Europeans think 100 miles is a long way, Americans think 100 years is a long time
“We’ve redecorated this building to how it looked over 50 years ago!”
Favourite fuckin comedian
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.
Years ago I bought a used drum set from eBay for my daughter’s Christmas present. The eBay auction was pick up only.
No big deal. It was only three hours drive each way. I did it on a Saturday. Drove there, picked it up, then drove home. All done in less than seven hours.
Wrapping it was the tricky part.
Suprise! Don’t you want to know what’s your gift?
That sounds like a fun outting. Hope she enjoyed the gift!
I’ve heard similar things. Like, I’ve had work commutes that are an hour long before. (Not that that’s healthy or ideal, but it’s far from rare)
I worked on a session in the nearest big metro to my small Texas town of 200,000 - daily commute of 2 hours and 25 minutes to get there in the morning, then 2 hours 25 minutes home (closer to 4 hours to get home on traffic heavy days). Not really unheard of.
Then, a few months ago - took a vacation on the beach island of South Padre, Texas then had to rush to a client in north Texas that next day. 12 hours of driving, all without leaving the state.
UK drivers know nothing of the true road trip life.
I’d say the 2 1/2 hour commute is pretty unheard of. I’ve never heard of it before. That sounds like hell. My boss’s is 90 mins and he’s always complaining.
I used to have a 40 mile/65km commute one way. I hated it. Inevitably someone would wad their car up on the highway, closing three lanes down to one lane during rush hour, and it would rapidly become a 90-minute commute.
Boss should find a good podcast and learn to meditate. Driving is my zen, especially on long highway stretches. I guess it also depends largely on if there’s a love of driving and what vehicle you’re in.
Thankfully it was just for 1 artist and we were done in about 3 weeks.
Sounds like when I lived in Tyler and had to work in the DFW Metro for a job. I spent months driving back and forth. Luckily my travel was paid.
That’s what this was, actually. TyTX - > DFW - > TyTX. Daily. You feel me.
Yeah, I do. Right after I got done doing it for work the singer in our band booked us at Trees. So I spent all that time driving back and forth, then drove out on Saturday with a car full of equipment.
It’s not like it was a big deal and that’s such a fun venue. I had a great time. I just can’t think of it without remembering that drive haha.
I hope you had a place to store your equipment there so you didn’t have to load and unload everyday at least. Doing that every day would have been my nightmare.
That sounds horrible
Why do Americans always do this weird almost-brag about this stuff?
And they say we should all just switch to electric bikes like in the Netherlands. I tried showing them a comparison of the states using a map but turns out “I am just being difficult”
The “map” is not the problem, you just completely fucked up your city planning. Size of a country has zero impact on your daily commute.
Size of a country has zero impact on your daily commute.
Lol Ok. Guess everyone has to crowd together in comparatively tiny little cities. All this usable land outside the cities is now uninhabitable. Genius.
Let me guess, we will own nothing and be happy, right? Oh and don’t forget about eating bugs!! Yum yum!
Go slink back to hexbear.
Are you completely insane?
Your response has nothing to do with my comment.
Here I’ll speak slowly
We have a big country. Big spaces mean longer commute. City design can't change physics of space-time.That’s not how cities work. That’s just how America decided to approach that problem.
To spell it out for you: your commute is always in your local area. The size of your country is not relevant to your local area. What is relevant, is density. Density though, has nothing to do with the size of your country. Unfortunately, you are about twice as dense as Hong Kong.
I mean, this sounds just like a big city thing, not an American thing. I live in Paris and hour long commutes are common here too.
As European cities are close together though, this can lead to situations where travelling between cities is not what takes the most time. I once (about a year ago) travelled a Paris-London which took me about 5 hours from start to finish - the Eurostar takes only just over 2 hours. The rest was travelling from my home to Gare du Nord, from St. Pancras to my destination, and border checks before boarding at Gare du Nord (thank Brexit for that one).
I get that from other people in the US sometimes, too. I live in Los Angeles county, and when people come from other places to visit they often think they can see way more things in one day than is reasonably feasible. Santa Barbara and San Diego are like 200 miles apart and it’s going to take 5 or 6 hours from one to the other. The Hollywood sign and Disneyland are 30+ miles apart and a good hour separate.
