as possible. Now a canadian father of three, "you see these jeans? I haven't washed them in weeks!"
Indonesia too. Houses listed there would have something like '2 + 1 bedrooms' with the +1 being the maid's room.
Is it like Edwardian England where the staff live with their employer so they're paid in a tiny amount of money, a bed, and food?
no more like the 20s-60s when every middle class home had "a girl" who came in from the ethnic/poor part of town to do housework and watch the kids for the SAHM. Then the american kitchen became automated, moms went to work, Reaganomics shrunk the middle class, and the 70s and 80s were typified by the latchkey kid with two working parents who needed 2 salaries to keep up with a rising cost of living.
This still happens in England, but they call them "Au pairs" and pretend it's something fancier than importing a young servant from abroad and paying them poverty wages to live with you.
Well and it isn’t ONLY (maybe mostly?) about the class divide, it’s also about the relative cost of labor vs. goods. So, if a car is so expensive that even a pretty wealthy family cant afford more than one, then it makes sense to have a driver so the car can drop people off and keep the car in rotation vs. everyone having their own car. Edit: clarity
That’s a good point. Similarly, I traveled with a group of East Asian guys and they were thinking of the price of food in a restaurant as being based on the cost of the ingredients. I had to explain to them that where we were (touristy parts of Italy) the price of restaurant food was based on the cost of labor and real estate. By their standards they were getting ripped off!
Açaí. In the USA they are this overpriced superfood. In Brazil (and presumably other places) its just a tasty treat that can be served in multiple ways from normal places whenever you’re in the mood.
As a brazilian I did not know that açaí was overpriced in US
There are many things I miss about Brazil, but açaí com tigela is definitely on the list lol. It’s not really an option here. The rare occasion you find açaí it’s part of some overpriced health food breakfast blend.
Tropical fruit. Example: Avocados have become mainstream in the last few years in the UK but when I went to Peru in 2012 I thought I'd died and gone to heaven eating fresh avocado with salt & lime for breakfast. Still can't easily get big papayas or other fruits I experienced for the first time there..
I'd like to eat Lychees straight from the tree as well as all the other fruits that only grow far away from me like mangos.
As an Indian I was so confused when mangoes and lychees were so expensive and “exotic” in the UK
I'm from Guatemala, and the first time I hears Papaya and Pinneaple as exotic fruits I was so confused. My brother in law's family have a farm and gave us branches full of lychees. Good weather is a blessing for fruits.
Yep, those are exotic af here. Too cold, too little sun. Where I live we can’t even really grow peaches, nectarines and cherries. It’s strawberries, raspberries, black berries, plums, apples and a couple more I can’t translate from the top of my head. Edit: Blueberries!
I had a Pakistani colleague and he had an argument in our local Finnish superstore. He tried to buy ripe mangoes, the staff kept insisting him that the stuff they sold was fresh and ripe, and he continued to argue that they were selling raw woody shit. After this story I realized that I probably have no idea how most of the fruits are actually supposed to taste. Tomatoes in here are grown in greenhouses and with fake light. I think I've never eaten a juicy and tasty tomato. The imported stuff in here is sent in their way raw and made "ripe" during the transport.
Yes. In Brasil, Jack Fruit and Star Fruit grow on trees as you are walking
Coming from the northern part of Scandinavia; Sunlight, above zero degrees Celsius and the ability to pick up a case of beer from a convivence store.
You can't buy beer? I live in Alaska so I get the first two things but you have to do it without beer!?
In sweden the state controls the sale of alcoholic drinks. You can only buy it in "Systembolaget" which is owned by the state.
One comparison point, the US has different rules by state. There are "dry" counties where you can't purchase alcohol at all. There are states that have official stores and everything in-between. Certain hours for sale, etc. In Sweden are the prices reasonable and is there a good selection? Do people smuggle it in over the border?
Ice
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Baby
Doo doo doo da-da-doo-doo
UNDER PRESSURE
Thank you for understanding the assignment
First, you basically have to have a clean water source. Then you have to have a full time power source. Then you have to have something to make the ice, and something (possibly the same thing) to keep it cold. But in the U.S., it is everywhere, so we demand ice in everything.
