Smartphones are everywhere in the US. So are debit cards, and you can set up direct debit with every regular bill you get. Even a lot of private schools allow this. People use debit or credit cards for everything, everywhere they shop, and hardly ever use 'checks'. Many banks do free banking though there are sometimes conditions like a minimum balance or having your paycheck directly deposited from your employer. (Because direct deposit is possible).
You can't buy a sim card there and put it in any old phone.
Drjohnsonscat -- the bf of your friend was probably buying a phone card, not a sim card. You can buy international calling minutes and dial an incredible number of access numbers, beginning with a toll free number, then a PIN, then the international access code, then the country and city code and then the local number.
YY, Front loading washing machines cost a fortune and are few and far between. Plus detergent for front loaders costs more..
There are sensible sockets in bathrooms; they have ground fault circuit interrupters if the wiring is recent, and not if it is old. You can use an electric razor or a hair dryer in most American bathrooms! The Colombian was right.
Kettles are mostly used on the stovetop the fill up and boil type, not electric. This is because people don't drink that much tea. Coffee maker technology is fab though, and they are relatively inexpensive. People cook pasta by boiling water in a large saucepan and then putting the pasta in. I thought that was how everyone did it, everywhere am wondering how you would do it with a kettle full of boiling water..
American cars, and especially the larger SUVs are sold in many places outside of the US. The ME in particular springs to mind. The sedans really are like reverse Tardises though -- I once went across the country in the back seat of a Chevrolet Caprice station wagon and it was murderously uncomfortable.
Driving tests are easy and practical and the process of learning to drive is designed to get you safely on the road, not to torture you and take money from you for multiple efforts. You learn the booklet, take the written test, provide proof of who you are (bills from utilities, documentation from Immigration, and take the road test. This is after 60 days of having a learner's permit for learner drivers over 21 in mist states. And the right turn on red is a really sensible idea, as are four way stops. I don't think there can possibly be many places where they fill up your tank for you, Squeakytoy. Certainly not in the places I am most familiar with.
Lots more automatic cars, and they have been around forever -- my exMIL never drove anything else, and she learned back in the late 40s.
There are many different styles of houses in the US. The average frame house that gets destroyed in a tornado would be more of a southern and southern-midwest thing, very cheaply and fairly recently built. A lot of homes are far more sturdy. You don't hear about all the homes that are not flattened when storms hit. This is Beacon Hill in Boston -- lots of brick. Brick is very popular and lasts through all kinds of weather, but even frame houses can keep going for a few centuries. My old frame house was built in 1915 and afaik it is still going strong almost 100 years later.
Here is the 'Chicago bungalow' style' -- when first built these brick bungalows housed working families who would have been packed into two-up-two-downers in grim terraces with a privy in the back if you were lucky if they lived in the UK. Chicago Bungalows featured lovely Craftsman details, tiled indoor bathrooms, nice kitchens, hardwood floors, basements, back and front gardens and an alley in the back for bins.
Houses feature plenty of hot water -- this was one thing I really appreciated in the US after chilly showers that were more like trickles in Ireland. and a very true comment on washing habits too, right at the start. 'In America, we just have hot water. It's just there'.
'Heat is so precious here, you lock it away in a closet'
'Don't open that door. There's heat in there'.
However, up to the 90s you couldn't get a nice Indian meal in the US for love nor money, and you could only buy curry powder in 'mild' or 'hot' in teeny tiny little plastic jars.
Unless a room has a built in closet it can't be legally called a bedroom in a lot of US cities. This sort of rule was enacted to prevent people renting out closets as rooms at times when housing was tight afaik.
One thing I like about American neighbourhoods is the open plan front gardens and the way Americans respect the semi-public space that is thus created. It is notable that only in really poor neighbourhoods do you find a lot of dividers between front gardens, metal fences, walls and gates. I find it really jarring to the eye seeing them everywhere in the UK and Ireland.
Dealing with Immigration used to be a PITA. back in the late 80s I spent almost a whole day waiting for an interview in a crowded, hot room, standing room only, clutching my number, my pile of documents and photos and my chest x-ray which I had to have taken in Ireland before I left. I kept it because the embassy in Dublin told me to bring it with me. Nobody I encountered in the US immigration offices knew what to do with it. Trying to contact the INS (as it was back then) to have a question answered meant spending hours in a phone loop listening to menus and pressing buttons and eventually getting cut off. I found out via a network of other Irish people the magic combination of buttons to press to get to actually speak to a human being and have my questions answered. I had my green card renewed ten years after first getting it and the process was a walk in the park by comparison.
Social security number and driving licence office people are often really rude and their systems mean a lot of lines and taking numbers. I often wonder if Americans' apprehension about a government-sponsored health system springs from their experience of state and federal government employees when trying to get simple business done in offices they pay for, by people whose salaries they pay, who are supposed to be public servants...
I remember my dad's family all drinking real coffee in Ireland, and my memories go back to the 60s; made with an old fashioned percolator. Fruit juice back then meant orange juice however, and it was vile, more like orange mixed with vinegar. No nice, sweet Minute Maid.
I also remember spaghetti but not other kinds of pasta, from at least the late 60s in Ireland. Dad used to ask for potatoes with his spaghetti bolognese, just to wind us up I think.
However, up to about the 90s you couldn't get a nice Indian meal in the US for love nor money, and you could only buy curry powder in 'mild' or 'hot' in teeny tiny little plastic jars.
We never had a tv with a remote, a dishwasher, a dryer, or central heating. We had a small fridge and small gas cooker. But that was mum and dad. After mum visited me in the US once, some time in the early 90s, she returned home to find that dad had bought and used a microwave. He was really proud of himself. But I remember him telling us about microwaves and how they worked way back in the 70s on a long car journey. We never had a computer and mum still doesn't. However, I remember playing Pong on a friend's home computer in the early 80s.
Mum is a bit of a luddite. Her kitchen and bathroom taps are the old fashioned non mixer type. She had an old rotary phone until it finally stopped working, some time in the 90s. The Teilifis Eireann man who came to look at it couldn't believe his eyes, and she got a much newer version that week. Back as late as the 70s one of my aunts had no phone service in her house in the country. Getting a phone in her house all the way up the lane miles from the main road would have cost her a fortune even when she had got to the top of the waiting list, and it would mean her phone would be used by all the neighbours, which she didn't want -- she wanted the neighbors to get together and get on the list but there were some holdouts so they were all late and Teilifis Eireann took their time. It eventually happened, but waiting lists to get a phone line and a phone were the norm in Ireland outside of Dublin. Ireland advanced really, really quickly from the 70s on in the field of telecom. It was incredibly far behind and the State-run Teilifis Eireann had a strong dampening effect on expectations.