Expats, tell me what aspect or social norm of your new country was strange to you?

[AjasLipstick]

I am a Brit in Oz and for me, the hardest thing to get used to was Sunday trading hours being like the UK in the 70s.

The weirdest thing was how much less formal people are...kids are dressed very informally and parties for children never have kids dressed up in party dresses but in shorts and t shirts. I like it now I'm used to it though.

Uk in NZ.

Oh my word ... optional shoes. DS was 6 when we moved here. He refused to do anything barefoot at school and was marked out as a stroppy young thing.

Mince and cheese pies, just why???

No blinking central heating. Cold houses and the endless rain. Our house is very well insulated

Idiot drivers everywhere

I quite like it here ....

And everything Pallisers mentions except the dish rinsing. I have never seen a home in Ireland where dishes were not rinsed.

Seasonal decorations - I think this is a German cultural thing too,
Eating at an ungodly hour - my family always eats between 7 and 8 and we are considered strange,
Punctuality,
Also, everyone off to bed before 11.

Interesting about the Taiwanese person understanding the Irish tea thing. There are some 'face' elements to Irish and some Asian cultures that are similar ime.

Thinking of the abbreviations in Australia, the police check website used to be "crimtrack", and immigration is still "immi". The car rego authority in Victoria is called VicRoads. The Melbourne A-Z is called Melways.

Some years ago, when wanting to name some tunnels in Melbourne, "inny" and "outy" were touted.

It's very much of the say what you see school, hence, the Little Sandy Desert and the Great Sandy Desert, and the just plain Little Desert.

Oh. Sitting on the ground, as done by teens waiting for a bus, or just waiting. Not just in the summer, so long as it's not actually raining.

@Montypontypine mince and cheese pies were one of these reasons we decided to move here after a particularly wonderful one in Te Anu. Mince. Cheese. Pastry. What more do you need in life. (Central heating would be nice actually)

Brit in Germany (Munich)
-don't do Double duvet covers rather two singles. These are folded in half then placed half way down the bed.

-giant square pillows on bed

-kids clothing is much less gendered and well suited to the weather.

• wooden toys over plastic (especially battery operated)

• Brezen (pretzel) are ok 1st foods.....even though covered in salt it's just picked off.

• lots of please and thanks and have a nice day here

• every car is big fast and german made even though they don't get out of 4th gear in the city.

• graves are very well kept and also decorated with the season

• little patches of waste ground are used to grow flowers and then you self pick and leave cash in an honesty box (would never happen in uk!) in autumn flowers replaced by pumpkins!

• so many more lol I find the german lovely though. The grannies are a bit of a nightmare sometimes though.

Also Aus/NZ. The 'sausage sizzle'. Usually done to fundraise. A sausage wrapped in one slice of white sliced bread. Just odd. Why not a lovely bap or a finger roll?

Yes, the good old sausage sizzle! I'm used to it now but agree it's weird.

I lived in NZ when this Toyota ad came out and there was a bit of a fuss about the use of "bugger" and after complaints it was only shown after the 9 pm watershed.

Isn't there a brand of bug spray in Aus/NZ called Bugger Off?

I was born, raised and lived in England until I was 20 then lived in the U.S. for 45 yrs.

First of all I must say that the U.S. is a huge country with varied customs and regions. I am in a very rural part of the NW.

I must have come across very rude for many years here because if someone invited me to their home for dinner I would just show up and not offer to bring food with me. When I started inviting people to dinner at my house they would always ask, “What shall I bring”? I’d tell them to just to bring themselves but people would show up with various foods. I found this very annoying. Example; one family brought big bags of potato chips (Crisps) and sat and ate them at the table. Some have brought ice cream and chucked it into my made-from-scratch trifle or other deserts, ruining them.

I was just asked to dinner and told to bring deviled eggs and the desert. They think every meal is a pot-luck get together.

