This topic will involve some overlap with other posts, but so be it; we are thorough or we are nothing.
And I hope we can all remember that “surprise,” in and of itself, is not inherently positive or negative: surprise can be positive or negative or neutral; and surprise can be STRONGLY one way, or MILDLY one way, or anything in between. Some of these surprises I am about to tell you about will unavoidably carry the indication of what kind of surprise it was (such as the disheartening dismay of no rice with the Chinese food, which meant we hadn’t ordered anywhere near enough food)—but others are NEUTRAL: just things I noted at the time as things I didn’t know would be the case, and was interested to find were the case, and thought others might be similarly interested to know. And of course some are POSITIVE, such as good bath-product scents and fun yogurt flavors! Or even if the experiences are unavoidably interpreted as MILDLY negative (such as water going out of the shower onto the floor), it was not a particularly negative experience FOR ME, since I don’t OWN or need to CLEAN the bathroom where that’s happening, and am FULLY ABLE to cope with the measure of “putting a towel down to catch the water”—and so it is not a HARSH CRITICISM OF ALL OF ENGLAND AND ALL ITS PEOPLE AND ALSO OF THIS ENTIRE TRIP, it is just something I thought you would be interested to hear about, in a Let’s Marvel at the Wide World and All Its Infinite Variation sort of way, and in the same way as I might tell you about unfamiliar practices I encountered in other regions of my own home country. Let’s practice a little!:
We were surprised when we ordered Chinese take-out food in England and it did not come with, in order of surprise from least to most: fortune cookies (I’d heard elsewhere that fortune cookies were a United-States-Chinese thing), disposable chopsticks, RICE. (Only the rice was impactful: it took a meal we thought would heartily feed seven people and turned it into a hearty snack.) And it DID come with what we have since discovered were PRAWN CRACKERS, which did not seem like either prawn or crackers but instead like some sort of puffed-rice cup; our two vegetarians were alarmed to find out afterward that they’d accidentally eaten prawn.
(Practice round! This was clearly a NEGATIVE surprise, and in fact a BOUQUET of negative surprises. And the timing was particularly bad for this kind of surprise: we had become over-hungry, and then we encountered NUMEROUS hurdles for everything about that meal, from not being able to find anywhere to eat, to not being able to use the hotel-room phone to order delivery, to calling places from the lobby only to find they could not take our order or could not deliver it until, for example, 9:30 at night. And then we finally succeeded in placing an order!!! but then it wasn’t enough food because there was no rice, and our vegetarians unknowingly ate something they wouldn’t have eaten. Nevertheless: we are not trying to blame ALL OF ENGLAND, or ANY of England, for this set of surprises; this could have happened in any unfamiliar ordering situation. It could have been a good lesson for us about being more educated about our options—except that in this case, it never would have occurred to us that Chinese food wouldn’t come with rice: we have lived in and/or traveled to the U.S. west coast, the U.S. east coast, and several places in between, and in all of those places rice has come with the food. For us, this was like needing to know to ask the restaurant if the sandwich comes with bread, and also needing to ask if the bread is vegetarian: we didn’t know that we didn’t know that we didn’t know. So it was more of a lesson in knowing that we won’t always know that we don’t know we don’t know. And that in that case we CAN eat small portions of non-planned food out of hotel mugs with coffee spoons, and search online for anything we don’t recognize, and then fill up on cookies. It is, bottom line, a lesson in making sure we have lots of cookies.)
I was surprised by how much wetter the eggs were cooked: fried eggs with liquid yolks, wet scrambled eggs rather than dry. (Practice round! This was a NEUTRAL surprise! It was interesting that eggs were, routinely and in every case we encountered them, cooked DIFFERENTLY than we would normally encounter eggs where we live. It was neither positive nor negative, just different/surprising. Obviously we could have asked for them to be cooked differently if it had been a negative surprise, and this option occurred to us immediately and without effort!)
I was surprised by the looser alcohol restrictions. Hard liquor was available in regular grocery/convenience stores; 18-year-olds (and even 16-year-olds) were served liquor without being carded. (Practice round! This was a NEUTRAL surprise! It was interesting that the rules and enforcements were so completely different than in our usual experience. It was neither positive nor negative, just different/surprising when compared to the way it is where we are in the United States, where I still get carded sometimes even though I have CHILDREN old enough to drink, and where my 22-year-old was prevented from buying alcohol because he was accompanied by someone who could NOT legally buy alcohol, and where grocery stores can sell only lower-proof items such as wine and beer.)
