A lot of 9-5 type jobs, people are getting ready for bed at 9-10. It's not just east coast? It's a thing here too. If the bagel is hot/toasted, you eat it flat sides open. Only actual like, sandwiches are eaten sandwichy. Any relation to Walpurgis? Actually, most older homes will not have a garbage disposal. There was actually a really weird moment for me visiting a friend once (who had always lived in an apartment where they usually DO have them) where they emphasized to me that they didn't so I couldn't just dump food into the sink that way. My response was basically "okay? I have never lived with a garbage disposal this is not something I would do." Seconding the how the fuck does your hot water work then??? Probably it's a difference in the amount of space between places. It would be in NO WAY feasible to heat water here and THEN pump it to people's homes. It'd be cold by the time it got there most of the time anyway.
Three questions. Toilet paper, bidet, or other? Toilet paper orientation? Flush or trash for toilet paper? Here there are great wars over toilet paper orientation. We all have our own bullshit reasons for supporting our preferred orientation. I go for over because fuck it it is easier to grab that way. Because I've never had to deal with pipes not being able to handle the stuff it is always flushed too. There are some families who live here and elsewhere in the states where our pipes can handle it that just throw the paper in the trash because they just. Aren't at all used to being able to flush toilet paper without the piping breaking. The amount of ire expressed about this by Americans who flush towards those who do not is astounding.
There are "flash" water heaters - they heat small amounts of water very very fast, on demand, and do not heat it at all when not in use. When I was in Rome we were in an ancient building that had been converted to apartments and they had these things in the bathroom and kitchen. Turn on hot water tap for about a minute and then poof - hot water. AND they keep heating more water as long as the water is flowing!
I think - though don't necessarily quote me - that it's heating all the water a bit at a time. So it takes a few minutes to start running hot, while the gas/electricity kicks in and starts heating it, but after that the idea is that the gas/electricity stays on and continues heating your water a bit at a time. Reading about combi boilers (which are generally the most popular here for Efficiency and Space-saving and so on), it seems that it takes the water coming through the mains and heats that on the way to your shower/tap/whatever. I am not enough of a plumber/not awake enough to work out how that works, though. edit: ninjaed by @Lissa Lysik'an
i dunno if this counts as culture shock or not, but when i was at school in oklahoma, the first time it snowed i was like ??? what the hell. i'd seen snow before, but only like three times in my whole life (and my LA roommate had never seen it) and it had been these pathetic little patches on our yard that were only like 2 cm thick. it was like a whole damn foot and everyone i knew who lived there or even more north treated me like i was crazy for being so astounded. i kept slipping on ice and had to borrow gloves because they don't really sell stuff like that in texas. i mean you can still find winter stuff like thick scarves and earmuffs or whatever, but it's like, no one really buys it? and if they do it just sits in the closet forever.
@QuotableRaven @Starcrossedsky @Lib Here in brazil we don't have that much a need for hot water - hell, sometimes during summer it comes out of the pipeshot enough to sting - so usually the only source of hot water is the shower, where the water is heated in the shower - the shower is a chamber and there's an electric heating thing made of... some sort... of material. water passes around/through it and voilá, hot water. There's some degree of temperature control on the thing, but you can always use more/less water pressure (more water pressure -> colder, less -> hotter) It has its limitations, sure, and sometimes if your luck is shitty like mine you'll start smelling burnt plastic or the electric thing will shoot sparks or it will simply short-circuit and break in the middle of the shower so you get surprise cold water BUT other than these rare occasions it's fine. They do a similar thing for faucets you can put on the kitchen/bathroom but few people have one. It's actually a selling point when it's an American style hot water tank!! One of the apartments I saw while looking for a place here in Londrina last december had a water heater for faucets and the washing machine. I still have no idea how it works, and my apartment doesn't have one so I'll probably never know. I know it's powered by cooking stove gas, which seems... Sorta safety risky? The places that do have solar or gas powered water heaters still have electric showers adapted to work with it to keep water from going cold (they always heat the water at least to body temperature unless you don't turn it on), but the solar tech is so costly and the gas heater takes so much space that most people can't afford or be bothered to have either. I mean, do I want to have one so i can have hot water in all water points? Probably. In my dream house, that I'll build when I'm super duper rich, and that will have a bath tub and sink garbage disposal dealio too, you know?
My apartment has a sauna and it's only 52 square meters :) (and I never use it because sauna heat makes me feel really ill.) That's not super typical (although this isn't a fancy place); usually apartment complexes will have one shared sauna per building. Since my apartment is more in a row-type setup, I guess they decided a sauna per apartment would work better. Saunas are such an integral part of Finnish culture to not have one easily accessible would be like... idk, not having a kitchen. None whatsoever. Finland already has a separate Walpurgis/May Day celebration.
I guess that would make sense, but most of the people I know in Latin America have 9 to 5 jobs so it still baffles me. In those cases dinner is at 8 and someone snacks at 4 at work. My parents have always been 9 to 5, with the occasional late day of "mom is coming at 10pm exhausted and hungry from running the exhibition let's make sure her dinner is nice and set up". I guess dinners aren't as heavy here often? Definitely not in La Paz, since the altitude makes digestion more difficult if one stuffs themselves before sleeping.
Having lived with both types of piping, I prefer flush when possible. But in Peru a lot of places are trash so we just deal. They usually have signs in English for that if they expect to get tourists who aren't used to binning the used toilet paper. I am the unlucky one in the house in that my bathroom can get stuck, so I bin the toilet paper used for #1, and flush for # 2. When I'm on shark week, I have to time several flushings if the bin is too full of bloody toilet paper.
Oh, in a similar vein to the sink disposal blade dealio, when I lived in the states as a kid I saw a lot of dishwashers. Like, the machine. I boggled at this because I had never seen them before, and I thought they were like, super modern rich people stuff. Seeing middle class with dishwashers left me feeling a bit ... I don't know, very developing world.
I am always boggled at how small people are in other countries. I felt like a literal giant when I was in the UK. When I stepped of the plane and into the train, I was like: 'Ah, I'm back in the land of the giants.'
This is how I felt in Honduras. Picture the white but not milk average height fourteen year old standing in a crowd of people that reached her shoulders. Which is to day, you'd be an actual giant there because I am sure you are taller than me.
That just reminds me that a friend of mine took steps in Japan 2 or 3 at a time because he is so fucking tall. The girls he was with for the trip found this hilarious and adorable. I meanwhile remain at a perfect height for foreign travel adventures. My one use for being so fucking short.
Being a tiny nine-year-old American in Amsterdam was mildly terrifying because everyone is so fucking tall D:
a couple breakfast-related culture shocks: ordering pancakes in a breakfast place in ireland and receiving corn syrup to drizzle on them, subsequent discovery that maple syrup isn't really a thing in ireland. and getting corn pops (the cereal) in michigan was a TERRIBLE shock. for comparison: ^^^ this is what i am used to. round. crunchy. delicious ^^^ and this travesty is what they sell in the states. horrifying
