Non-Americans Are Sharing The Bizarre Things Americans Do That Are Absolutely NOT The Standard In Their Countries
Written by admin on December 2, 2025
Recently, Reddit user BestPostRead asked, What’s one thing you thought was normal in the U.S. until someone from another country said it was weird?” and y’all, I had NO idea some of these things weren’t common around the world. Here are 57 things people from other countries think are weird, weird, WEIRDDDD.
1.
“How long political campaigns are. In many countries, politicians can’t actively campaign except during a set few weeks leading up to the elections. Must be nice.”
“In Berlin, election posters can be up for eight weeks: starting seven weeks before the election, ending one week after.
Also, primaries are pretty much invisible because they are entirely party-internal. Each party holds internal elections for their members to find their candidates, and then they tell the public about it.
Sometimes the news reports from the parties’ conventions where the election happens, but the general public doesn’t see election campaigns for the different candidates of a party.”
“In Ireland, you’re not allowed to advertise politics on TV. Each party gets a 10-minute slot where they can say their bit.”
2.
“Pharmaceutical commercials on tv and billboards for lawyers on the side of the road.”
“Bright, splashy commercials showing what a great thing this shiny medication is, such a good thing, then speed talking towards the end of the commercial disclosing the known major side effects, things like high blood pressure, death, etc. I ignore them all because I loathe commercials of every stripe.”
“Pharmaceutical advertisements for prescription drugs to consumers are illegal or highly regulated in almost every country in the world except the US and New Zealand.”
“My husband is a Brit, and he always knew that we had drug commercials, but he is still weirded out seeing major celebrities on them.”
3.
Similarly…”I moved to the US from Canada — the openness and amount of advertising for tobacco and alcohol were startling.”
4.
“And ads for gambling and guns. We have ads for online gambling and sports betting now, but not to the same extent and not for so long.”
5.
“I always thought it was polite to at least smile and nod when you make eye contact with someone. I learned recently that not only do some cultures find the smiling fake and unnerving, it’s even rude to look strangers in the eye in some cultures.”
“As a midwesterner who lived in Denmark for a while, this was one of the biggest differences. I was walking along a path in the middle of nowhere Jutland when I passed someone and said ‘good morning,’ and he didn’t even turn his head to look at me. We could probably see each other coming from a kilometer away at this point, and he was the only person I had seen all day. Eye contact is avoided at all costs on buses, the train, and when walking. Now that I’m back in the US, when I pass people, I don’t make eye contact, and I can feel their eyes on me as I walk by. It’s so uncomfortable.”
“Talking to random strangers. It’s just not something other cultures do much. When I was living in Germany, it made it really hard to practice German because no one would speak to me randomly at the grocery store or other shops.
I also hadn’t realized how annoying it is sometimes. When I see American tourists just randomly annoying people on public transit. I’m always a little embarrassed now.”
6.
“The death penalty. I did a short study abroad trip to Scotland, and at one point, I was talking to a professor at the school we visited about differences between our countries, and he said, ‘I can’t believe you guys still have the death penalty!’ I never realized how we’re one of the few Western countries that still have it. Even then, we’re in the minority third of countries in the world that still have it.”
“Judicial murder was last used in the UK, Canada, Australia, NZ…in the 1960s.”
7.
“Being ashamed of taking a sick day. When I moved to the Netherlands, I found out that if you are sick during a vacation day, then you get that day back.”
“I’ve literally thrown up at work before, and they didn’t want to send me home. Until I KEPT throwing up. The USA is an actual joke.”
8.
“Having so little time off of work.”
“I moved to Germany but kept my same job, just transferred entities. My American team constantly makes jokes that I’m “never working” or “always on vacation”. I honestly don’t fight back bc in reality, it’s abhorrent that Americans get no time off while Germany has a minimum requirement. I only take off what I’m allotted in Germany. No more. Americans need to stand up for their rights, but they’re too ingrained to actually believe they don’t deserve them.”
9.
“The bright orange color of cheddar cheese. It was called ‘chemical cheese’ by our Spanish exchange student. She had a point, though.”
10.
“Giant yellow school buses.”
“This is by far the thing I get asked about the most. I’ve noticed when I meet Europeans here or have guests (eg, most recently from Dublin), when they see a bus, it’s like they spotted Bigfoot.”
“I have a cousin from Colombia who visited us. The first time she saw a school bus on the road, she yelled, ‘Holy shit, they’re real!’ To which I was confused, and she explained she thought yellow school buses were made up for movies and weren’t a thing we actually used.”
11.
“Leaning on things. Apparently, Americans lean on things way more than others. Spies in WW2 were taught not to lean, as it can identify you as American.”