I live in Jacksonville, FL and people overseas often think I’m right next door to Miami because it’s also in Florida. It’s a six hour drive!
I grew up in SoCal and this is why I have barely ever been anywhere. It’s dense enough around here.
I would make the point (not necessarily for an hour’s drive) that the roads are often more tiring to drive on in the UK – that is, they’re not as flat, wide or straight as freeways often are, so require more concentration. Driving for an hour along Welsh country lanes doesn’t feel the same as hitting the freeway for an hour. Just my two cents/tuppence
The mountains of Northern California are treacherous. Many of the highways up there are frequently shut down for extended periods.
Being from SoCal and having lived in the UK, let me explain:
In the UK many of the roads are quite literally conversions from horse drawn carriage paths. In some cases, a drunk wanker from Liverpool could draw a better line for a road than most roads connecting off many of the UK motorways (Especially in Wales or Scotland). Add in round abouts, hills, creeks, rivers and stupidly narrow bridges, it’s difficult.
I’d sincerely rather drive the Grapevine through Mammoth into Yosemite Village with black ice warnings than try and drive myself from Maidenbower, West Sussex UK to Dundee, Scotland again tbh.
Or even at night. Lotta these highways though just a straight line can be real dangerous.
Yeah the Karen migrations are rough.
Yeah, I can understand that. My cars got cruise control. Id doubt thatd be very effective in the UK less your in some scenic area like the Cotswolds.
Cruise control is fine on motorways, but that doesn’t mean you can relax when you’re still surrounded by other vehicles also going at 70mph!
Canadian here. I drive 4 times a year to my family cottage 8 hours away.
Same experience when my wife and I went to Scotland to visit friends. We were in Glasgow and wanted to check out Edinburgh, less than an hour bus ride, for the day. They told us that we were crazy and that’s a whole weekend trip.
We laughed pretty hard. A full hour drive is only half of a daily work commute in Toronto, on a good day.
I used to commute Edinburgh - Glasgow, and plenty of others do the same. It’s also common for folk to do the trip just for an evening to go to a gig or something (a lot of tours will have their only Scottish date in Glasgow). I think your friends were probably meaning that you’d need more than a day to fully be able to see what Glasgow has to offer? If not, that seems really odd as it’s a busy commuter route.
I’ve got four different countries, with different languages and currencies, within a four hour drive from my house. I only drive if the road trip is the goal.
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.
In the US, 100 years is a long time.
In England, 100 miles is a long distance.
In star trek, 100 miles is a lot of transporter chiefs.
Hey now he got promoted once
In the delta quadrant, 70,000 years is a long distance
Here in Australia, during the 80’s, 90’s before widespread internet. There would be several European’s who needed rescuing each year as they decided to try and walk between major cities, because it looks close on a map.
I remember one German guy who needed rescuing while trying to walk from Sydney to Adelaide…that’s 1200km away…in a straight line.
Joke’s on him for wanting to go to Adelaide, honestly.
And remember, never go to Adelaide. It’s a hole (Not the Sunscreen Song)
Who wouldn’t want to visit the Black Stump?
Also in Europe if you get hungry you can pick mushrooms, skin a boar, or pop in to a town. In Australia you got… witchetty grub
Canada has a highway that goes between the most easterly and westerly points of the country. If you drove from end to end, stopping only for gas and drive through meals, it would take you about a week.
The most easterly and westerly points on the mainland. You’re not getting from Vancouver Island to Newfoundland by highway.
There are ferries.
Lol, that’s great.
I’ve also heard of Europeans planning vacations in the US, expecting to see New York, Florida, Texas, LA, etc. without realizing how much travel that is.
I met a foreign exchange student in Australia. I asked what they were planning to do for their break.
They’d recently taken up surfing, and couldn’t decide if they wanted to surf the east, west, north, or south coast. So they had decided they would stay in Alice Springs, basically in the middle of all of them, and do day trips to each one.
