Everyday aspects of life tend to become very "whatever" to us over time: It's the little things many of us don't even think to be impressed by, like weather, traffic, or native wildlife. However, to people who have never seen them before, those things are literally mind-blowing, and when you get to witness genuine excitement like that, it can really just melt your heart.
So, when Reddit user u/scoopy-frog posed the question, "What's something that's mundane in your country, but foreigners think is incredible?" to the r/AskReddit community, I literally couldn't stop smiling at how cute these all were:
1. "Oh man, one of the absolute cutest things I've ever seen. A work friend of mine at the time was visiting from Australia. He came into work that day totally beaming because he had seen a squirrel on his way there. I was very confused until he told me they don't have squirrels in Australia. He went on and on about how cute they were, and I told him I had a surprise for him when we went to lunch. I walked him a few blocks up the road to a local college campus where the squirrels are so fearless they will literally come and take food out of your hands."
2. "I couldn't believe the bike highways around Amsterdam. They had interchanges, multiple lanes, and better signage than some real highways."
3. "I asked a colleague from India what he found most interesting since moving to the US, and he said the orderly traffic. He did a 'mind-blown' motion and everything."
4. "When I was a teen, we would host Japanese students for a few weeks in the summer. They were from a private school in Kyoto and often had never been outside the city. They would stay with us in our 100-year-old house in the middle of nowhere. The first student who stayed with us was absolutely captivated by two things: stars and cornfields. He knew what corn was, obviously. He knew how it grew and what cornstalks looked like. But he'd never seen it."
"I don't think he realized how tall it got or what it felt like to be in the middle of it. He spent one evening in the yard, flat on his back, literally touching grass (snow angel style) and looking at the stars. He'd never seen a mostly dark night sky. So we turned off all the lights in the house and showed him planets and constellations. Stars aren't exclusive to Canada. We don't even tend to get northern lights where we live. But man, that kid was blown away. Stars and cornfields."
5. "A Coca-Cola delivery truck was in the parking lot where I was working. There was a couple from the UK who were very excited about it. They took selfies next to the truck, and the driver let them sit in the driver's seat for more pictures. It seemed like a real treat for them."
6. "I used to work retail in Metro Detroit, and we got lots of Canadians that came over to shop. They were absolutely fascinated by one-dollar bills."
7. "My Australian cousins were visiting me in California. I took them to a house party, and they got so excited about the red solo cups. 'Oi, they've got the red American cups!'"
8. "Temples in Taiwan — every backroad has one. There's probably six or eight within a five-minute walk from my building. An American friend visited, and he was mind-blown that one of my windows looks over some back-alley temple."
9. "My family hosted my Brazilian exchange brother from Sao Paulo, and he was captivated by snow. He was a senior in high school but woke up the entire house having fun in it the first night it snowed. We hosted his little brother the next year, and he was the same, just a bit quieter about it. They were not big fans of Oklahoma thunderstorms, though. You really have to have been born here to appreciate the beauty in them."
10. "Originally from Argentina. Foreigners, especially Europeans, don’t believe you can actually drink water from most springs and streams when hiking in Patagonia. Kept insisting on using purification tablets. We repeatedly drank from springs to show that it was normal, and we all do it while hiking, but they still struggled to wrap their heads around it."
11. "In Singapore, our crosswalk buttons have a pad that elderly people can tap their ID or bus card on to get more crossing time. I've seen so many 'amazing tech inventions that the whole world needs' TikToks, and they always feature them. I've only seen an elderly person use it once. Still neat, though."
12. "The distance between things in the US is another huge point of wonderment and shock, as well. So many of our family and their friends don't believe us when we say you can't expect to go to Yellowstone and Yosemite in one day."
13. "We had a foreign exchange student from Germany while I was in high school. At the end of the day, there was a huge joint parking lot between the big middle school and the huge high school of a big consolidated district where all the buses parked while waiting for us to get on. She found the bus and was freaking out, begging the bus driver to let her run up the hill to take a picture of the ocean of yellow school buses. She said it was the craziest thing she had ever seen. She didn’t know the yellow school buses were real, and she wasn’t expecting you to see more than a hundred of them at once."
14. "In Michigan, in 1980, I was a student at a local JUCO, and there were a ton of foreign students there. I befriended a couple of Saudis in one of my classes. I don’t remember why, but this chemistry class took a trip to Lake Michigan, literally 20 miles away. These guys were full of questions about the lake, and I was pleased I could answer them (I'm proud AF of my lakes)."
"During discussion, one says they have a large body of water at home (the gulf), but nothing as 'sweet' as this. His choice of words was a life-changing moment for me. The condition of the water, which was generally thought of by locals as nasty (1980) was described as sweet water. It makes one think, and often, about the abundance of something here, a critical resource for life itself, not being available elsewhere."
And finally, this person decided to flex on how unreal their "mundane" maternity care is in their country:
15. "Kraamzorg! When we have a baby, we get an in-home caretaker for the first week. They know all about taking care of a newborn, so they teach you how to feed your baby (bottle or breast), change diapers, bathe your baby, etc. They also make sure the baby is healthy and gaining enough weight. But they also take care of the rest of the family, so the parents and siblings can enjoy their time. They make food for you, clean the house, check on the stitches of the mother, etc. It is lovely! Plus, if there’s something off, like an unhealthy environment, addiction, abuse, postpartum, etc., it’s seen and dealt with. This is in the Netherlands, by the way."
Have you had any more experiences with everyday things visitors from other countries were fascinated by? Let me know in the comments!
Note: Responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.