American Quirks

(American-style LOL)

What Americans find matter-of-fact, visitors from foreign lands may find hard to fathom.

Size and variety are two such mysteries.  Portions in American restaurants tend to be way bigger than in other countries.  And free soda refills?  They rarely occur overseas, except within American fast food chains.  France, in face, has banned such refills, due to concerns about obesity.

Step into an American supermarket, and you’re bound to view multiple varieties of the same product.  There’s chocolate-flavored, butterscotch-flavored, cherry-flavored, one percent, two percent, and so on.  One visitor from the United Kingdom wryly commented:  Nothing is grape flavoured in the UK.

Then there’s the instant intimacy that Americans like to flash.  Toothy grins are especially disconcerting to Japanese tourists.  It is considered quite rude to bare your teeth in Japan.  

The “imperial system of measurement,” i.e., miles rather than kilometers, remains a source of constant amazement to foreigners.  America is one of only three nations in the world (the other two being Myanmar and Liberia) that doesn’t widely use the metric system.

 

Resources

http://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/smart-living/20-things-americans-do-that-confuse-the-rest-of-the-world/ss-BBEiyrC?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=BHEA000#image=1 

Copyright July 25, 2017 by Linda Van Slyke   All Rights Reserved