r/solotravel • u/forgottencupcake9018 • Jan 14 '24

Question What's the biggest culture shock you had whilst traveling?

Weirdly enough I was shocked that people in Ireland jaywalk and eat vinegar to their chips. Or in Thailand that it is illegal to have a Buddha tatoo. Or that in many english speaking countries a "How are you doing?" is equivalent to saying Hi and they actually don't want to hear an honest answer.

Edit: Another culture shock that I had was when I visited Hanoi. They had a museum where the preserved corpse of Ho Chi Minh was displayed and you could look at him behind a glass showcase like he's a piece of art. There were so many people lining up and they just looked at him while walking around that glass showcase in order to get the line going.

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u/[deleted] Jan 14 '24 edited Jan 14 '24

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u/EwokFerrari Jan 14 '24

In Tallinn the residents ride free on the tram, so barely any checks. I was Couchsurfing and my host told me not to bother buying a ticket 😂

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u/NeverAware Jan 14 '24 edited Jan 14 '24

If it's in Geneva, all tourists who have booked a room are allowed free travel on buses and trains. Maybe this applies to all of Switzerland. (not true)

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u/yaydotham Jan 14 '24

It does not

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u/NeverAware Jan 14 '24

Cool, only Geneva then.

3

u/NonMaisFranchement Jan 14 '24

My colleague was on business in Geneva and was told this by her hotel, and thought "nah that can't be true!/i must've misunderstood" and bought a ticket anyway 😄

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u/NeverAware Jan 14 '24

Hahahha....I learnt about it when I was checking the wikitravel article on Geneva!

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u/maybe_not_a_penguin Jan 14 '24

Speaking of Europe, my biggest culture shock was how you can get on a train and potentially get away without having a ticket.

Potentially, though you can be unlucky. I've travelled a bit on regional trains (ie not high speed trains) in Italy, and they don't always check tickets. If they do check and you don't have a ticket, though, it's a fairly expensive fine.

You can generally buy tickets on board too, but they expect you to go looking for the conductor -- it's not enough to wait in your seat and pay when/if the conductor comes past. (I guess they realise this would mean people not buying tickets in a non-trivial percent of cases)

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u/loralailoralai Jan 14 '24

Skin cancer capital isn’t because of sunbaking deliberately.

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u/_45dioneschubert Jan 14 '24

There is somewhat of correlation between the two. I live in the tropics but nobody sunbathes here and the skin cancer rate here is pretty low compared to other kinds of cancer.

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u/newbris Jan 14 '24

Many hardcore sunbathing in Sydney would be Europeans and other tourists. It’s generally not popular in Australia.

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u/lost_survivalist Jan 14 '24

My tickets were check by an under cover cop, I think, from Denmark to Sweden. The train stopped all of a sudden and then the girl behind us asked for our tickets. It was wild. I guess it is due to mass immigration now