If you live in a different country to your birth - cultural norms you find odd?

[Triffid1]

I am South African originally. As I was dropping DS (13) at his activity last night at 7pm, knowing I'd be picking him at 8:30, I was thinking how I just don't think I'm ever going to get used to the lateness of things for children in this country. I honestly don't think i was out of the house after 6:30 on a school night, ever, until I was about 16!!! Admittedly, we also started our days much earlier - school start was 8:05 I think.

And I admit, I find it even odder because you change your clocks so that it gets light earlier and dark earlier. And certainly where we are (SE England), everything happens LATER, not earlier. I'm also from Cape Town though so to be fair, it gets light much later so getting up in the dark was a pretty normal event in winter for us.

Does anyone else have anything like this that they find odd? Light please - I'm not looking to bash any other cultures just note the differences!

Birthdays.

In the uk you ONLY congratulate the birthday person, not their family or their friends. Not even their parents.

It still blows my mind that you can walk into a child's birthday party, just breeze past the parents with a quick hello, give present to the child with a muttered never too enthusiastic "happy birthday" whilst slinging a badly wrapped present at them. But birthday cards are a must have here, very important and everyone must bring a card along with the present.

Sorry, I’m not pp but also Irish.

The answer is no.
They were called keeners here (in English), women who mourned and wailed over a body.

The practice was discouraged by the Catholic Church and had died out by the 1950s.

Some people still just like attending funerals though.

@whichjumpertowear thank you! :)

I find that so interesting. I'm guessing by your name that your are from the Netherlands? I never considered any country would congratulate the parents for being able to conceive and give birth at a certain time. I can understand it to a degree though, that THEY are to be congratulated. The parents I mean. But why do you congratulate the friends?

Yeah, you congratulate family members (always - if you told me that you were planning on going out to dinner this eve for your husbands birthday my initial reply would be " ahhh congratulations with your husbands birthday" - even if i had never met your husband).

But if you turn up at a dutch birthday party then don't be surprised if YOU get congratulated on the person's birthday. Because usually only close friends and relatives are invited to the party. And you then have to congratulate the person back. You will then all sit in a circle and drink coffee and chat.

The other weird thing about England is that "shit" is a proper swearword. In NL its nowhere near as bad to say. Took me a little while to break that habit.

Dotty

I have noticed that, by comparison, people in my native country are terrible busibodies who have an opinion ‐voiced or silent‐ about bloody everything anyone else does. There's a very judgemental national trait in a populace of a country which has forged success out of social compliance and 'running with the flock'. The UK, which is much more 'just crack on, nobody will mind' feels liberating.

However, shoes indoors is grim.

@MarkWithaC
I don't understand the shoes off thing. It puzzles me when in UK. My close group of friends, mostly of over 30years and in our 50s now, don't take their shoes off coming into my house and I don't entering theirs - if they have carpets /large rugs I do but most have hard floors downstairs and downstairs loos. I would take them off going upstairs though as that's more likely to be carpeted.
This is obv not the case when we've been in mud, manure, rain, got wellies on etc.
We often have dinner parties and get quite dressed up and I'd be a bit miffed to have to take off my footwear, chosen to match my outfit. The kids, now all grown knew to take dirty footwear off and would usually just take their shoes off anyway as more comfortable. However, They'd often play in gardens in the summer in bare feet and walk around the house after. Some of these friends have different heritages, all brought up in London but with English, Irish, Canadian, French, Spanish, West Indian backgrounds. All lovely houses kept very clean and tidy. When I watch TV/Film no one takes off their shoes, particularly if they're dressed up. I do take my shoes off when at home though as it's more comfortable, unless we are having company for drinks, lunch, dinner whatever and I wouldn't have shoes on the furniture and so obviously would remove my shoes at friends if we were chilling on the sofa! But dinner, cuppa or drinks at the dining table, no. We do still love a kitchen disco so they might come off after dancing! I, and I imagine my friends, sweep and mop/steam our well used floors daily. Our kids, and there are many between us, are all perfectly healthy adults and survived crawling.
However I DO always offer to remove my shoes if going somewhere for the first time.
I've been puzzled by the options on here regarding this.

Well good for you and your bladder of steel.

What an odd post.

Everywhere in Europe bar Sweden and UK from what I now read.

These posts - and many others - expressing horror at wearing shoes indoors always make me wonder just how filthy British pavements and public places (shopping centres etc) with public toilets are. Is it the sheer number of people and the weather? I remember being taken aback by the grimy streets of London, but that was in 1989. It’s so different where I live in Australia. Even Melbourne, one of our biggest cities, where I lived most of my life, didn’t compare (and it gets pretty damn wet in winter, but no snow).
The public toilets where I liive now are very clean.