Okay, enough practice! I will rely on you to handle it from here onward, and I will not feel the need to keep reminding you that “encountering something different, and remarking upon it with interest” does not mean “criticizing it and calling it bad.”
Also: keep in mind that I am a relatively NEW traveler. We do not take vacations: as with “going out to eat,” this was one of the things we voluntarily traded in order to have five children. (Not because NO ONE can do it: I know PLENTY of large families go out to eat, and take vacations. But because WE couldn’t.) The most traveling I’ve done is in the last few years, when I’ve been driving kids to and from college, and going on college visits. So maybe you will be surprised to find that I was surprised by something, and maybe you would like to cherish that silently within your heart!
This may have just been the particular hotels we stayed in, but all of the showers had half-or-less glass doors. Like, half-or-more of the bathtub/shower area was completely open, with unblocked water flying out onto the floor to some extent, ranging from “almost none, how it is almost none when this is wide open??” to “we had to put down a whole towel just to soak up all the water that flew out because there was not enough door/curtain stopping it from doing so.” I can’t claim to have been FULLY SURPRISED by this, because several commenters mentioned it ahead of time—but I still felt a little surprised to see it in actual practice, because it seemed so UNLIKELY, and particularly because several other commenters had said “WHAT?? That was not our experience at all!!,” so I admit I’d wondered if the first group of commenters had encountered something rare.
Again, this may have been just the particular hotels we stayed in, but none of the bathrooms had fans to remove the steamy air. At least one had what seemed to be a non-working fan; more than one had no apparent fan mechanism of any kind.
Again-again, this may have been just the particular hotels we stayed in, but all of them had what were to me DELIGHTFULLY-scented bath products. I am accustomed to the products in the U.S. hotels we usually stay in, which usually smell like public-bathroom handsoap (i.e., cheap/chemical/institutional), or else like artificial coconut.
Again-again-again maybe just the particular hotels, but anyway the light switches were OUTSIDE the bathroom doors. Which would have been fine if the lights for the rest of the room weren’t in the same panel. So if, for example, you got up and did not remember that the bathroom lightswitch was the second one in from the left in this hotel, you would turn on the light for the entire room when you got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night; and, even if you DID remember, you turned on the bathroom light and then had to open the door and let the light flood into the room. Paul, fortunately, had inexplicably assumed I’d want a nightlight for the room (I never sleep with a nightlight), and so he put that nightlight in the bathroom so we wouldn’t have to turn on the bathroom lights at night. I have added “bathroom nightlight” to my Future Travel List.
We were surprised by how extremely hot the water was: many places (hotels and public restrooms) had little stickers warning about the heat of the water, which was easily more than hot enough to scald. In one of our hotel rooms, hot water came scaldingly out of the cold water faucets as well, and we had to let it run for a few minutes until it started being cold. Ample, ample hot water, is what I’m saying.
In one case, the light switches in a hotel room seemed not to work at all. Luckily, we were traveling with a cosmopolitan group, so I thought to group-chat them about it before going down to check with reception: it turned out we were supposed to put our hotel key-card into a slot right inside the door, in order to operate the electricity in the room. Maybe you already knew this, and would like to have a little chuckle! Or maybe instead you will file this away and it will save you later from other people having a little chuckle at you.
This might have been the particular areas we traveled to, but I was surprised to need reservations even for casual pubs and pizza places. The travel agent had advised us to make reservations, but her phrasing made me think she meant we should make reservations if there were PARTICULAR places we had our hearts set on, in order to avoid disappointment. Instead it was Pretty Much Everywhere. One night my half-group went to a pub and I felt self-conscious about our reservation once we arrived and it was three-quarters empty and extremely casual—but then we heard group after group being turned away at the door for not having a reservation, with the server saying they were “completely full for both sittings.”
I was surprised not to be able to buy Dramamine (meclizine hydrochloride); if we traveled again, I would bring TONS of it. Thanks to you, I was not surprised to need to bring our own melatonin, benadryl, and hydrocortisone cream. (There was a later discussion that indicated we could have acquired hydrocortisone cream by asking a pharmacist; still, I was glad to have it with me already when a child acquired an unexpected hive.)
