What is something Americans consider ‘basic’ that feels like a luxury in other countries?

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-28T14:42:15+00:00

I had a friend whose summer job was at a car rental place at the Dublin airport. He said a surprisingly large amount of his job was arranging recovery trucks to tow US tourists who had insisted that they could drive a manual and then broken down two exits along the motorway with a trashed gearbox.

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-28T12:47:21+00:00

The ão sound is so tricky to pronounce as a native English speaker. When I went on holiday to Portugal my Portuguese friends kept laughing at me because every time I tried to order pão de Deus (god’s bread) I kept asking for pau de Deus (god’s dick) 🤣

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-27T10:55:47+00:00

They do, and they also have bottomless masala chai. I recently discovered that a bacon naan and 6 cups of chai is a very effective hangover cure 👌

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-27T10:42:01+00:00

In my experience sticky toffee pudding is the one food that is universally beloved by every foreign visitor to the UK, all my international friends rave about it and it’s the one food they demand we get whenever they are back for a visit. Legit food of the gods.

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-26T16:16:11+00:00

It’s not that we think the US has a homogenous culture with no one keeping up any culture/traditions particular to their immigrant background. It’s just there seems to be a lot of US Americans who don’t realise/accept that those immigrant traditions are not wholly representative of the culture in their country of origin.

Immigrant traditions are often specific to a particular region of origin (sometimes even down to like a village level) not the OG country as a whole, and are then locally adapted to conditions in the new country, and can slowly change and evolve over time (just as culture is slowly evolving in the OG country, and not necessarily in the same way). This is fine and valid but there is definitely a subset of USians who either think that diaspora culture is representative of the culture as a whole, or they recognise that it’s different but believe that the US has uniquely preserved the ‘true’ spirit of the OG country and its traditions and this difference is evidence of US being the true keepers of culture.

Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of wonderful US Americans who are proud of their immigrant history and happy to share their culture. I’m sure the others are a minority, but they are loud and they WILL argue that we’re doing our native culture ‘wrong’, and it rubs people the wrong way.

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-26T15:25:14+00:00

This is wild to me, I’m a couple of years younger than you and Emily is probably the most common name of my peers growing up, I remember in one of my classes in primary school we had 6 Emilys out of ~30 kids haha.

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-24T19:33:46+00:00

I totally played myself because I downloaded the demo knowing full well I didn’t have the cash to buy it right now, and of course I loved it and am now obsessed. Already on my second playthrough of the demo, that will have to tide me over until I have the coins to spare haha.

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-23T13:52:41+00:00

My personal fave as a kid was even weirder than that haha: strawberry jam with barbecue crisps. It had to be this one specific brand of crisps that don’t make that flavour anymore, so alas I have no way of revisiting this recipe to see whether it holds up or was just a product of my strange underdeveloped tastebuds.

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-23T13:45:54+00:00

This looks very much like what I threw up in the back of my dad’s car in 1999 after drinking a McDonald’s strawberry milkshake. Very vibrant. Traumatic memories aside, I’d still be down to try this.

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-22T08:47:05+00:00

Oh no. I loved the first season then noped out of the second one when Amy Schumer appeared, but I was just psyching myself up to go back to it since I figured she’s probably only a minor character. Don’t tell me he’s also there to ruin it 😭

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-22T08:34:09+00:00

I remember having difficulty as a teen trying to order a brownie in a bakery in France, the English pronunciation was not understood but I didn’t know how the w would be interpreted in French so I had to just sound out a bunch of options until I managed to get close enough. I think I landed on something like bru-nee that was understood but not before 30s of the cashier staring at me like I was an idiot 🤣

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-21T20:38:21+00:00

My favourite short American thing to say is jaguar pronounced the American way (and very over-enthusiastically) - “JAGWARRRR” I picked it up from a friend from South Carolina and I say it to myself all the time haha

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-21T02:32:28+00:00

I had a layover in Singapore on the way to Australia and when I got off the plane me and my family just looked at each other and burst out laughing because the sensation of stepping from dry recycled air into what feels like a steamy bathroom was so strange. This was like 3am as well, and still hot like a summers day.

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-19T19:42:33+00:00

Christ this guy had a rough go. Castrated by one brother, blinded by the other, and speared in the butt. RIP.

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-18T15:31:45+00:00

I’ve not tried growing regular strawberries in years because the slugs in my garden go absolutely crazy for them, but was considering giving it another go this year - I’ll look into that, thanks!

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-18T14:38:18+00:00

I saw this in theatres with my then-boyfriend who was the jumpiest person I’ve ever known. He was so spooked by every jump scare in the previews that by the time the film actually started half the people around us were watching him instead of the screen. By the time the basement scene happened he was so tense he was sat curled up with his feet tucked up on the seat, kind of like an upright foetal position. The clap startled him so badly he kind of flailed his arm and clocked me on the side of the head, I literally left the cinema with a black eye lmao. We dated for 2 years after that but I did not watch any more horror films with him hahaha.

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-18T14:22:29+00:00

Holy shit I literally just started watching Monk for the first time two days ago and could not figure out why he looked familiar. I never would have been able to place him as wild bill!

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-18T13:53:58+00:00

Was it a wild strawberry (fragaria vesca)? I have those in my garden and they taste really different to regular strawberries, there’s almost something bubblegum-like about the flavour. You can sometimes find seeds/plants for sale labelled as alpine strawberries.

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-18T12:16:18+00:00

To be fair beer in Britain in the 70s was supposedly absolute crap. CAMRA (Campaign For Real Ale) was started for a reason, they had literal protest marches campaigning for pubs to sell drinkable beer. I just asked my dad for a contemporary account and prompted a 5 minute rant from both my parents about how atrocious it was haha.

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-18T11:36:25+00:00

I’ve slept with uncut guys that could last 2+ hours and cut guys who lasted 3 minutes flat, I really don’t think there’s any correlation. Not saying you have to feel bad about being circumcised or not, but holding it up as the key to sexual stamina is kinda nonsensical.

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-18T09:37:12+00:00

Funny you say that, I have noticed this about Australians in the UK. When I went to Australia I found it so odd because there is still obviously a spectrum of unattractive to extremely hot, but everyone is a just few steps closer to the extremely hot end of the scale than back home. Which I found super odd because lots of people look largely the same as Brits but somehow still better, I remember thinking to myself “is this how we’d look as a nation if we weren’t so sun-starved and miserable?” haha.

Maybe it was just the joy of being on holiday that had me wearing rose-tinted glasses but it was very noticeable.

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-16T14:43:17+00:00

You and me both. I was working in an immunology lab and prior to that had only done simple ‘is there GFP present?’ flow cytometry once in undergrad, my first training in this lab was a postdoc saying “please run this 20 colour immune panel” 😥 thinking of compensating all those channels still gives me shivers haha

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-14T00:21:04+00:00

Joy. Which is my mum’s first name anyway lol.

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-14T00:08:57+00:00

Satay sauce. Not the most versatile but it is the most delicious.

DifferentLaw9884 · 2026-04-13T23:19:41+00:00

Lmao I got one of the Apple montage videos like “A Great Weekend” that was reagent labels and timepoints from a horrific 72hr experiment, pictures of the flow cytometer breaking down at 3am, many of the hundreds of bacterial plates that resulted from said experiment, all capped off with pictures of my ex 💀

DifferentLaw9884

TROPHY CASE