h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Actually, there was one thing that really surprised me, and not in a good way at all. I went to Nebraska because I worked for British Airways at the time and got cheap flights pretty much anywhere. My sister had gone to Uni in Glasgow with a Nebraskan, and she realised she could get concessions & be able to go and visit. I tagged along for the ride basically.

Her friend had a sister who was a lesbian. She got married when she was 18 and had twins when she was 19. Her God-fearing parents just couldn't accept her sexuality, and regularly went for advice to their local pastor. Their pastor told them that being gay was just wrong, and that they had to do everything they could to changed her 'lifestyle' through a tough-love regime. They sat and told us about this when she was sitting in the same room as us, silent.

She died from anorexia maybe 18 months later. After maybe 5 minutes I thought that her parents were killing her, and that if they had accepted she was gay then she'd have the same chance of happiness that anyone else would have. It was probably the most disturbing thing I've ever seen. My parents would never have treated me or my siblings like that, and I'd have disowned them if they had. The essential goodness of these people was utterly warped by their Christianity.* It seemed like mind-control, that they couldn't see what was so obvious to me.


*I do realise it's just their version, so no crowing from my fellow atheists please.

I've never been, but, conversely, my American relatives did find that washing machine programmes ran for an awful long time. Certainly here in Germany it's not considered properly washed if it hasn't been taking a battering in the machine for a couple of hours at 60 deg. C.

Oh yes, the thing about the taxes is a bit weird I think. I still don't understand it.

Don't understand what about the taxes?

In Europe, there's a thing on a shelf, and there's a price on the shelf. Naturally, the price on the shelf is the price of the thing on the shelf. So when you take it to the till, the price you pay is the price that was on the shelf. This seems logical enough.

It can be a bit of a shock for a European to pick something up in a shop that was priced at, say, five dollars, and arrive at the till with their five dollars already, to be told "six seventy". Is it really too complex for the shops to put the actual prices on the labels/shelves?

thanks for summarizing this so nicely

I now have this overwhelming urge to apologize on behalf of my fellow countrymen for experiences you all have had that I find profoundly embarassing.



I'd like to think that most of those things don't happen as a matter of course.

Hell no. If I wanted to go somewhere that's exactly the same as home, I'd stay home.

And after all - the most consistently surprising thing for most Europeans I think is how friendly and polite everyone (apart from people who work in airports) is.

I must also say that donuts were a completely new experience for me when I was a child, also the variety of breakfast cereals. Now you can get a lot of the stuff here, too. Just not quite in that variety. Food is definitely different. Bu we knew that.

I grew up in Oregon where we didn't have a sales tax. I didn't like them. Now that I've lived in Georgia for a distressing amount of my life I've come to understand them and tend to favor them over income taxes.

We have some stores that do cost plus pricing. The price on the shelf is what they paid for it, and they add 10% for overhead as well as sales tax at the register.

Just remembered another one - motorbikers wearing little in the way of protection. Open face helmets, if any, shorts and sandals, bare arms etc.

Between San Francisco and Silicon Valley:

Ads for cash loans to cover bail. Repeatedly. On mainstream news at breakfast time. Perps aren't really seen as a marketing demographic in the UK.



Twobit, can we turn this lot into an entry when the subject's run its course? It seems like perfect Guide material to me.

@Pedro, I noticed the same thing about hair colour in the Netherrlands in the 90s. And your Nabraskan tale will stick in my mind for a very long time. Poor girl.

More differences: the dominance of country music and the absence of what is played on German radio as 'pop'. The love of guns. The size of cars. The small number of cars with manual transmission...

Number plates (licence plates) only at the rear. And consequently no reversing into a car parking spot.

Air con. Moscow had more than the uk, but there was even more in the is.

I never knew that about US sales tax... it's definitely quite odd, especially coming from a country where the retailer legally has to sell stuff at the labelled price, even if it's wrong.

"no reversing into a car parking spot"

I always, always reverse into parking spots, including when in the US. It's safer.

Should I not have done?

I think Bea's pont was that you always park forwards so that your licence plate is visible. If you weren't nabbed for it, I shouldn't worry. Let's see what the USians say: Is backing into a parking space illegal or just not the done thing? Depending on your State, of course.

The only reason you're not allowed to back into parking spaces here (You do see signs to this effect) is because the exhaust would harm the wayside flora, or make ugly marks on the car park walls.

But reversing into parking spaces is safer!

Consider: when you're going INTO the space, you can be reasonably sure that it's an empty space, i.e. a space it's safe to go into backwards. Plus, you can take your time.

But when you're *leaving* a space, you're driving into a space where there might be moving traffic. You want to do that *backwards*? Really? Far safer to drive out forwards, surely.

Speaking of marks on walls... "parking garages" in Vegas: every. Single. One. Had shoe prints. On the *ceiling*. Not one or two prints. Thousands of them. In EVERY car park. Is it a tradition, or an old charter, or something?