I read about this a little. It came from movie stars leaning on stuff in movies. It’s a more dynamic pose than just standing around, so it infiltrated the culture. To this day, it’s still a very American thing to do. Whenever I have a boss tell me or my crew to stop leaning on stuff because it ‘looks unprofessional,’ I sarcastically make a big deal about how un-American they’re being. Seeing as we’re federal employees, this joke has layers.”
12.
“How we treat nudity in general, whether in the media or in real life. It’s not until you interact with people from overseas (especially other developed nations) that you see the way Americans view nudity is weird as hell. The fact that I wanna swim in a pool without a swimsuit doesn’t necessarily mean that I wanna have sex with anyone there. This is a sentence that makes sense everywhere else in the developed world…except ‘the bastion of freedom’ called the United States.”
“Sexualization of nudity. In a lot of other countries, nudity on its own is not seen as inherently sexual. There are many art schools that have models come in full nudity to show anatomy while learning human form. Same with nude beaches being much more common in other parts of the world. Nudity on average television as well.”
13.
“My dad’s wife, from a Nordic country, asked why Americans glorify war and our military. As I was trying to explain, I realized how deeply ingrained the military is in our country, and how difficult it is to explain to someone whose nation is fundamentally different.”
14.
“I’m literally on my way home from two weeks in Europe. I watched European Cops, the TV show. It was literally like a joke. People were getting pulled over for being on their phones or having a stolen item in their car. The array was peaceful. Guns and violence are so normalized in the USA.”
15.
“My husband, who is Swedish, told me he never understood why kids in American movies would threaten to steal lunch money…because school lunch is free in Sweden.”
17.
“The gaps in bathroom stalls. I never gave them a second thought until a European friend visited and was genuinely horrified. She was like, ‘Why can people see you?? Why is there a huge gap under the door?? This is a human rights violation!’ Now I can’t unsee it. We really do have the worst public bathroom privacy in the developed world, and just…accept it as normal. 💀”
“I went to Norway to visit and couldn’t find the toilet in the bathroom because I thought the stalls were closets because they looked so much like a door to a different room to me. No gaps, floor-to-ceiling door, then everything I had read on Reddit about bathroom doors made sense to me.”
“And how about the gap between the door and the frame that it locks to? There always seems to be a quarter-inch gap all the way up the edge of the door. Anyone can glance in and stare into your horrified eyes while you’re doing your thing.”
18.
“Parental leave. When you have a baby in the US, the mom gets a couple of weeks off, but an old family friend was from Sweden, and he said that mom and dad get A LOT of time off after the baby is born — like months, and usually it’s paid. That’s when I realize that we are being screwed over big time.”
19.
“Red Solo cups.”
“Some of my friends overseas were fascinated by them because of American movies; it was a little bizarre. I brought a stack of Solo cups to a few of them on my trips abroad 🤣”
21.
“Having flags everywhere. My family hosted a German exchange student when I was in high school, and she said one of her biggest shocks was the fact that people have flags in their yard. ‘Do you forget what country you are in that you need a flag in your yard?’ Lol.”
22.
“The Pledge of Allegiance. I never thought anything of it until a Swiss friend said, ‘We have a flag too, but we don’t pray to it…'”
23.
“Tipping everywhere and everyone in bars and restaurants.”
“Even building credit card readers with automated requests for 10, 15, or 20 % tip.”
24.
“How sweet everything is, baked goods, sauces, and even things like apples.”
“My friend from the UK made a comment that there’s so much salt and sugar in our food, there’s no need to add more when we prepare meals. Reality check.”
“People always bring up how sweet the bread is, and I have to agree!! When my family visited Florida two years ago, we bought some bread to make sandwiches, and it tasted a little like cake! God only knows how sweet actual cakes are in the US. And why is US Fanta BRIGHT ORANGE?!?!?!?!”
25.
“People going bankrupt because they had a major illness and people who can’t go to the hospital because they can’t afford the copays.”
“I’m in Japan RN and I’ve had a condition with chronic infections that almost killed me a couple of times since we’ll before I got here. Over the past week, I found out I had an infection that spread from my sinuses to my ear and the neurons of my eyes.
I saw a specialist the evening I noticed something was wrong (which would have taken weeks in the US), who referred me to a hospital first thing the following morning. At the hospital, I had a series of tests done all day, a surgery in my ear, and was put on a course of IV antibiotics along with steroids and painkillers.
I’m uninsured.
