• BarrierWithAshes@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • NABDad@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • BrandonMatrick@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Klystron@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • CADmonkey@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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.

          • BrandonMatrick@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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.

            • jscummy@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              As a temporary thing it’s not that bad but it’s also an extra 5 hours on your day. I’ve done 3.5 hrs for a client meeting but at that point that hour long meeting is all I’m getting done that day

        • averagedrunk@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          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.

            • averagedrunk@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              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.

        • Diasl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          Losing nearly 5 hours of your life just driving is pretty crazy. I’ve done East Yorkshire to Cardiff and back in a day to collect something and that took the best part of 9 hours with good traffic. In bad traffic that could have easily been 13 and it’s not that far.

      • Interesting_Test_814@jlai.lu
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        1 year ago

        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).

    • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Riskable@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        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!

    • chumbalumber
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      1 year ago

      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

      • Rouxibeau@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The mountains of Northern California are treacherous. Many of the highways up there are frequently shut down for extended periods.

        • comador @lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

            • comador @lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              While living in the UK, I bought a Heritage pass and took off almost every weekend either by light rail or by car. When my wife came to visit though, we drove from my flat near Crawley to Scotland over a 3 day trip. We visited in order: Ashford, Broomfield (Leeds Castle), Rettondon, Chelmsford, Ipswitch, Cambridge, Nottingham, Leeds, Newcastle upon Tyne, Edinburgh, Perth and finally ending in Dundee where I have distant relatives.

              In all my trips, driving through the hills of Yorkshire and Cumbria are the scariest, but getting to Scone Palace outside of Perth through snow was quite challenging.

              • Syldon@feddit.uk
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                1 year ago

                So not really the main roads.

                Most of the non main roads are a result of the feudal farming system. The US differs because people could buy up large rectangles of land which fit nicely together. The farming in Europe was a piecemeal affair, and roads were built onto to that. The UK is a very London centric country. The further north you get the less that is spent on roads and transport.

      • BarrierWithAshes@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • smeg@feddit.uk
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          1 year ago

          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!

      • S_204@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’m in Winnipeg. A friend of mine has a family cottage 2 hours north of thunder Bay.

        It makes no sense to me why they continue to torture themselves by keeping this property.

        Why don’t you sell your cottage and buy something closer?

        • Tigbitties@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          History. My grandfather bought it 70 years ago. It’s an old school house… That he actually went to school in. He died it too.

          Besides that, we still have family and generations of friends we still know and love in nearby.

          It’s located on an Unesco site on the bay de chaleur. It’s not worth a lot either. Im pretty sure I’d be trading down if I bought another place. I doubt I’d find a spot that beautiful.

          Anyway, the drive is stunning and it doesn’t bother me.

    • CeeBee@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Zdah@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • CeeBee@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Nope, they were really saying that you can’t see anything there unless you go for the whole weekend.

          We walked around, checked out the castle, saw a lame touristy film about Nessy, sampled some incredible whisky and were home for dinner.

          It was kinda the same with St Abbs. They said we had to leave Friday morning and leave Sunday evening (again from Glasgow) or we wouldn’t get to do much. Now I’m not going to say the place isn’t gorgeous, but what we did was hang out in a… cottage? I’m not sure what to rightly call it, but we hung out at someone’s place, played board games, played cards, hung out by the bluffs, on the beach etc.

          I don’t disagree that it was a relaxing and fun weekend, but we didn’t need to spend a full 2.5 days there to do what we did. They made it seem like if we lost even an hour the weekend was lost.

    • Airazz@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • cybersandwich@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Event_Horizon@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • The Picard Maneuver@startrek.websiteOPM
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      1 year ago

      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.

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        1 year ago

        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.

      • Punkie@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.”

        • BOMBS@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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 😆

    • RagingNerdoholic@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • blackn1ght@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      That guy just have been a huge idiot, I’m pretty sure the vast majority of people know how far away New York and Los Angeles are from each other.

      • cybersandwich@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I read that story in a book about the history of England: English history made brief, irreverent, and pleasurable.

        The letter was from the 1800s I believe so maybe we can cut him some slack for not really knowing.

    • Nepenthe@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • KreekyBonez@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        if the MBTA ever gets its shit together, cars could disappear entirely in the city

        don’t hold your breath for that one

        • bostonbananarama@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          if the MBTA ever gets its shit together…

          Might be better to plan for transporter technology than that, more plausible at least.

      • sping@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • just_change_it@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        You’re talking about a space that is probably less than 15 square miles. Outside of that driving is a lot less painful.

  • Riyria@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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      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.

      • moonsnotreal
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Nepenthe@kbin.social
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          I’m from NC. My mom is from IL. Neither one of us can pronounce the word “horror.” She pronounces it precisely like “whore” 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.

              • havokdj@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                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

          • averagedrunk@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            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.

          • moonsnotreal
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            1 year ago

            Eh. Its ok. They had decent sundaes the last time I went like 6 years ago.

    • angrymouse@lemmy.world
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      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.

      • BOMBS@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • braxy29@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • gmtom@lemmy.world
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      Because comparatively it doesn’t.

      Your country simply hasn’t existed long enough pre industrialisation for a broad range of accents to develop.

      • Pipoca@lemmy.world
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        The US isn’t a uniform age.