I was surprised at how many women I saw wearing dresses, just out and about, casually. It’s not that dresses are so uncommon in my experience, or anyway I don’t THINK of them as so uncommon. But something about the number of dresses I saw in England was enough to catch my eye as unusual. And lots more fun patterns than I’m used to seeing! It made me want to wear more dresses.
I was surprised at how easy it was to go through Customs, in both directions. Regular airport security was the usual barking unhappy experience both ways: “EVERYTHING OUT OF YOUR POCKETS AND INTO THE BINS”/”SHOES OFF”/”MA’AM THAT NEEDS TO BE IN A SEPARATE BIN”/”SIGH, NO, YOU HAVE TO WALK STRAIGHT THROUGH, DON’T HESITATE”/”HANDS OVER YOUR HEAD”/etc., with several of the kids being put through additional screenings and backpack-searches. But CUSTOMS, which I was MUCH more worried about (especially coming home, because I’d heard U.S. Customs was pretty much The Worst, even to their own citizens, which did not remotely surprise me), was a breeze both times—so that both times, we ended up out of the whole process saying, “Wait: did we do it? Was that all? Did we miss something?” We’d talked to the children ahead of time about how we would be separated and asked questions, maybe odd questions about whether we’d walked in pastures (that specific example came up in Paul’s research), and then none of that happened at all. On our way into England, we weren’t even checked by a person: we just had to stand at a device that scanned our passport and our face; one of us got a “See an agent” alert, but there were no visible agents to see, so that person just started over at a new machine and this time was passed through. On our way into the U.S., we were checked by a person who checked us all together as a group, no separating us, and only checked each passport/face and asked one of us (Paul) if we had any food. I will note that both times, in both directions, I saw people who were not-white being detained for further screening/questioning. I’m not saying it was because they were not-white. But: they were not-white, and it happened both times in both directions, and there was more than one not-white person both times in both directions.
I would be VERY INTERESTED to hear about things that have surprised you in your travels!
Of all of these, the one that made me go “That’s weird” out loud under my breath was the hot water one. Ouch!
I have stayed at a resort in Mexico that had the key card for electricity thing. Seems like an ok energy-saving thing, only a mild hassle.
Traveling in India, one of the consistently surprising things to me was how the hot water worked in the bathrooms. They have a small hot water tank in each bathroom that needs to be individually switched on, with electricity, to produce hot water. (It did not produce great water pressure most of the time.) And, in most of the places we stayed, the shower head was just open to the rest of the bathroom with no specific shower area delineation or curtain. Meaning the toilet, at least, would get wet, and if you were lucky maybe the counter by the sink would stay dry so you could put your toiletries and clothes there. Mind you, we were not staying in fancy hotels in urban areas.
Something else about India that would have been surprising had I not been prepped beforehand is that sometimes there were not regular toilets and only squatty potties in public washrooms. MOST public washrooms, even in rural areas, did have a toilet, but NOT always.
(Caveat: India is an enormous, diverse country, and I only traveled through a few states in the north.)
Travelling in France (about 10 years ago) with little kids, one who was recently potty trained, was an adventure in toilets! First, in publice bathrooms there was no toilet seat, but there were often kid sized toilets (which my daughter loved!) – still with no seat. A few places in the rural areas there were hole-in-the-ground-type toilets (squatty potties, as you say!) and those were a no-go for any of us, but especially the little kids with no aim.
We went to London last year and I kept noticing unleashed dogs walking in busy pedestrian areas. They were all well groomed so I assumed they were pets owned by someone in the crowd, but I saw it so much it was jarring. I wondered if it was an urban thing rather than a british thing. Surprising!
Where I am in California you almost always have to order rice separately when you get Chinese food. It’s a side that you pay for. So interesting that it comes with your order where you live. Imagine all the differences there are within our own country that we don’t know about because you don’t know what you don’t know! That would be a fun future post.
We Californians also have hard liquor in our grocery stores.
This is different in every state. I currently live in Texas, and we have just beer and wine in grocery stores. Liquor is at liquor stores only. Before this I lived in Indiana, where grocery stores (and pharmacies!) sell beer, wine, and all manner of liquor. I know that there are other states like Pennsylvania and others where no alcohol at all is sold in grocery stores and one must go to a special “government store” to buy beer, wine, or liquor.
