I live in the Canadian prairies.

One time I was flyin’ down the highway and I noticed a man with car parked on the shoulder, staring out into a farmer’s field of flowering Canola.

I stopped because I could think of no reason other than he’s had car trouble, and is staring off into the distance trying to figure out WTF he’s gonna do now.

He explained to me that he wasn’t having car troubles, that he was on a visit from Hong Kong and it’s the first time he’s ever traveled outside. He told me that from the structure of the city and sky rise density, he’d basically never seen a patch of sky or open land. The biggest patch of sky that he’d ever seen would be about the size of a 2 packs of cigarettes held at arms length.

Woah.

And here we have the joke that the terrain is so flat and monotone that you can watch your dog run away for 7 hours.

I was born and raised in New Hampshire. The leaves turning in autumn is just another part of the season for us like pumpkins, apple cider donuts, and haunted hayrides. People from other parts of the US or even other countries, though, treat it like its a wonder of the world.

I have lived in Tucson, Arizona for about 5 years. I still get excited about all the little lizards and birds. And Coyotes, and bobcats. Last night I saw a toad for the first time. There is a TON of wildlife here, kind of like you hear about Australia, and it’s pretty amazing. I’m sure it’s all pretty old hat to a lot of people. I also see gorgeous mountain ranges every day, which is not something I grew up with in New York.

Oh, and there is legal weed (marijuana) every damn where. It’s fucking. Awesome. We…did not have this in NY growing up.

In Montreal, it’s pretty typical to see groundhogs and raccoons. It was a fairly regular phenomena for me to walk through St-Helen Island and see tourists that stopped to take pictures of groundhogs.

Summers are wonderful, it doesn’t rain very much. We tell outsiders that it rains all the time. Oregon, USA.

I live in the middle of a very sparsely populated forest. Tourists want to see the black bears, wolves, eagles, loons, and deer. You will see the deer, eagles, and loons if you are on a lake. But you probably need to spend serious time in the forest on foot to bump a bear or wolf. If you want to see those, we have a bear and then a wolf center where biologists study their behavior and keep a small number in captivity. And evidently, both centers are pretty famous for the work they do with other wildlife biologists around the world.

And oddly enough come fall, they drive around to see the leaves on the trees turn pretty colors. It’s popular enough that news stations in the one large metropolitan area we have in this state, actually tracks and includes the rate and areas where the leaves are turning color so tourists can drive and see them.

When winter arrives, we get a fair number that drive here to go ice fishing when the ice gets safe enough to drive on.

I live in New York City. Apparently (based on how shocked they look) tourists come from places without: Gift Shops, Theaters, Rats, Black People, Buildings, or Walking.

AIDS

Squirrels, I guess. Oh and so many prisons.

I did miss lizards in England, they are so nice to have around. And the occasional alligator is cool too, I can only imagine how exciting for a tourist.

I was absolutely stunned to see such OLD things in the UK, we don’t have the thousand year old buildings. And basements & the underground metro, places you walk down underground to get to are very uncommon here, would flood. The rain was different too, not a storm, you can just umbrella your way along, that was nice.

Oktoberfest

Practically every house and apartment has (access to) a sauna. If not inside the apartment, there will most often be a shared sauna in the basement.

About the UK, I’m going to go a bit deeper and note that it was somehow eye-opening that there’s a whole society that actually just daily drives English. For my whole life before the visits to UK and later US, English was the language of the internet and some specific international situations where it was most people’s second language. Until well into my mid-20s, I basically didn’t have real life contact with any community that would just speak English natively, despite speaking it myself fairly okay-ish.

I lived in London for a few years and it always amazed me to see foxes just roaming about. I still think it’s cool.

I’m from another country, foxes are not really a thing here.

In Sydney most trains…

(a) Are double decker

(b) Have seats which flip to face the opposite direction.

Australian pedestrian crossing lights cater for the blind and the deaf-and-blind. Billie Eilish’s brother/producer sampled the sound, when he visited, for her smash hit.

Palm trees and birds that stand chest high.

I spend about 1/4 of the year in the UK so I’m used to it now but I remember being shocked by the bad teeth.