This all cost me around $400. Sucks that it’s the last bit of money I had for the month, but all that in the US would have been a life-ruining sum of money and taken months to complete (likely allowing the condition to worsen, thus requiring even more intervention and costing more money — which maybe is the point, now that I think about it).”
26.
“Americans are shocked when they find out that other populations don’t instantly kill someone who breaks into their house. It’s so common a concept that it has a name: The Castle Doctrine. Someone enters your home without permission and you ‘feel’ threatened (the intruder doesn’t actually have to threaten you), you can just kill them and it’s perfectly legal and seen as heroic. I had a friend from the UK suggest I was joking and that was just a ‘Hollywood Thing.'”
“My favorite story was several years back, when a Canadian couple caught a young man with addiction issues breaking into their house to steal stuff for money for drugs, so they sat him down, gave him coffee, and talked to him about his life choices. I distinctly remember the Americans commenting that they thought it was a joke, and asked why the Canadians didn’t just kill the intruder.”
27.
“Having to ‘do taxes.’ The government already knows what you owe, so they just send a statement (many, many countries do this).”
28.
“Apparently, folding pizza to eat it. I was living at a hostel in Australia with mostly European roommates. They made fun of me for folding my pizza. They said I was making an American pizza sandwich.”
31.
“Drinking milk. My Belgian friend was so surprised and amused that I just drank a glass of milk at night. Many cultural differences I either already knew were different/weird, or genuinely believe Americans actually do better. But the milk one caught me off guard.”
32.
“Saying something is disrespectful is very obviously American. Everywhere else, people would say it’s rude or impolite…slightly different concept.”
36.
“Driving really long distances like it’s nothing.”
“I drove from Dublin to Galway, which is only about two hours. People were losing their minds that I was going to drive ‘across the country.’ I live in the Bay Area. It took me two hours to travel 27 miles into SF for a promotional ceremony last week. Lol”
37.
“Cheerleaders. My daughter was in a diner with her Spanish boyfriend (and the diner was a typical American thing to him), and a group of high school cheerleaders came in in their outfits, with pompoms and painted faces, and he got all excited and said, ‘they’re real!'”
38.
“Refrigerated eggs. Wierded me out seeing them in the shelf over there.”
“Oh yeah, that’s bc in the US the eggs get washed, which removes the protective outer coating, but in other countries they just vaccinate the chickens.”
“Fun fact:
It’s illegal to sell unwashed eggs in the US
It’s illegal to sell *washed* eggs in Europe.”
39.
“Random inspections by drug-sniffing dogs at schools. That’s just the way it was. I never thought much about it, until someone from Australia said that would never be allowed in their country.”
40.
“Waiters taking your credit card away from you to go run it for your bill, instead of just running it in front of you at the table with one of those little machines like they do in Europe. Our model in the U.S. is a great way to let someone steal your credit card number without you knowing it.”
42.
“Trash. The amount of waste produced, and how we have huge trash cans for garbage to be collected weekly. Most other countries I have been to have much less waste overall.”
43.
Relatedly…”Almost everything is packed in plastic. I think I produced three to five times more trash than in my home country because of that.”
45.
“Bread. European bread has so much more variety, texture, and taste.”
And no glyphosate. So you can eat bread and pasta in Europe and lose weight on your trip. It’s the best.
46.
“I cooked a soul food dinner for friends in the UK, and they loved the fried chicken, Mac and cheese, cornbread, and greens, but they wouldn’t eat the candied yams with marshmallows on top. They thought it was dessert. I said no, it’s not, and they said, ‘We don’t mix sweet with savory.'”
47.
“High fives! I was working with a team in the UK once upon a time, and I went in for a high five, and the guy just left me hanging. It kept happening, too. Like I’m out of my mind or something”
49.
“The government being closed.”
“In Australia, if the Government can’t get its shit together enough to function, everyone in both houses gets kicked out and we go to an election.”
52.
“The amount of meat we consume. How much food we consume in general but meat specifically.”
54.
“Large beverages. As someone from the UK, this was very strange until I spent some time in the summer heat — now I get it!”
55.
“Root Beer.”
“I was stationed in England for a while back when I was in the military. The Brits absolutely hated it. After talking it through, I discovered it was the anise, IIRC. They used it in a popular cough syrup, so to them, root beer = medicine.”
56.
“Putting Christmas lights on houses. We had an exchange student from Europe, and she was shocked to learn that it wasn’t just something that happened in movies.”
Now it’s your turn — if you’re not from the US, what’s something you think is super weird here? And if you’re from the US and moved abroad, what struck you as strange about other countries, or what did you realize only happens in America? Let us know in the comments or via this anonymous form!
Submissions have been edited for length/clarity.