I didn’t have the heart to tell them that to get to the nearest ocean from there takes about two solid days of driving. Add another day to get to a beach with decent surf.
Found out the same between Tokyo and Okinawa. It’s like flying from Washington DC to Miami. “Just take a train,” is 32 hours, plus time on a ferry.
Not a really a day trip, even though it “seems like Japan is a small country.”
That’s more like saying to catch a train from Miami to Puerto Rico. No one is gonna build all that train line over the ocean for hundreds and hundreds of miles 😆
Shit if you’re in Los Angeles, you could spend 4 hours just to move 10 feet.
Boston seemed like that too, when I was there, and I’m still wondering why anyone who lives there bothered to have a car. On the outskirts, yeah, but if you’ve got business in the heart of Boston specifically, it seems from experience you should just walk.
if the MBTA ever gets its shit together, cars could disappear entirely in the city
don’t hold your breath for that one
if the MBTA ever gets its shit together…
Might be better to plan for transporter technology than that, more plausible at least.
You’re talking about a space that is probably less than 15 square miles. Outside of that driving is a lot less painful.
The trains are so fucked that my 7 mile 30 minute bike commute is 55 minutes by train. It’s a straight line with one change.
Driving would be 30-50 aggravating minutes and $450 for a parking space.
Boston is a regional city that bizarrely believes itself to be a major international metropolis. The levels of journey times and cost of living are up to par anyway.
Need some more trains.
there is traffic ahead of us
Pff in Australia I can travel over 2000km in a straight line and never leave my state, and it’s not even the biggest.
Now we need somebody from Siberia to tell us how they can drive for 5000km and never leave their federal subject (I had to look that up, it’s what the different regions of Russia are called)
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
People say ‘whenever’ instead of ‘when’ and I want to clock them for it.
Except the guy you’re responding said ‘everywhere’
Thanks for sharing though.
I can see why you’ve read it that way, but I’m quite sure they’re saying that some people say a word slightly differently in another part of the USA and they’re joking that it makes them angry.
I think the commenter might have been talking about Americans in general.
So they take the opportunity whenever they can?
I just like to make stupid posts, sorry.
I’m right with you haha.
I thought about it and I say “whenever” pretty often.
It’s a weird thing to bother someone so much.
Whenever I think about the silly little things that bother people, I’m all, “Whatever could there reason be?”
But four a real problem, like one that should bug someone! I used to could go through a day without pain. I reckon I’m done got old.
Wander how the commenter wood fill about that. To much little stuff bothers folks. Shood worry about big thangs.
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.
Man, in my neck of the woods, you can tell which town someone is from by accent. I’m not even joking or exaggerating. This is a rural area, with towns that are close in terms of driving distance, but that were originally formed by distinct immigrant groups. Even with TV amd radio kinda smoothing out accents in general, there’s still plenty of difference.
As an example, there’s a town maybe twenty minutes away where when they say yes and it’s “yay-us”. My town it’s more yeah-s as a single syllable. Two towns the other direction, it’s yeah-us. And that kind of difference is across everything, not just one or two words. The degree of drawl, whether or not you get elisions at specific places in words, it’s all part of it.
People from the dimwit town I grew up in pronounce garage as “gararge” it drove me insane. Also, the main attraction of the town is a gas station that sells ice cream.
I’m from NC. My mom is from IL. Neither one of us can pronounce the word “horror.” She pronounces it precisely like “removed” and I can’t get over it. I, myself, dislike “harrr” movies.
Added bonus: I am a grown-ass adult and the only way I don’t stumble introducing myself is if I do it like everyone else did growing up: by pronouncing the L in my name like a Y. I cannot pronounce my own fucking name and it’s not even a disability. Usually, I just hope no one notices.
One of the more entertaining parts of learning another language is the extra attention to sound has made me super aware, more and more, of what speaking quirks I still have that weren’t smoothed out by the midwestern influence which is considered to be the “general” American accent.
The lingering Chicago dictates random K’s must immediately be followed by a Y (Shikyaaga!), but the southern part of me demands that any L at the end of a word is a W now and we’re dropping consonants like we drop relatives when they come out as humanitarian. I’m horrified, I feel so bad for any foreigner who has to talk to me.
horrified
You mean harrified?