Here I think the word ‘bugger' is a spin off from the saying ‘cute as a bugs ear’ and they sometimes call children ‘cute little buggers’. There was a Day Care center near us called, ’The little Buggers Day Care”. I showed this place to my dad when he was visiting from England and I think it was one of the highlights of his trip.

Here to say someone is full of spunk means they are energetic. My mil died a few weeks ago and I was informed she was full of spunk when she died.

I really love living here and after all these years England has become strange to me. Things I find odd about England;

Children starting school so young. Here kindergarten is for a few hours/day and the kids are 5 or 6 yrs old. 1st grade is when they start to go all day and it is for 6 - 7 year olds. And kids get 3 months off in the summer.

People in England tell each other off (shout) if they think they are breaking some rules.

Dog shit in little bags hanging in the hedgerows.

Washing all the dishes in the same dirty soapy water and not rinsing.

Supermarkets not bagging up groceries for you or asking if you need help out to your car.

People parked all over the place.

People driving like bats out of hell down country lanes.

Since I’ve been gone I notice Brits have picked up some American customs such as saying mom instead of mum, having high school proms, trick or treating and some more. Also I am shocked my the number of American fast food joints there. Subway, Pizza Hut, Burger King, McDonalds, Starbucks. We just had fish and chips 45 years ago.

A PP mentioned something about only getting Lipton tea here. Our local stores sell Yorkshire Tea and PG Tips.

I lived in the States for 3 years. Early meal times; 5pm is dinner time, all the restaurants closed by 8. My first dinner party I started early, cooked a 3 course meal and everyone went home as soon as they'd finished dinner. They were (& are to a certain extent) with technology. I was paid with an actual paper cheque. No chip & pin at the time (they only have contactless technology for Applepay , no cards do contactless)

Tipping I still find frustrating, but since finding out that they're taxed on predicted tip from your bill, I'm more stringent.

No one just goes to a pub (bar) for a drink because they're pretty seedy places.

Parking only facing the side of the street that you're on.

Brit in Aus here. Nothing much phased us when we moved over here until we encountered the Drive thru Bottle Shop!
You basically park your car under a car port, someone from the shop comes out, asks you what you want; goes back in and gets it. He then comes out with a mobile EFTPOS machine and your booze, you pay and drive off!!
Utterly bizarre.

Oh, @Nakedavenger74, I work at Bunnings; home of the sausage sizzle!

Had lunch with an American, Canadian and myself a Brit last week, all 20+ years in rural France.

All our French partners are hoarders,and we find the quantity of snacking in our home countries bizarre.

Very difficult to make friends where we live. Most people's friends are either from primary or secondary at the latest. They hang out with those friends forever.

Can be friends with people at work but very unlikely to ever be invited to their homes. Will meet for lunch in a restaurant though.

Social events are couple based or family based.

Big kids here play with little kids always. They never tell them they are too young to play. Makes for excellent mixed aged gatherings, parents rarely have to step in.

"Also, I don't understand standing to the right on escalators etc. when you drive on the left. Seems backwards to me."

I think I know the answer to this, SuperBeagle.

Re driving on the left, "in the past, almost everybody travelled on the left side of the road because that was the most sensible option for feudal, violent societies. Since most people are right-handed, swordsmen preferred to keep to the left in order to have their right arm nearer to an opponent and their scabbard further from him."

Standing on escalators on the right probably also relates to right-handedness. When escalators were invented in the very late 1800s left-handedness was viewed as 'wrong', to the point that left-handed children were forced to learn to write with their right hand. So right-handedness was seen as the norm. Therefore it became the custom to stand on the right of an escalator in the UK so that your right hand could hold onto the moving handrail.

Well, that's my take on it anyway

In fact the only reason the rest of Europe drives on the wrong side is because Napoleon was left handed....