        You get more hyper-local accents like the Boston, Philly and NYC accents in the older US cities, and fewer in places that haven’t been densely settled as long.

        Is there a difference between a Las Vegas accent and a Pheonix or Los Angeles accent? Honestly, I don’t really know.

        Still, there’s fewer hyper local accents and accents tend to be spoken over a wider area. Probably also because the US has had relatively large amounts of internal migration. Also, I assume average people travel further on average than they used to when wagons were the state of the art.

      • Riyria@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • gmtom@lemmy.world
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          Then you compare that to say England, that has been around for several millenia and has had influence from Celtic, Gaelic, Norse, Germanic, French and even Spanish to extent for hundreds or thousands of years before America existed. And then since America existed has had influence from Indians, Chinese, enslaved Africans and other immigrant cultures from around the world, just like America did. Then its just not really comparable at all. 200 years is legitimately nothing on the time scales needed for the depth of accents to form and Americans just don’t understand that at all. It’s like a European talking about 100 miles being a long distance, an American would scoff at that idea.

    • Torvum@lemmy.world
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      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.

      • Riyria@sopuli.xyz
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        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.

        • Torvum@lemmy.world
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          I worked on the river so I got used to every southern and local accent as the line boats came through.

    • Mossy Feathers (She/They)@pawb.social
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      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).

      • uberrice@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • NABDad@lemmy.world
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      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:

      https://youtu.be/wjr2CexQ5V4

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

  • z00s@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

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

    • Rambi@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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)

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        1 year ago

        I’m not Siberian, but from what I’ve gathered from the talks of people who lived there, is that people in far east Russia have a weird sense of time and distance. You might be in in the middle of fuck nowhere with the closest living person being like a 100km away from you, but when you call them with some any dumb questions like “Hey do you happen to have a bottle opener?” they respond with “Sure, I’ll be there shortly” and then they do indeed arrive… in 4 hours. It’s as if they don’t have places to be, and it’s totally okay for them to spend an entire day driving to a shop or to friend to lend them a screwdriver. It’s especially baffling to people who lived their entire lives within ~40km Moscow’s ring road and they hear stuff like “Minsk? Sure, that’s like a hand’s reach away - only 720 kilometers. I’ll drop by on the weekend”.

  • Okokimup@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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

    • LillyPip@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      People say ‘whenever’ instead of ‘when’ and I want to clock them for it.

      eta: I’m specifically disparaging the southern US states here. They just flat-out use words wrong, and I can say that now that I’m too far away for them to kick my ass.

        • Bob@feddit.nl
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • mxcory
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            1 year ago

            So they take the opportunity whenever they can?

            I just like to make stupid posts, sorry.

            • theangryseal@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              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.

              • LillyPip@lemmy.ca
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                It’s a minor niggle I was joking about with hyperbole, but it does bother me a bit because ‘when’ means a specific time and ‘whenever’ means any of multiple times. Their meaning isn’t interchangeable.

                Like: ‘I talked to my dad when he was in town’ means I talked with him that last time he was in town, but ‘I talked to my dad whenever he was in town’ means any or all the times he was in town – it might have been a hundred times or two, I can’t tell, but not the one time like the other more accurate sentence.

                It doesn’t make me mad, but it very briefly ruffles my feathers. (e: and then I move right on)

                • theangryseal@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  I honestly get why it bugs you, there are things like that that bug me too. I can’t think of any at the moment (fairly intoxicated), but I definitely know of some words (not specifically at the moment, again, intoxicated) that irk me when misused. Not as much now that I’m older and I’ve met incredibly intelligent people who can’t even spell their own name. Well, that and my own ego has shrank by at least three quarters.

                  When I believed that I was some hyper intelligent alien, every misuse of a word made me cringe to my core.

                  At 38 years old (recently gained a year because for some reason I thought I was 39), I realize that I’m not shit and younger me just needed to feel superior for whatever reason.

                  I don’t know. I’m drunk. Sorry if I made no sense or was insulting in some way.

                  Hope you’re having a good night.

  • nednobbins@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

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

    • AdaA
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      1 year ago

      You can drive for 30 hours and still be on the same highway in the same state in Australia.

        • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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          1 year ago

          The thing is, Australia is basically the same size as America (minus Alaska), but only has 6 states and one state-sized territory. 7 compared to 48 means the time taken to travel across one state is much greater.

          Canada is obviously a lot bigger than Australia, but it also has a lot more provinces/territories. 13, which is almost double. And while it’s a lot bigger, it’s nowhere near double the area. 30% extra land for 85% extra provinces, to be precise.

  • Zeth0s@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

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

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    1 year ago

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

    • aeronmelon@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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.

        • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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          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.

            • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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              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.

              • travysh@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                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.

                • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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                  1 year ago

                  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.

      • trailing9@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Start by linking a city in Mexico with a smaller city in the US. The cities will prosper and other cities want to be connected.

        Don’t forget that local public transport is needed or you need parking space for many cheap rental cars next to the stations until self-driving cars are available.

        • LillyPip@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          That’s actually brilliant.

          e: Is Canada already doing this? Iisn’t there public transport between Windsor and Detroit? I’m going to look into that.

          • trailing9@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Please drop a quick note about your results.

            I would expect that the high in high-speed rail is necessary. Otherwise it’s not a connection of economically distinct zones. Additionally the economies are more similar so that there are fewer reasons for travel.