And then of course there are all the varied blue laws about WHEN alcohol is sold/not sold, whether it is permissible to have a happy-hour promotion on alcohol, etc etc. Most of those are designed to restrict alcohol sales, originally for moral reasons of some kind, but when I lived in Madison, WI, I remember that there was a restriction on grocery stores selling beer or wine after 9 pm to protect business at bars and pubs, LOL. Very Wisconsinite of them.
Louisiana does as does Maine. Massachusetts freaks out about beer and wine (except sometimes and good luck figuring out the rationale for that). New Hampshire has beer and wine at the grocery and liquor at state controlled liquor stores that have something to do with post-prohibition something something money making shenanigans, I think.
I’m also from California, and I am also accustomed to Chinese restaurants not automatically including rice. (Most restaurants HAVE rice; you just have to ask for/pay for it—although a lot of places will include it as part of a meal deal/lunch special or whatever.) That’s also the case in the UK/Ireland in my experience, but it wasn’t something I had to get used to when I moved here.
This comments section is for ALL travel surprises!
Yes, this is how it is in Houston’s Asian town at most places
Reservations were also an issue for us in Italy back in 2011. We lucked out in our first couple of cities because we always ate very early, which is very American. At one place they were hesitant to seat us because they were booked for the night but we promised to eat like fast Americans and the server laughed and we had a lovely dinner and didn’t even feel rushed. By our third city we knew to make reservations. Usually we’d stop by a place in the early afternoon and reserve for that night. We didn’t even have an international phone plan and stayed at air bnbs. I believe one of our hosts called a restaurant for us that she felt very strongly we had to eat at while in Rome.
Chinese food in Spain was also not like how it is in the US. My parents went to a Chinese place expecting to order off a menu, but it was early in the evening and it was served like tapas. You got a few appetizer sized portions with every alcoholic beverage ordered. When they asked to order a regular dinner it also didn’t come with rice, they had to ask. But I’m also seeing that more in the US too. I think restaurants want to cut down on food waste and will give less rice for free or you have to ask for it.
Yes to everything you said about water, plumbing, lights, and no fans. I think it’s interesting how such simple things can surprise us when they are different.
I also wanted to add that the prawn chips were a free starter once at a Thai restaurant in California where we used to live and my friend ate them without asking what they were. She is mildly allergic to shellfish.
I now have two kids with food allergies so my perspective on ordering food of any kind has drastically changed. We can’t assume that anything is safe, I have to ask, especially if it’s a food that’s new to me. I have heard though that vegetarians and those with food allergies can eat very well in the UK. Many places have binders with information on each dish so you know what the ingredients are. This is more difficult if you’re ordering by phone, of course. Next time whoever orders can say there are vegetarians in the group and clarify that the food meets those specifications.
The bathroom light switch thing is because it is against building regs in the UK to have the switch (or a normal electricity socket – the low voltage ones for shavers/toothbrushes are ok) inside a bathroom. In private homes they are outside the door as well, unless they’re the ones that pull from a string in the ceiling. This is peculiar to the UK afaik and whenever I travel abroad it’s strange to have them in the bathroom (feels Illicit and Dangerous). I’m a bit surprised you’ve not come across the thing where you have to put key in to work the lights – or rather I’m surprised it isn’t common in the US, I’ve seen it in many countries and would have assumed the US was the same. Most hotels it doesn’t need to be the actual key though, any card will do, so you can just use a random loyalty card or something.
Ah appreciate the tip on being able to use a random card. Hadn’t thought of that.
When we end up at these places we end up asking for an extra key card for the light because if we don’t keep a key card in our purse/wallet we’ll immediately lock ourselves out lol.
I was also (pleasantly!) surprised by how easy customs was both coming into London and returning to Seattle. We arrived at our AirBnB an entire hour earlier than I expected because it was such a breeze! That has definitely not been my experience on other trips so I hope this trend continues.
The weird shower glass thing is so odd to me. I guess it’s easier to clean? But also you get water all over the place? It used to be quite unusual to have showers at all in the UK—a lot of places only had baths—so I could understand if some places were retrofitted with the weird glass for space reasons or something, but the new places we stayed also had it? I dunno. I did appreciate the heated towel racks, though.
