memes

Europeans think 100 miles is a long way, Americans think 100 years is a long time

One thing that came as a culture shock for me is that I'm used to driving like 4 hours to see relatives. And this is usually several times a year. Then I heard from some Britons that they have rarely visit their relatives who are only like a hour drive away. Really messed me up the first time.

There is a story of a guy in England who sent a letter to his friend in Los Angeles. He asked him to "pop in" to New York City to see how his daughter is doing.

The LA guy wrote back and said it would be faster if he went himself.

I really don't think Euros have a solid grasp of the scale of the US.

Shit if you're in Los Angeles, you could spend 4 hours just to move 10 feet.

I once drove for 10 hours in the UK and was still in the same town! That magic roundabout is very confusing.

Pff in Australia I can travel over 2000km in a straight line and never leave my state, and it's not even the biggest.

Traveling across the US is like switching to an alternate dimension where everything is pretty much the same, but a few things are off. Like, Congress is the same, but suddenly there are dunkin' donuts everywhere and the land is weirdly flat

I hate that people treat the US as if it doesn’t have a wide variety of accents. I can drive an hour in any direction and the people sound different than where I live. A lot of states have their own accents, and there are regional accents within them. I live in Illinois and people from No. IL and Central IL sound completely different from people in So. IL.

Accents get even more differentiated the further North or South you go. PNW sounds different than NE. Etc. The real difference is that a lot of the accents in the US aren’t based on indigenous languages spoken in that region (even though some are), they’re largely based on the group of Europeans that settled in the region.

Americans are very very good at code switching, which is why I think a lot of people think there are only one or two accents.

I remember this as, "Europeans think 100 miles is far away, Americans think 100 years is a long time."

You can drive for four hours and still be on I-5 in LA.

Nothing like driving for 10 hours and still not leaving California or Texas!

Yesterday I drove 4 hours and went from northern Minnesota to slightly-less-northern Minnesota.

Try in Italy, you drive 2 hours and you need subtitles for understanding the tv series filmed in that city

My wife and I drove from North Carolina, to Wisconsin, to South Dakota, and back to North Carolina again as a cross country road trip. We drove over four thousand miles.

It was fucking bizarre.

There comes a point where your mind can barely conceive that people are still speaking the same language. I think your monkey brain must assume that once you're far enough away from home, then surely everything and everyone must be a foreigner.

And for sure, there are parts of the United States that seem to be literally foreign to one another, and there are parts of the Midwest that are such titanically empty swathes of corn fields and wind turbines that it seems like one has dropped into a parallel dimension.

But there's something kind of awesome, in the awe-inspiring sense of the word, that it's all one big country, one big union of people who have (more or less) decided to engage in one big human project all together.

I think everyone should have a chance to make such a journey. It really crams the concept of the scale of this country into your consciousness in a way that can't be done without actually covering the mileage, on the ground, for yourself.

In LA you have just completed your commute to and from work on a tuesday

Lol try Belgium, where driving 20 minutes is a different dialect and 1-2 hours is a different language.

And yet high-speed rail is a foreign concept

In Australia, you can FLY for 4 hours and still be in the same state.

I'm a Canadian living in Korea and sometimes have to explain to locals that the reason I've never been to Vancouver is because I lived on the opposite coast and it would take a week to drive there. In Korea, aside from a few outlying islands, you can never be more than four hours away from anywhere else in the country.

Twice? There's at least four distinct accents between my house in north east London and my job in the south east of the city.

We can't stop here, this is bap country.

I can drive 8 hours and still be in the same state. It’s weird, man.

(e: I mean no cities, avg 60mph the whole way. So weird.

Things were better back when you could sail around the world for years and never leave the Kingdom.