I never knew that Dull. Every day's a school day!!

giant square pillows on bed

Owing to work moves, we now have British, Belgian, Swiss and German bedding. I sleep on the British and Swiss pillows, DH on Belgian, DD1 has one of those ridiculous 1m square German pillows, and DD2 has given up the whole thing and still sleeps on the pillow that came with the little IKEA toddler duvet set. Everything is labelled with marker pen and it's like doing a bloody jigsaw puzzle when you change the beds

Regarding the grannies, do you get a lot of advice about appropriate levels of dress for small children in cold weather? I've had many a friendly offer of unsolicited advice, only for them to get embarrassed when they find out I'm from Scotland. Yes, there is an entire country of children who are able to go out without a hat or matchhose when it's 10 degrees and somehow they survive

I'd rather (and do) sleep without a pillow than on one of those giant German ones. The way that they (certainly MIL's generation) called a duvet and pillow the 'bed' confused the hell out of me at the beginning.

When dc1 was small we lived next door to a pair of lovely and very elderly Russian-German ladies. They would often appear as we were leaving the flat and bemoan the clothing we had put on dc1 (in a mild, albeit damp, southern German autumn/winter). He was sure to freeze abominably.

I went back to work quite early with dc1 (pre-Elterngeld days) and dh would bring him to me to bf in breaks (higher ed institution) and I had a student express open disapproval when she saw me doing so while having a coffee once. Nurseries for under-threes in that part of the world - which we didn't use, as dh was a SAHD for a year or two until we moved - were called 'Tagheime', literally 'day homes' , which said all it needed to about attitudes to WOHM. I found a lot of people really struggled to wrap their heads around me being simultaneously an evil working mother and a loopy mollycoddling extended breastfeeder.

(Although, oddly, childminders are called Tagesmütter (or, if male, Tagesväter - and I have heard of a few, more than in the UK) and that doesn't seem to come with disapproval attached. Tagheime definitely were, though)

Brit living in Cyprus for 9 years now.

Cypriots are in the main lovely people,but god are they LOUD! The first year I lived here I thought everyone was angry or aggressive all the time..nope, they are just loud and don't mean to be rude! Giving birth here was tricky

Food is life here.It was normal for everyone in the office to discuss their breakfast, lunch and dinner plans daily. Even if someone commented they were going to TGI Fridays next week, a chorus of 'what are you going to order??!!' would break out. Followed by a 20min discussion on what people would order if they were going.

The heat..I still can't handle the beach unless it is May or Sept/Oct.My two boys that were born here barely break a sweat and get really cold in the 'winter'😂

“In fact the only reason the rest of Europe drives on the wrong side is because Napoleon was left handed....”

Partly. Roberspierre establishes it as law in Paris first and Napoleon just followed it and spread it with conquest. Just like the Brits did with their colonies. But bits of Austria, and all of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Hungary drove on the left until Hitler invaded and forced them to drive on the right.

Interesting trivia from a new scientist article I read... Lots of countries considered switching over in 1960s including Pakistan. They didn’t because camel “trains” “drove” through the night while the drivers kipped. And it was too difficult to teach an old camel new trick .

Cyprus here too.

Half day closing on Wednesdays.

Young babies and toddlers eating in restaurants after 10pm.

Yes yes to the speaking volume too! I had two C sections here. Terrifying!

In winter, everyone wearing tracksuits everywhere!

And the beach thing too . I have never got into the habit of going really late here when its very hot like some people do.

Brit in Aus here too.
Weird but love
Sausage sizzle - never used to eat hot dogs cos I don't like hot dog buns, there's too much bread for the amount of sausage. A single white slice of bread is perfect.
Rego/VicRoads/servo/bottlo/smoko/arvo... Shall I go on?
Did my first Aussie shop the other day, barefoot in shorts and singlet. Normally throw thongs (the shoes!) on but it was 38C and I was sweating just thinking about putting more clothes on.

Weird and dislike
The casual racism that seems to be prevalent (I'm technically rural, but the metro boundary is about 10km up the road, so barely rural!) Every foreigner with non white skin is a "wog", every native with non white skin is an "abo" and it's horrific.

Oh, another like
"Fuck" is used like punctuation, and like pp said, "cunt" is pretty much synonymous with mate.