Things that are common some places, but seem completely crazy to outsiders
Ask mefi question:
I’m curious to know about other … occurances that, to an outsider, seem completely crazy but are common in daily life in certain places in the world.
Many interesting answers, such as:
More than once in the middle of downtown Mexico City (a 10-million person, high-tech metropolis) I’ve walked out of a glass-and-steel skyscraper and almost collided with a donkey.
When I was in Tokyo many years ago, I wondered at the audacity of their crows. I saw a few of them using a drinking fountain, with one of them holding down the button and the other drinking from it, then switch and again. But that was minor compared to what Japanese crows are reputed to do… steal food from open windows, outwit the crow patrols trying to prevent them from nesting on electric lines and shorting out the grid, even exploiting crosswalks and car traffic to open nuts for them. To quote from the NYTImes article, one expert believes “We are not sure sometimes who is smarter, us or the crows.” I find this all totally crazy, and yet totally magical.
When I was living in rural-ish Spain, leaving the dog’s bowl out on the porch overnight during the winter would result in an army of tiny field mice bivouacked behind the porch sofa. When we went to the local Everything Store (part gas can dealer, part local bar, part supermarket, part butcher shop) to pick up some mousetraps, the little old lady proprietress laughed and said, in the local dialect, what amounted to “mousetraps? pshaw, those are for the tourists!”
She gave us a kitten instead. It was the most bizarre retail experience of my entire life. But when I mentioned it to a couple of friends & neighbors, they thought only notable part of the whole story was that I’d got the kitten for free.
When I lived in Saint Petersburg, Russia, my host father took me to the family’s Dacha (summer cottage), a tiny, dingy little house with no electricity outside the city. After dinner, we went into the Banya, stripped naked, and then he told me to lie down on a bench in the sweltering heat. I was terrified of this man, by the way. He started whacking me aggressively with birch leaves stringed together, whacking me everywhere to “open up the pores.” Then, he laid down and asked me to whack him. It was thus that I ended up whacking a Russian police captain, naked, with birch leaves.
Which is a totally normal thing in Russia.
In Thailand they have an official National Elephant Day. City officials fill the streets with buffets of bananas and other assorted fruits for the elephants to feast on. What you would see if you happened upon in would be a bunch of decked-out elephants perching elephant-style on the ground with their trunks in a mountain of fruit! And it’s not just one or two cursory elephant feasts, no; it happens all over the country!
I’m sure there are many things around here that must seem really strange or stupid or wonderful to strangers, but, not being an outsider, I can’t really picture what they might be. I know many tourists find road signs with moose warnings so wonderful that they occasionally steal them off their poles. I can’t imagine how exotic it must seen to them, but I suppose it does.
Last year, vacationing in Croatia, we rented a car for a day. I don’t know if it was local custom or a personal quirk on the part of the owner of the car rental agency, but they had taken the time and effort to remove the seat belts in the back seat. I’m so used to seat belts that even the thought of not wearing them seems odd to me (why would you not, it takes two seconds to put them on and increases your safety tenfold), but to spend extra effort to make it impossible to wear them? I can’t even imagine a bad reason why someone would do that.
Those two quirks are pretty lame compared to the examples from metafilter, though. What’s totally normal where you live, but must seem very strange to outsiders?
