Questions you have about other nationalities!

[WatermelonWaveclub]

Just for fun. DD and I were just watching a video where Americans were asking questions about the UK. What are your questions (can be for any nationality from any nationality)? And please feel free to answer other people's questions!

I'll start with some questions for Americans:

Are your grocery bags really those ones without handles? They look really awkward to carry!

Why do you not have electric kettles?

In High school films the English teacher for example always gives them some homework to do by the next day and says 'see you tomorrow' - do you have the same classes every day? We just had English twice a week or something!

Ooh I know why they don't have electric kettles. Something to do with the voltage meaning it would take a very long time to boil.

I would like to know if there is a standard Christmas Day meal in Australia or do people just have whatever they fancy?

One for Americans, again from high school tv/film - what is "extra credit"? What does this get you? What's the incentive for doing additional school work for "extra credit"

Another one for the yanks...

Why do you call pasta and spaghetti "noodles"? Like what do you call actual "Asian" noodles? Everyone I see in an American lasagne recipe "layer your noodles" and I'm like waaaa?

Swedes: in Frozen what accent does Oaken have?

Some stores have paper bags with handles, some without! It really depends on the shop.

As a PP said, lack of kettles is due to the voltage. I also don’t really remember having much need for boiled water unless it was in a pan, when I was growing up in the US.

Again, it depends on the school but yes, we usually had the same classes every day! I went to one where we had block classes, so Week 1 was an A day, B day, A, etc., and the next was B, A, B, A, B so we had double-length classes but it worked out to the same amount over 10 days. A and B days had different classes.

Midwesterner here but yes, all of those were noodles! Not sure why though!

Really? How interesting! I can't imagine not having a kettle!

I would like to know if there is a standard Christmas Day meal in Australia or do people just have whatever they fancy?

Some people, generally of British heritage, might cook a tradition, hot Christmas meal with all the trimmings. Many others will have a cold leg of ham, BBQ, prawns, steaks, sausages and salads. Others still might be Muslim and not celebrate Christmas at all of follow their own Greek, Vietnamese, Chinese traditions. No set meal for all of Australia!

American but have lived in the UK since I was a uni student…

Plastic carrier bags have handles. Usually the paper grocery bags don’t have handles but every time you think they never have handles then you go into the rare shop that does have handles on their paper bags. They aren’t difficult to carry though and they are one thing I quite miss because they are useful in a practical sense. But keep in mind Americans are almost always taking their shopping home in the car, so you do your shopping with a trolley that we call a cart (and very, very few places require a coin to unlock them), pay for everything and put it into the bags, put the bags back into the cart and wheel the cart to the car. As much as I like paper grocery bags, I don’t really fancy hugging one too carry it home on a 20 minute walk.

Electric kettles are available but not popular. You can even buy them at normal places like WalMart. But Americans drink coffee way, way more than tea, and not instant coffee as a rule. So for every Brit wondering why we don’t have kettles in America, there’s an American wondering why there aren’t filter coffee machines on every countertop in Britain. (If you want to get really nerdy about this one, there is an entire episode on Technology Connections on YouTube all about kettles in America.)

High school classes would just depend on how your school is set up. Mine had 55 minute lessons, so you would have core subjects 4 or 5 days a week, which is pretty similar to here actually. But some schools have longer lessons with block scheduling so then you’d have the same number of hours but it would just be a couple days a week. The education system has had big changes since I was a teenager but not n my day we definitely had assignments that would be due the next lesson, even if that was the next day, but things like essays would have more time.

Noodle just referred to the shape. Penne not a noodle. Spaghetti a noodle. I don’t know. I don’t make the rules. In many parts of the US (including mine) we have very little in the way of international food so it never came up that pasta wasn’t a real noodle and Asian food did have real noodles. (I also had literally no idea what curry was when I moved here, and my mother thinks it’s witchcraft that I can eat with chopsticks and is very confused by the entire concept of lentils. We are really good at barbecue and that’s all we’ve got.)

I didn't know that...how strange!

Norwegian, I’m not Swedish but my husband is.

Interesting...I don't understand how you fit all the different subjects in if you do them everyday? I mean we did Maths, English, Chemistry, Biology, Physics, History, Geography, R.E, P.E, Personal and social studies, Music, Drama, Art, French, German, Technology, I.T. Obvious cut down when doing GCSEs but still over 10 subjects.

This one blew my mind when I became a teacher here because the systems are just really different in this respect.

The teacher assigns whatever they want - usually some done in class and some done at home. Each piece of work is worth a set number of points and your mark is recorded as points. So if your maths teacher assigns 10 points of work a day, and you always miss one, you’ll get 9 points each day and at the end of the term you have 90%. This but varies but as a general rule, the grades work as 90/80/70/60 as a standard: 90% gets you an A, 80% a B, and then we don’t have E, G, or U that we had here before the reworking to numbers. So 60% is a D and 59% and below is just an F and you’ve failed.

Go back to your one missed question every day getting you a 90% but then there was also one day when you didn’t do your homework. That day you get a 0 so that will bump you out of A range.

Enter Extra Credit: you do extra, optional work and get to add those points on and it can bump you back up to the A.

Or you’re in a really tight race to be Valedictorian and then you do
extra credit all over the shop in hopes of
finishing all of high school with more points than anyone else.

Where do Isle of Man and Channel Island people say you are going when travelling over to Great Britain? Do you say "Great Britain", or "the mainland' etc (I suspect not the latter, as it would deny the autonomy of the islands).

America: MM/DD/YYYY. It makes no sense to write it in that order, especially when the entire rest of the world uses DD/MM/YYYY, so just... why??

German peeps - is it normal to talk about children's poo as 'großes geschäft' or is that a weird translation?

I would love to know this too!
But although you say no-one else uses this, we do use the order.
Verbally it’s very common to describe tomorrow as “July 19th”.

Now I must know what Australians have as their Christmas meal.

I’m British, I have a question for Americans… it’s a really strange question but my Mum is always commenting on it when we watch US dramas or movies…

So, on American TV shows, whenever there is a phone call/conversation between characters, they never seem to say goodbye at the end of the call- they just hang up.

Is that just for the purposes of filming better scenes, or do you usually just hang up at the end of a phone call without explicitly saying goodbye?

@scoobycute, the Americans who call spaghetti, noodles, call Asian noodles egg noodles.
In the UK we used to write the date as the US does now. We took it to the US, then changed to fit in with Europe. The US kept the format.

I’ve never heard a British person say July 19th - always the 19th of July. Not sure if I misread your post though…

Its weird Americans use the month-day format even though they have a holiday they call ‘the 4th of July’, not July 4th.

On the subject of Christmas meals - do all Japanese get KFC or is that an urban myth?

I've wondered this for decades! In US tv shows/films they say something then hang up. How do they know it's the end of the conversation without all the "right then", "love you", "goodbye", "so I'll see you next week", "must get on", "no, you hang up" type talk? And is it the same for face to face conversations?

Another one for the Americans. How common is it to have a beach house?!

@BrioNotBiro I'm an islander. We either say we're going to the mainland or the North Island.