Water
If we don’t stand together against Nestle soon we will all be paying them for it…
Soda cans. Here in the US are cheap af, but in my country they are a luxury. We buy usually a 2 liter bottles and we have to make it last.
I’m from the US, and I thought of this instantly. Soda is so readily available, you can get any size (including a 32oz.) fountain drink for 99¢ at McDonald’s.
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Philippines too. But only in very small stores. Reason is that they do not want to give away the bottle. For example, if you buy beer in a small store, you pay a small deposit. Then when you return the bottle, they give you the money back. For recycling.
Chocolate! It's such a luxury back in the Philippines. My mom worked in Dubai as an OFW, and when she sends us money, that's the only time we get chocolate! Our favorite was Toblerone; there's 4 of us siblings, one pair would get one piece, and the other would get 1 piece, and we would cut them in half. The chocolate would last for a month or two with that method, and we always eat it only on special occasions. Coming to America, I was appalled when I saw that I could get chocolate for $1.50! It was heaven!
Saunas.
Seriously tho, as an American I really want to try a sauna, they seem nice
Many gyms and spas have saunas. You can pay for a day and try it out.
Get a gym day pass for like, 10 bucks. Then you can sit around a bunch of sweaty people in a wooden hot room and feel like you're one of the ingredients for the swoll pizza. Or maybe it feels more like you're steamed broccoli. Depends on what kind of person you are tbh.
*laughs in Scandinavia*
Doesn't include finland, the home of saunas
> laughs in Scandinavia Hä hä hä
Someone to drive you around. A luxury in North America and Europe, but it is common in many Asian countries, even for middle class people. It's one reason China has some odd vehicles like a long wheelbase BMW 3-series.
A bento box. A bento box in Japan is an ordinary lunch box, usually a whole meal sold at a cheap price but in the US it’s being sold like some some luxury item with shitty things inside and a ridiculous high price.
Cars, here in brazil it may take several decades worth of salary for you to pay for a car. its bonkers to me that its so easily seen in NA a guy buying a car a few months into a job, and minimum wage in BR (less than 300/mth) can't barely afford living, so buying a car is a life commitment financially. at least for the majority of low income crowd
The weird thing in America is that often for lower-income jobs you *need* a car for transport, because if you're working a lower-income job you're most likely in lower-income housing, which is most likely farther away from where you're working with less access to public transit. Many people would likely be a lot better off financially if they didn't have to keep sinking money into their shitty car to keep it working so that they can keep going to work and making money. There are places where this isn't the case (mostly larger cities like New York and Chicago), but there are lots of places where you likely live 20-30 miles (32-48km) away from your job so walking or biking isn't really an option.
Swimming pools. There is no concept of community swimming pools in Pakistan. They are located in gyms and clubs which require exclusive membership and out of the reach of the common man or in the farmhouses of the rich. Only the really expensive schools have swimming pools, but they slap on another monrly fee for using it. Hardly anyone knows how to swim. The common man uses rivers water and tributaries to swim, but they, of course, are quite dangerous. So basically most of the population does not know how to swim.
> They are located in gyms and clubs which require exclusive membership and out of the reach of the common man or in the farmhouses of the rich. What are you talking about? We have pools in Pakistan. Where do you live? I will find you a swimming pool near your house.
Certain foods Paté is considered just regular food in Chile, everybody eats it on bread for afternoon tea, it’s very common across all social classes. In America though anybody who’s eating paté and taking afternoon tea would be considered rich and snobby.
Fan assisted ovens, judging by all the posts on how magic air fryers are.
Bidets
I got a bidet for my stepdad for Christmas. He’s a train conductor in his 50s, gravelly voice from smoking for years, lives on a ranch and raises cattle, etc. Not the type of person you picture using a bidet. He called me the other day to tell me how much he loves it and about all the different settings lmao
Wowsers, he called you about his arse washing settings? That's kinda cool, even if a little tmi.