Hmmm. I remember that some years ago one of my stepkids was pleased to discover that in continental Europe (possibly Spain, I’m not completely sure which country) one could get a beer in McDonalds.
The very varied designs of toilets, both shapes and flushing mechanisms, is a source of amusement/interest to me when I travel.
Many years ago traveling around eastern Europe shortly after the Wall came down, I stayed in many places (inexpensive rentals and private homes) where the entire bathroom was perhaps 5 * 6 feet and contained a toilet and a sink, and was fully tiled at least up to about 6′ on all the walls with a drain in the floor, and the showerhead (and taps) just stuck out of one of the walls … so the entire bathroom was also the shower.
@Swistle (and many others here also), you would probably very much enjoy the book 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff if you have not already read it. It’s the story of a New York resident who orders books from a British bookshop in the post-war era and the dialogue that develops between her and the booksellers (via letters) as well as the ongoing rationing the British are experiencing are a very interesting read.
I loved that book!!
Oooh that is such a lovely book!
That book is delightful! And so is the movie made from it starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins
Good heavens, I didn’t know it had been made into a movie. Will watch!
Great to know many others have enjoyed the book. My mother passed a copy along to me after reading it and I did not expect to enjoy it as much as I did. But I did!
Nightlights! Are brilliant to carry around. We stayed in New Orleans this past year and the shower and toilet were behind a door with NOON AT THE EQUATOR levels of light, switch maybe on the outside and NO OUTLETS. But we put a nightlight in the sink area and just peed with the door open in the middle of the night because there is no reason to wake EVERYONE up for 6 seconds of bathroom use. Who designs these spaces?!?!?!?
How was the Chinese takeway in England ? I’m not partial to it here at all but curious if it was similar or noticeably different?
It was SO DELICIOUS—but we’re used to diluting the deliciousness by putting it over rice, so it was rather INTENSE. Like eating pizza toppings with no crust!
The room key in the slot by the door! Many years ago I had a business trip to Singapore and we arrived extremely late in the evening and I spent an inordinately long amount of time feeling around in the dark trying to get lights to turn on before I gave up and went back down to the front desk, where they then told me how it worked. Turns out there was a tiny sign by the main switch near the door to the room, except you cannot see that sign in the dark. I have never encountered anything like it since.
That hotel room, however, had the best shower in the entire world (the water was the perfect pressure; everything was configured in the perfect way).
Public (meaning in restaurants etc) bathrooms in the Netherlands are often pay to pee. maybe about 1 out of three times in my experience.
I’d say this is in Amsterdam (and some other very touristy spots) only – places where a lot of people may come in just to use the restrooms without ordering anything to eat or drink. Oh and places that are open late into the night, like nightclubs.
The cultural shock for us in Holland was the “poo shelf” in the toilets 😱
https://twitter.com/fchadfallout76/status/1492587898096570371
All the public toilets in Paris, in our experience, you have to pay 1-2 euro. They all had an attendant and were spotlessly clean, but there was usually an outside spot nearby that stank of pee. :/
I’m an expat dual Canadian US citizen and my experience of customs entering the US was that it was slightly annoying before I got my green card and later my citizenship; green card or passport in hand – trivial! Every time, even at the height of Covid (my dad died during Covid so there was a lot more traveling than I’d usually do during a pandemic). And I travel between both countries a lot.
I love this sentence immensely for some reason: “and so it is not a HARSH CRITICISM OF ALL OF ENGLAND AND ALL ITS PEOPLE AND ALSO OF THIS ENTIRE TRIP, it is just something I thought you would be interested to hear about, in a Let’s Marvel at the Wide World and All Its Infinite Variation sort of way” And also the bit about the child “acquiring” a hive.
Some things that have previously surprised me while traveling:
1. Grocery stores did not have bags. This was in the early aughts, so that was not A Thing in the US states I was used to living in, so I found it highly surprising.
2. Breakfasts. My husband and I stayed in a bunch of hotels on a trip around Europe before we were married, and they almost always offered breakfasts as part of the price. They would be delivered to our room on a little tray and they almost always had a soft boiled egg, some bread, some cheese, and some yogurt. In Sweden, we fell in love with this very particular lacy kind of white, mild cheese that we then looked for everywhere. So different from the breakfasts I am used to in the States (pancakes! waffles! bacon!) and so delightful and fun.
