I’ve only been abroad one time, and there were little gecko/lizard things everywhere, climbing up walls and scurrying across roads, and nobody cared. I was constantly fascinated but to the locals they’re just kinda there.
Bonus question to anyone who visited the UK - was there anything that fascinated you but I’d be taking for granted?
Pic unrelated.
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.
You go to some tiny, dying town and it has 700 years of history, often 1000+ years of proof of habitation before that and a majestic church that is a work of art on its own.
Fireflys.
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.
In Oxford, it’s “normal” to see students walking around in sub-fusc (formal academic dress) at certain times of year. It’s not just for matriculation and graduation, you have to do all of your exams in it, too. Tourists seem to love it, though. Some will ask random students for photographs. Some won’t bother asking.
Poutine is lazy junk food and there’s nothing impressive about a slop pile of gravy, curds, and fries.
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.
When I was in grad school, a French post doc saw one of the pine cones ( some get around the size of your head). She wanted to keep it to prove that “ everything is bigger in America “
I live in the Gulf Islands of BC Canada. So. Many. Tourists. I don’t leave my house on the weekends in the summer. We have fabulous beaches though, and it really is lovely. I moved so much as a kid so I’ve always been like oh this is a cool place, I could move here whenever I travel. This is the first time in my life when I’m happy to be going home. Vancouver island is amazing.
Summers are wonderful, it doesn’t rain very much. We tell outsiders that it rains all the time. Oregon, USA.
The sea
My school was in a village that is a UNESCO World Heritage Site so in the morning there’d be coachloads of Japanese and American tourists unloading and getting their cameras out and I was just trying to not be late for registration.
I’m in the UK and it’s totally normal here to have kids sitting on harbour walls catching crabs (crabbing) at any seaside town. I don’t give it a second thought but it seems to fascinate foreign tourists.
In the US and one that I haven’t seen others mention yet is the hummingbirds
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.
