My father is from yorkshire and my mom is from texas. I've lived up and down the UK for 20 years, been all over europe and asia. One thing I've learned is that basically, america is not unique for this. The paradigm you are describing is between rural and metropolitan.
Metropolitan londoners move with culture at ease, and so do parisians, berliners, etc. But ask the opinion of a brit in benidorm and you will get similar confusion on local customs, a similar feeling that "the UK is the only place that exists, the rest of the world is a holiday spot". The provincial sort, people who live in small town or city, people who are not well travelled; their entire world view can be defined within a country.
And also, for the record, the school uniforms do still baffle me a bit. I tend to play UK apologist in the US and US apologist in the UK. So for full balance, the lack of electric kettles in the US also baffles me. Trust me, Brits who visit me in the US are just as vocal about their bafflement with the local customs as the inverse...
The US has electric kettles and I think they’re becoming more popular, they’re just a lot less convenient than in the UK because boiling water with 110v is slower.
Yeah, but I bet you don't have iced tea makers there. ;-)
Fun fact: growing up in Texas, I'd never seen hot tea until my mid-teens, despite drinking iced tea every day. That's why Brits have electric kettles everywhere. We call them hot-pots and they were at least common for students to have, mainly for making instant noodles.
Also funny: the normal sized tea bag I saw growing up was gallon sized.
Even now, as an adult living in Europe that does have an electric kettle, I don't use it much, and I'm not sure it's worth the counter space. They don't heat water much faster than the stove or microwave, and unless you're making loads of tea, as British folks are wont to do, it's not obvious why you'd need one. I bought one when I was experimenting with an Aeropress, but now have an espresso machine.
My Texan mom was visiting me in London and we went to a bit of an upscale café. My mom tried to order an iced tea, the server politely informed her that they did not serve iced tea. She then proceeded to say "Oh darlin', in that case I'll have a glass of ice and a cup of tea."
I ended up with my first hot tea ever by ordering tea in Mexico, as I would have in Texas. I was very confused when I got a mug of water and a tea bag. I was 15-ish. I'd literally never heard of anyone drinking tea hot. (This was in the mid-90s, so reading stuff on the internet wasn't much of a thing.)
Europeans, on the other hand, seem to be baffled by the concept that iced tea is just, you know, cold black tea, not a soft drink you buy at the store. I've seriously had people ask me how to make it.
Pour the boiling water (> 90 C) onto the bloody tea! Preferably loose tea in a teapot, but a bag in a mug will do.
Why in gods name I'm brought a mug of lukewarm water with sperate teabag, even in a five-star hotel, and expected to get a decent brew of strong black tea is beyond the wit of my understanding..... And don't get me started on having to flag down a waiter to ask for a teaspoon and milk jug every-sodding-time!
(At this point, somebody from the USA will invariably post claiming to be a tea connoisseur, and tediously explain why lukewarm brews are superior and the proper Indian/Chinese/Japanese/Antarctic way of doing things and that British drink shite tea. My response to this is "bugger off").
I don’t think it’s really weirdness or some unique cultural flaw, it’s merely that America is huge and you functionally don’t need to care about the rest of the world if you live there as an average person. The same is largely true in say, China or India. Australia is a small country far away from most places so it’s natural that it is forced to integrate more.
I saw plenty of American television while growing up in Australia; there's a lot of it on in the UK, even though the UK is a television powerhouse in its own right. In America, learning about other countries is a choice; in the rest of the West, it's mandatory.
>They also seemed to have difficulty in accepting new knowledge about the world unless it was said with an American accent. The most innocuous and well-known features of British (and Commonwealth) schools (uniforms, houses, pastoral care, terms, public examinations) not only surprised but also baffled them.
it has been my experience observing people from other cultures trying to understand anything about American culture is that the same phenomenon seems to pertain in that case - so perhaps it is just a common feature of humanity.
Albert Speer in his autobiography said that Hitler's inner circle were extremely uninformed about anything non-German, and that if you had been to some country for a vacation for a week one time you were considered an expert, this is something I've noticed with many people regarding places and assignment of expertise. I bring it up just to back up my theory that this is a common human thing, and not just an aspect of American culture.
Learning about new cultures is exactly what makes moving to a different culture fun, but when you're a teacher, you have to know how your school functions, because you have to enforce order within that institution. I was surprised that my American colleagues hadn't considered that British schools might work differently from American ones. It's not an issue of understanding the differences, but knowing that there are differences.
I've never read Speer's autobiography, but I read somewhere that von Ribbentrop was the only one with any experience of working outside Germany. In any case, I'm not sure I'd want to use a group of leading ethno-nationalists as an example of how ordinary humans think about other cultures.
>In any case, I'm not sure I'd want to use a group of leading ethno-nationalists as an example of how ordinary humans think about other cultures.
sorry for having that spring to mind, I could certainly use any number of examples from my own experience but I guess that could be discounted because how do you really know what my experience is.
At any rate the great number of British, Danish, German, Swedish, and Italian peoples I know have no real understanding of American culture, and excepting the Danish, German and Swedish not much understanding of each others' cultures as far as I can tell.
Of course that is all as far as I can tell, and that is just based on my interpretation - for example I don't necessarily think you have much understanding of American culture or Americans based on your statements here - but that's because I disagree with them (as being particular to Americans), if I agreed I guess I would think you were especially insightful.
on edit: so I think you're basically just the way most people are about other cultures, making some assumptions based on little exposure and some examples of your acquaintance. Because it is very difficult to really get into anything relatively large, you don't have the time. Maybe your colleagues should have known more, but not sure that translates to knowing anything about Americans.