3. Salads. Maybe this was particular to the parts of Germany/Austria we visited, but I found that salads were just lettuce and dressing. And they were SO GOOD — fresh and tasty and the dressing was perfect. But very different from American salads, with all their toppings. (Although I went to Paris with my mother when I was eight, and that’s where I first fell in love with salad, and THAT was also just lettuce and dressing.)
I am always curious to find out which countries serve free tap water with a meal and which do not. Italy, France, Spain, definitely no, you must buy bottled water (although it is quite reasonably priced). Sweden not only has free tap water, I went to self-serve-ish places (like a museum cafe) that had free SPARKLING water, which was heavenly. After Sweden we went to Denmark, no more free tap water.
I feel like the dinner reservations thing has gotten so much MORE since covid. Even in San Diego where I live, forget going most anywhere on a weekend without a reservation. Even casual places! And this summer in Italy/Greece reservations were an absolute must.
I also feel like US customs/passport control has gotten much faster/easier. This summer when we came back the agent just had us stand in front of a camera to get scanned, didn’t even ask us questions at all. So fast! Even as a (white, middle aged) American I feel like it used to take longer.
Traveling is so interesting!! I am enjoying hearing about your trip!
I lived in Germany for a year and remember being relieved while traveling in Greece when they would just bring a small pitcher of water to the table for free. So that makes me think that in Germany and the other countries I was spending time in, it was not a regular occurrence!
I just got back from Iceland and they serve fresh tap water at all restaurants. But no ice. Iceland is so expensive, but you save some money on drinks since nothing is as good as that water.
We were able to get free tap water in Spain in restaurants when I went there in 2016 (Vaso de Agua de Grifo). Our tour guide told us how to order it.
Most places in the Netherlands will refuse to give you tap water because they don’t make enough money just selling food, so they rely on people having drinks with their meal to ensure enough income (/profit).
When I went to New Zealand, I found it mind-blowing that some super markets were open 24/7. In Japan I was surprised how clean everything was, almost no litter anywhere. But there were so few trash cans. I later learned that most people take their trash home and I love that it works there but would never work in my home country. I one ate soba noodles in Japan and was take. Aback that they were cold (I did read the menu but my Japanese wasn’t good enough to get that aspect). In a hotel in Japan I was served fish for breakfast one which was delicious but still odd because it was not even 8 in the morning. In Italy, I was surprised at how cheap coffee was. In Stockholm I was pleasantly surprised with how long some museums were open. But oh my god, everything was super expensive. I am really into Greek and Roman mythology, so when I visited Rome as a teenager I was disgusted at how dirty the city was then (in the summer) and absolutely crowded. Would still like to visit again but probably not in the summer time. Super specific but also super odd was that in our air bnb in Split (Croatia) they put chocolate ducks of all things on the table as a welcoming gift. Chocolate ducks! I still don’t get it but I liked it and they were super tasty.
(Now that I read this again, it feels like I‘m bragging because I visited a lot of places, but I grew up quite privileged in Europe and plane tickets used to be cheap plus I wasn’t always so aware about my carbon footprint… but I just loved to and still love to travel…)
In a chiming in way: and in some US states (including the only two where I’ve ever lived), you can’t even buy beer or wine at the grocery store! Liquor stores only for anything stronger than mouthwash.
Same here in Australia… there is quite a selection of non-alcoholic beer and wine in most supermarkets now, but absolutely nothing alcoholic
“So maybe you will be surprised to find that I was surprised by something, and maybe you would like to cherish that silently within your heart!”
HA HA HA HA
The key card thing! My first time in London (2000) I had to call down to the front desk to say the lights weren’t working and they explained about the key card. WHO KNEW. Not this American!
I was surprised in Japan at the large variety of toilets. There were toilets that had sinks on the back of them…you use the water to wash your hands and then in drains into the toilet to be come the toilet-bowl water in the dorms and a hotel, there were squat-potties (with no toilet paper provided) in the train stations (with one “western” toilet in a stall sometimes at the end), and there were some toilets in buildings and hotels that had a whole panel of electronics for everything ranging from fake-flushing sounds to bidets to seat-heaters.