Yes, I do :(
Lol, I knew someone was going to call me on that.
Lol don’t sweat it man lol, I’ve lived in my state my whole life and people think I’m from California or something when they hear me speak
I grew up in Podunk Northeast Texas so I have the drawl. But I left and spent a lot of time all up and down the eastern seaboard married to a woman that grew up out west. So my brain added every affectation I ran across to the drawl.
Now I have the long vowel sounds in a fairly rapid speech pattern, do the weird O sound they use in South Carolina, will occasionally pronounce house like I’m from Ontario, and have a hard time saying my first name if I don’t concentrate.
I still sound mostly like a shoeless Texas hillbilly bootlegger but with a bunch of exceptions. So it makes me sound drunk as hell, until I am drunk. Then the exceptions leave and I sound like I just got off work at the oil rig and I’m headed to the strip club to cheat on my wife before heading back to the trailer.
I say horror a little bit like “harror”
Is it good ice cream?
Eh. Its ok. They had decent sundaes the last time I went like 6 years ago.
I just doubt it when I heard this argument, here in Brazil even your neighbor have a different accent cause they are son of two German, Lebanese, Japanese or Italian descendants and you are from the same but your other parent are from another culture and then you are so lost you create your own accent that sometimes speaks one or the other holy shit I don’t know who I am.
Dude, I LOVE Brazilians. I went for a little over 2 weeks in July. People were so nice, respectful, considerate, and laid back. I want to spend a month there next time I go.
Also, your bananas are on another level. I haven’t eaten a banana in the US since I got back.
I usually send people this video when they say that all Americans have the same accent. Shoot even within the same cities you’ll find different accents. It does a great job of showing just how different they can all be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMS70m-OzXo
i never really thought of it a code switching, but that’s an apt description. there’s definitely “professional” me and “hometown-accent-in-full-force” me.
Also from IL, southern. Near StL. The accents change like a proximity ring the further or closer you get to downtown, and even then going Ozarks MO is still different from Troy IL.
When I was in law school I did a deep dive on the formation of Illinois and ended up going down a big rabbit hole of the dialects of Southern Illinois. The reason different parts of southern Illinois have accents that sound so different is because a lot of people settled there from Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, and even thought towns were closish to each other the accents were very different because of the group of southern settlers. Super interesting. Where I’m from in Southern Illinois people have a very unique and unmistakable accent.
I worked on the river so I got used to every southern and local accent as the line boats came through.
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.
Is this why I can hear my Finnish friend’s “generic euro” accent when no one else can?
(She travels a lot and has a very, very weak Finnish accent, but a fairly strong “generic European” accent. None of our other European friends can hear it; the only people who can are American and even then it’s inconsistent).
That’s a thing with us Europeans - especially if you don’t want to perfectly adopt a British or American accent. This is when you end up with the “euro accent” - you’re perfectly fluent in English, without the accent of your native language, but since its neither British nor American English, it sounds just the slightest bit different.
Ok, if you’re going to talk accents, you have got to include Pennsylvania Dutch.
Everyone always talks about Southern accents, New England accents, Texas accents, Cajun, etc. Pennsylvania Dutch always gets left out, and I think it’s a fantastic accent.
Doug Madenford is my go to example:
Because comparatively it doesn’t.
Your country simply hasn’t existed long enough pre industrialisation for a broad range of accents to develop.
Europeans have been settling in North America for 500 years. The United States being a young country has nothing to do with the evolution of accents and dialects. When the US was formed the Spanish had been in the Americas for 200 years, the French and English not much less, in addition to enslaved Africans who brought their own native languages to the continent and then were forced to learn English, Spanish, French, or Portuguese. That alone is more than enough time and groups of people for dialects and accents to develop.
Nothing like driving for 10 hours and still not leaving California or Texas!
Grew up in South Texas. Going to visit family in Missouri, we would start driving at 5 in the morning, only braking for food and bathrooms, and still have to stop for the night at the Arkansas border.