Came with some more - lots of cards - birthday/christmas/easter/passing the driving test.. everything deserves a card.
Clutter in UK homes. i cant get over how much stuff aome people have.
Wall to wall carpeting, inc in bathroom (luckily not often now).
Supermarket bread that is sliced rather than a loaf.
The weather 🙈.
It took me 10 years to work out that 'how are you' is not a genuine question.
House price and houses generally obsession.
Christmas pudding.

I grew up in the U.K. and moved to Sydney 18 years ago. Even now I’m impressed with how early everyone starts things. My kids have before school sports training at 6.45 and the roads are pretty busy by that time. Two people my DH work with go for a morning kayak and loads of people I know do early morning CrossFit at 5am.

The only other mild thing is how seriously everyone takes their kids sports. Everyone can swim well and when we were in the U.K. for a year both my kids ended up swimming for their schools and my oldest said “back home I’m not even the best swimmer in my swim class” 😁. Doing sports training 3-4 times a week is totally normal even for not particularly sporty kids and it’s totally normal to play cricket, do athletics, swim and something else and there’s a team for every level.

Oh also laundry rooms. I’ve lived in flats and a couple of small houses and even they have a separate room for the washing machine and tumble dryer - even if it’s a kind of airing cupboard.

Sliced bread in the UK is much nicer than the shitty American toast bread here in Germany. I miss a Warburtons toastie.

The bakery bread is like chewing leather, dentists rejoice.

This is fascinating
So where you are from you all get celebrated? Where is this? I feel.luke.dh's med family could have the potential to go that route....

I hadn't read your responses when I wrote this! Now I know. Fascinating..

Yes, I completely get why swimming isn't as big here but it disturbs me quite a lot. But then, our schools all had swimming pools and and we did swimming in PE as well as swimming at home, friends houses, the sea all the time. Trying to get my dc to understand the basr level of competence, and stamina, I expect from them is quite hard.

Stayed in hotels in the US a few times and found it confusing that the rooms had coffee machines (filter ones, this was a while ago now) and coffee, plus teabags…but no kettle. I couldn’t figure out how to make the tea? I did try heating just water in the coffee machine, but it retained a distinctive aroma of coffee so I couldn’t use it. I still don’t know what I was supposed to do 🤔

That's true, but if dogs wore boots they'd have to take them off! It's about minimising the amount of crap coming in. This morning I found a lump of pigeon poo on the doormat inside, obviously come from someone's shoe. Better than walking it through the house! we've had worse

I don’t think that poster meant professional keeners, a practice which had pretty much died out by the 1950s, after, as a pp said, it was discouraged by the church as both ‘pagan’ and putting women in an authoritative role at funerals. (There are a few recordings of

But I also think that poster’s mother was misunderstanding the women she appears to have been so hostile to, who went to local funerals whether or not they knew the deceased. It’s perfectly normal in Ireland, indeed it’s expected, that people who didn’t know the dead person will attend their funeral, in support of a colleague, friend, or neighbour who’s been bereaved, or representing a family who knew them but was on holiday. My mother’s childhood neighbours who lived around where she grew up drove forty miles to the city to the funeral of a man they’d met once, 20 years earlier, at my parents’ wedding. It’s a cultural difference with the UK, not grief vampirism. Those women were either themselves Irish immigrants to the UK carrying on their home practices, or had absorbed it from their parents.

I don't know the point of that either (and I'm also English and live in England) but I think it means 'I'll probably bump into you again sometime'.
But the best example of pointless greetings for me was queueing up to check in at the doctor's surgery. It's a small town and everyone knows the other faces. So there was lots of
"Hi, how are you?"
"I'm fine. How are you?"
"I'm alright," kind of thing with the people leaving. I found it funny that we were all there to see/had seen the doctor but were all apparently "fine" 😆.

Someone mentioned crap pillows, well we have crap beds, no where to get a good one, even when they offer danish style beds they're not.
Horrible curtains.Awful quality housing.
Better food than in uk, wonderful food so that makes up for it for me.(Lots of other positives)

@MaybeALittle thanks!

My children don't generally stay up that late, only on special occasions, and it shows. When we go for the school bus in the mornings, the bus monitor regularly points out that my daughters are bright eyed and bushy tailed whereas many of the other kids, less so. My daughter's best friend for example gets dragged out of bed ten minutes before leaving the house and turns up barely awake. She's ten now and I don't think she's ever gone to bed before 11pm at best.

oh we always take our shoes off, I think it’s much more hygienic! It’s just living in the UK, I’d noticed this sneering attitude towards people who allowed shoes in house but this often came from people who had dogs or cats running outside (probably touching animal poo!) and then were fine to them to come in and walk all over the kitchen floor and hop on the sofa! I just couldn’t see the difference in whether the dog or the human brought the pigeon poo in - same germs either way!