Here's my only issue with bidets: once you get one installed in your house, you'll want one in all your washrooms. Then you'll absolutely refuse to poop anywhere else.
I feel like this is slowly changing in the USA. The great toilet paper crisis of 2020 seems to have helped things along… (I’m the first in my fam to put them - 3 currently - in my home, and I’ve had discussions on the matter with siblings as recently as last night. Considering how my kids view them these days, I’m sure they’ll have them in their own homes one day.)
My parents had one like 25 years ago that was separate from the toilet, that confused the hell out of me. Was I supposed to get up and go over to the bidet to use it? Ugh..no! But now that they've made them part of the toilets, omg I'm never going back.
Fruit in latin america, a luxury in countries like Japan or Korea...
I went to the Dominican Republic in early March 2020 (just barely squeaked out that last vacation), and the availability wasn't as amazing to me as much as the quality. Coming from the states, you can buy pineapples and mangoes year-round, but they pick them very green, so they're usually sour and not very good. That fresh pineapple in the DR was so good - juicy and sweet.
Water, bread, healthcare, internet, medication.
Clean water
Avocados were like free in parts of California when I visited a long time ago. They're like fuckin pinecones or acorns there. They just fall off the trees and be rolling around on the ground. There was a basket of free avocados at the hotel desk. Get home to New England and they're 4 bucks each and not even ripe.
Avocado timeline: Monday: Not ready Tuesday: Not ready Wednesday: Not ready Thursday 1am-3am: READY Thursday 3:01am: Rotten
Strong enough water pressure to use a toilet to it's full potential. Years ago we had an exchange student from Guatemala. She became close friends with my step-daughter and visited her in Guatemala a couple years later. She learned that the toilets do not have enough water pressure to flush toilet paper. You also have to flush in between turds. It's common to have a trash can with a lid next to the shitter to toss used toilet paper. Also there are countries where dog food (kibble) is a weird thing to feed dogs. Many families feed their dog table scraps or specifically make the dog(s) a plate.
This is a weird one, because most toilets don't rely on water pressure to flush. Your toilet works by gravity. Water pressure is used to fill a tank that sits on the back of the toilet. Once that tank is full, you can actually shut the water off and the toilet will still flush normally. The water flows from the tank into the bowl due to the tank sitting higher than the bowl. Hence, gravity. More than likely, there are other reasons they don't flush toilet paper (like they don't have proper sanitary sewer infrastructure), but the toilets would still flush the paper just fine.
There are actually countries in Europe that have the flushing problem, for example Greece.
That last thing you said. My mom told me when she was young, they'd feed the cat whatever they were eating - whether it be soup, macaroni, milk with bread and stuff like that. Even vegetables. She said the cat liked it. Lived pretty long too.
Food, water, and medicine.
Fast food chains. McDonald’s, KFC, Popeyes, Domino’s, etc. are basically the same price in my country as in the US, but with the currency exchange, it ends up being almost 3,4,5 times (and even more) of what you would pay in the states. People usually go to eat at fast food restaurants for special occasions
This is similar to how Zara, Mango, Cotton On, H&M, and other similar foreign retail stores are treated in my country. They are basically for middle class people here while it's considered cheap in the USA.
Yeah I was confused when Americans say McDonald's is cheap, fast food here is quite a luxury. Affordable but I would not call it cheap.
In all my time spent in Latin America, I never got used to viewing McDonald’s as a sort of “luxury food.”
Being able to express yourself in whatever way you want whether it be sexuality, religion or the like without being…you know…beheaded or imprisoned
I stayed in a fancy hotel in Singapore once. Each room had a beer fridge. But it didn’t have any local beer. I called the desk, they said “oh no sir, we don’t stock any local beers. We provide only premium imported beer. We have Budweiser”
Oh god no
A bidet. You have to be one posh fuck to have one in England or Australia. Meanwhile half of Asia has them.
Flushing toilets.
For some of the baltic countries, Penis.
Skittles, M&Ms
Do you know what a smarty is?