The Tokyo airport has bidets in every public bathroom with heated seats and a machine that plays water noises. They also have a platform that flips down so you don’t have to stand on the floor is changing your clothes.
It’s been a long time since I did any real traveling, but back when I did, I remember being surprised by all the water in Switzerland. Water fountains that just ran continuously because why not? No dust. And also the tunnels…we specifically wanted to drive over some kind of mountain pass to really experience the Alps, but the roads just stick to the valley floors and went through mountains as needed.
In Asia (China, Japan, Thailand) they don’t really have breakfast food. So hotel breakfast buffets are what you would order for dinner. Delicious
When we visited China, we were at a hotel that served both Chinese people and Westerners, so they had a double breakfast buffet: one with yogurt and muesli and cheese and scones and jam, and the other with dumplings and seafood congee and salads. It was amazing.
In 2008, we visited Hong Kong Disneyland & came across the “card in the slot” issue. It affected all the lights in the room including the desk lamp & bedside lamps. We could turn things on & off, but nothing lit up. We did finally find the remote for the TV. Used the light from the TV screen to find the phone & then called down to the desk. (This was after midnight, so no help from the windows either.) They explained about putting the card in the slot & we did figure out on our own that you could use any card. It was explained to us that by requiring the card in the slot, it tells the front desk that there’s someone in the room in case of emergency, as you’d take the card if you left the room. That way in case of fire, etc., they didn’t need to spend extra time checking those rooms as they would register as no card in slot – no one in room.
One of the hotels we stay in nearly every month, has remodeled their rooms & they either have a shower with a half wall, or a tub/shower that you practically have to sit on in order to get into as the tub is made to be extra deep. (I have back & hip issues & it scares me getting in & out as I can barely lift my leg high enough to swing my foot over. I’ll take those half wall showers anytime.)
As for the chinese food & rice thing – most places we eat chinese food, the meal comes with fried rice, not white rice. A few places like Benihana’s will bring you white rice with your meal, but charge extra if you wish to convert it to fried rice. We haven’t come across anywhere here in California that does not provide any rice (or ChowMein) IF you’re ordering a full meal, but we have eaten places where you buy each item ala carte, mostly fast food places. Restaurants seem to include white rice & one place gave us white rice automatically even though we ordered pork fried rice. We got both…..so much rice!
Being able to buy contact lenses from a vending machine in Russia.
What?!?! That is crazy!!! I would love it though.
I love reading about travel and all the different ways the world works! Great topic and great comments. I think to me one of the surprising things was in Egypt, I had to pay a lady to give me toilet paper at public washrooms. That was best case scenario, actually, because often the washrooms did not have toilet paper nor a lady distributing it.
One thing that surprised me about the States – and this was specifically in Maui, so who knows – was that I was ID’d at the grocery store while buying beer. First the lady asked who it was for and although it honestly was for my sons, they are not 21 (also something different from Canada, the legal age is 18 or 19 depending on the province), I said it was for me and then she asked for my ID! I mean, obviously I am not under 21.
For some reason our house’s upstairs bath/shower has the half door, maybe because it is an older house? We had to buy a retractable rod to fit in above it so we could hang a shower curtain.
As for the rice thing – whenever we order Indian food delivered to our place we don’t order rice (which does come separate). We make a large pot to save some money. But it would definitely be something we would want in person!
Rice is definitely a standard thing here in the UK, although I would say it’s 50/50 whether it’s included or a separate order, I always have to check!
The dresses one is so true, I think the default UK outfit for lots of women right now (me included!) at this time of year is patterned dress (midi and maxi are v popular) + trainers + denim jacket/leather jacket/light summer jacket.
Little things that surprised me, a Brit. when I moved to California after not having spent loads of time in the US previously:
– fruit on otherwise savoury plates of food. It very much took me aback to find melon or strawberry sitting on the same plate as scrambled egg – with no divider!
– Sales tax applied at check out and varied by state. Obviously you adapt to that fast! But confusing the first few times
– paying for gas is totally different in the US (in the UK, at this point 10+ years ago, you self-served petrol then stepped inside to pay after at most places) so that actually blew my mind for a little while ;)
– LA parking restrictions. I once parked *not* facing the same way as all the other vehicles and was chased down by a kind lady who explained I would get a ticket. Not a thing in England!