You only slow down for food and bathrroms>
What about red lights?
Traffic?
We have these crazy things called Interstates over here that don’t have traffic lights and range from 2-20 lanes to avoid even the appearance of traffic. Terms and conditions apply to the latter.
only braking for food and bathrooms
only breaking for food and bathrooms
bathrroms> (Because I can’t spell either)
Nope, everyone in Texas drives like we’re playing Burnout: Revenge
For people wondering, this is true. When you cross the Texas border they automatically attach a small device to your car that allows you to survive any wreck and reset your car to being brand-new!
or at the very least, people here drive like they think this is true.
I didn’t wanna say, but I’ve been to Dallas. You have too many lanes to be coming into mine.
Except for the construction areas of 35, where five lanes will suddenly become two
Here’s a crazy alternative: railway.
Oh right. You guys don’t have that.
We’re trying, it just keeps getting fucked by corruption and NIMBYs. Like everything else in this cursed state.
Even with rails it can be slow ass fuck. I took the train from LA Union station to Seattle and that took I want to say a day and a half. Standard stop and go maybe it couldve been faster if ot was more direct but even then at most youd probably only shave off maybe 4 hours at max. Its an 18 hr drive.
So take a train at night and get some sleep? That’s usually how rest of the world deals with long distance travel. Plus, not driving for 18 hours sounds a much better alternative in any scenario.
Dude I left at fucking 8 in the morning from LA and didnt get to seattle till like 5 in the afternoon the nex day. The problem for me though is that I had nothing to focus on, I dont have such problems driving. Also the train only left in the morning, so yeah. 34 hour trip is fucking horrible.
Nah. Just take like 4 Ambien and sleep for that entire 34 hour train ride.
I drove Seattle to LA over the summer. Did it over two days. It wasn’t pleasant per se. But I got to sleep in a real bed. Took an impromptu trip to San Jose (Winchester house). Found some good taco trucks. And still got there in half the time a train would. The train just doesn’t make sense for us, not on long trips at least.
Yeah without some major improvements they just trains are only viable for say Redlands to LA. People seem to forget just how fucken big the US is, California alone is larger the Britain FFS.
Also I wish I could take sleeping pills, but between the Autism and my bodies resistences they just make me pissy.
Drive for like 200 hours and never leave Hawaii
Yesterday I drove 4 hours and went from northern Minnesota to slightly-less-northern Minnesota.
Was it cold up there Margie?
Oh, you betcha. Yah.
So Grand Forks to Grand Rapids or there abouts eh?
Just about, yeah. Good ol’ route 2.
Weird. It takes 6-7 hours to go from Minneapolis to the Canadian border… So would you have been driving like Arrowhead to Morehead on back roads?
Try in Italy, you drive 2 hours and you need subtitles for understanding the tv series filmed in that city
I remember this as, “Europeans think 100 miles is far away, Americans think 100 years is a long time.”
I once drove for 10 hours in the UK and was still in the same town! That magic roundabout is very confusing.
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.
If you’re originally from the Midwest you get the opposite experience:
There are places that you can’t tell what town you’re in, for miles and miles, because buildings are everywhere, and there are no cornfields or empty areas to separate cities. Cities are just allowed to grow into each other in some places.
Road trips were always the thing that made me appreciate America for what it is. If my only experience of America was the one place I lived, I probably wouldn’t like America as much as I do.
I’m soooo interested in driving from Florida to Alaska. I might do it next year.
I once made a trip out west (I live near the East Coast) towards Yellowstone National Park. Some of the sights I saw were almost surreal.
There’s dozens of us out in the fields, dozens of us!
As a Floridian, people from the Pacific Northwest might as well be foreigners to me. They are just very different from what I’m used to interacting with. They’re usually chill, accepting, quite socially conscious, into peculiar hobbies, and wear a lot of black. That’s uncommon here.
We can’t stop here, this is bap country.
This is among the best comments I’ve read on Lemmy, perhaps even the best.
Welcome to cob land.
You can drive for four hours and still be on I-5 in LA.
Yeah, define ‘driving’ lol