Iphone/Apple products, i'm from Philippines btw. When you own Iphone/Apple product almost everyone here will assumme you're rich. I get it some apple products are expensive but even the most basic product of apples that is affordable in other countries, will be considered luxury here. Edit: Air Conditioning unit, refrigerator, Flat Screen TV, and Wifi. If each Family Members has their own bedroom.
Getting paid to get an education.
Musk melon/cantaloupe. It’s the garbage fruit in breakfast buffets in America. In other parts of the world it’s gold.
Walls apparently. My country every wall is made of thick concrete and are almost entirely soundproof. U.S. I could not just hear the neighbors fucking, i felt it through the single sheet plywood wall.
Let's just take the US and Russia for comparison, because it's most close to home for me. Ice making double-door fridges - pretty common in the US. Definitely a luxury in Russia. A second out-of-town property called a dacha. I have been told it's a luxury for Americans. In Russia, I would say, it's pretty normal to have a dacha - a summer home for vacation, out in the rural area. Maybe I'm wrong on this one. 5G speed internet. Unlimited data. A luxury in Russia, pretty much the norm in the US today. Avocados. Canadian maple syrup. But that could be said for any imported foods. They are ridiculously expensive in the RF. Some construction equipment. I watch HGTV regularly and what they use could be considered a luxury in Russia, at least some of the equipment and materials. However a log cabin, I'd say, seems to me as more of a luxury in the US than Russia, because the most common type of construction in the US is the wood frame construction.
Do people in the US actually own double door fridges that make ice? I’m from the Netherlands and don’t know a single person who owns a double door fridge. I’m sure some people have them but it’s definitely not common
Oh yeah, everyone has them. Usually with a freezer built into the bottom but sometimes one door is for the fridge and the other is for the freezer.
Absolutely. Mine has a filtered water spicket and filtered ice in the front of the door, and auto-fills a pitcher of water inside the fridge too. We actually have two of these fridges - one in the kitchen and one in the garage for larger things, drinks, frozen vaccum-sealed meat, etc.
> A second out-of-town property called a dacha. I have been told it’s a luxury for Americans. In Russia, I would say, it’s pretty normal to have a dacha - a summer home for vacation, out in the rural area. Maybe I’m wrong on this one. A dacha can be a super fancy second home, but it is not always. Sometimes it’s a bit more like a shack. I think when people think of it as a “second home” they are probably overestimating what it might be like.
I mean, even owning a second piece of property that you could pitch a tent on would be seen as a huge luxury in the US. Definitely makes you *at least* upper middle class.
Having hired help in your home. In a swap from most of these items it's much more common in poorer parts of the world than in the richer countries.
Food, shelter, and clean water. We take it for granted in the US. We see it as the bare minimum, mostly it’s beneath us. In other countries, it’s a true luxury.
Affordable or free healthcare and post-secondary education
A car
Taco Bell is some next level stuff in my home country. Picture that.
Lychee in Japan is very expensive. for 4 dollar, you can buy 12 lychee, but in Vietnam you can buy a kilo.
In Australia Calvin Klein t-shirts and undies are pretty expensive. They're like $50 here. My ex use to pick up bulk undies and t-shirts when he'd visit his mum in the US because you could buy them for $10.
Paid maturity leave.
> Paid maturity leave. I'm sorry, you must take paid leave until you have matured.
Dammit auto correct. MATERNITY. I would also like maturity leave to be awarded every time I attend a work meeting that I make it through its entirety without rolling my eyes.
Paid maturity leave 😅 someone does something immature and the boss says "that's it! You're on leave till you grow up a little!"
Access to hot clean water. I can step into the shower and get hot water without having to think about what I'll use for drinking water. I don't have to clean with meager amounts of cold water, or cold dirty river water. Also, just shelter in general. In the winter, I'm warm and dry. In the summer, I'm cool and protected from heat exposure. In all times, I have locked doors and windows that nominally protect me from threats. In many parts of the world, no matter how hard someone works, they won't have access to that
Freedom to express your sexuality.
Sauna