This post reminds me of a pamphlet my grandfather got from a GI posted in the UK during WW2. It was a guide to local customs and contained the advice “the British have no idea how to make a cup of coffee, but that’s OK – you have no idea how to make decent tea” Always seemed like a diplomatic approach!
I confess to being ridiculously and naively surprised that prawn crackers are made of actual prawn – I assumed it was artificial flavouring. Also, I hate the word ‘prawn’. The words ‘prawn sandwich’ make me want to die a little.
I have come across the hotel-key-in-slot for lights, but it always takes me a bit to figure out.
The hot water out of the cold faucet is both surprising and seems kind of dangerous.
The water slopping out of the shower WOULD be a negative surprise for me – slipping hazard and just generally makes me unhappy.
In Morocco, the fact that we always wanted still water rather than fizzy and our mint tea unsweetened made us veritable freaks.
Some of these things (mostly bad surprises!) are increasingly common in the US, too. Hotels with no door/curtain? WTH? I’ve now been in several hotels in the US that had no door on the shower and also no fan in the bathroom and I am always peeved about it!
That’s so strange about having to use the room key to activate the electricity in your room! I definitely would have called the concierge about that!
I’d like to say how refreshing it is to hear someone else articulate that they had to make sacrifices, like not taking vacations or eating out often, in order to have a large family. We’re a soon-to-be family of six and it feels as though we’re the only ones in our social circle (all families with two children) who don’t have the disposable income for these types of things.
And it’s also nice to know that you were able to take this big, wonderful family trip together after many years of forgoing such luxuries!
Oh! Something surprising in Paris, France many years ago (before we had a gaggle of kids, we had this one big international trip together). I was pregnant and feeling tired after a day of walking, so I asked my husband to get “takeout” from one of the many nearby restaurants so we could eat in our hotel room.
He came back with two croque monsieur sandwiches on a ceramic plate, loosely covered with tin foil and side salads in bar glasses, with a third glass containing salad dressing. They gave him silverware, too. We washed the dishes and brought them back after eating the meal. It was so clumsy and charming. We were delighted at this cultural difference and how they so kindly accommodated our request and trusted us to bring back their dishes. (Of course, there were places where you could get a crepe or falafel or pastry to go. But this particular café was a strictly dine-in establishment).
Other things that surprised us: horsemeat and parmesan baby food flavours! Just how wonderful French grass-fed butter is. And not refrigerating eggs in the grocery stores! (We now have our own laying hens and visitors are often surprised to see our eggs sitting on the counter at room temperature… If you don’t damage the egg’s cuticle like we do with our sanitation processes in North America, there’s no need to put them in the fridge, except to extend their shelf life).
It’s these funny, quirky things (like those listed in this blog post) that are most memorable, I find.
Not my own story, but my SIL recently visited Israel, and their hotel catered to both travelers and locals. The breakfast buffet carried ALL the dairy foods (like cheesecake, cheese, ice cream, etc), because many (if not all?) people who keep kosher do not eat dairy in the evening (or because of the dishes and separate kitchens? – I’ve already forgotten some of the specifics, sorry!)
Travel surprises! I live on the east coast of the US and just got back from a trip to Alaska. Two surprises stood out:
1) There were so many Thai restaurants. Fairbanks has a population of 30,000 people and there were a dozen Thai restaurants. (By comparison, my town of about 100,000 people has 4 Thai restaurants). Throughout the state there seemed to be more Thai restaurants than any other type of food, even seafood (which is what I expected to see a lot of in Alaska.) I definitely wasn’t expecting that.
2) We passed several construction crews working on the highways as we drove across the state and without exception every crew we passed was 100% female! I’ve started to notice more female construction workers in my home state recently, but for ALL of the construction workers to be female? That struck me as very surprising because in the US in general I still think of that as a profession that is definitely male-dominated.
Another travel surprise that still stands out in my mind: I visited Russia many years ago and every single time I ordered a “salad” it was potato salad. (The Russian word for “salad” was one of the only ones I could reliably recognize on a menu and pronounce, and I was desperately craving leafy greens so I kept ordering the salad and then remembering after the fact that it was probably going to be potato salad. It was, every time.)