• Went living in a small village at 1000m altitude. Despite it’s colder here, I no longer cough for months around winter.

  • My relationship, bought a new house sold our old one and now it seems its slowly falling apart

  • When I moved from middle Connecticut to San Diego all the good Italian food was gone, yes there was sushi but no good Chinese takeout and holy shit forget about pizza. Cali pizza is nothing like CT pizza and I hated it. Don’t even get me started on the mutant pile of stuff PA calls pizza.

    • Just a shot in the dark, you originally from Bergen County, New Jersey?

        • That always drove me crazy when I went to Germany. “Oops, forgot toothpaste”… wtf, nothing’s open. Guess my teeth will just rot.

          Germany’s not even religious, what’s with the Blue Laws?

          • Germany is religious AF still. Officially not really, but its a deeply Christian country. Most holidays are christian ones (the ones that are not, are not religious). The “christian” party is still the biggest party (although that is changing, and their values are more “let’s suck off the rich” than christian). In some cities (like cologne) no building bigger than the cathedral is allowed. There are more examples :)

            • I think people confuse Christian past with actually being Christian. In Poland about 50% of people attend mass every Sunday. In Germany that’s 7%.

              It’s still tradition in Poland to have a priest visit your home once a year to do some magic, every child gets baptized in church, 75,6% of kids attend religion classes at school because yes, religion is still part of curriculum in public schools. Abortion is illegal, there’s no civil unions let alone same-sex marriage, no no-fault divorce, no euthanasia or even legally recognized DNRs.

              That’s a Christian country. Germany just has some Christian traditions.

            • Which is hilarious, because I’ve been to Cologne many times and know it’s the gay capital of the country :)

          • Germany’s not even religious, what’s with the Blue Laws?

            It’s actually interesting thing. In some countries the “stores closed on Sunday” is a religious thing, like in Poland. Stores used to be open but it was changed recently because the right wing government pushed for it and most people think it’s so that people go to church more.

            In Germany it was the other way around: all the stores were only opened Mon-Fri and closed early because everyone just assumed that people working in stores should work the same hours as everyone else. This led to terrible experience for the customers (everyone scrambling to do their shopping on Friday evening, right after work) so they slowly started extending the opening hours and finally allowed stores to open on Saturdays.

            In Spain stores are closed on Sunday but again, not because of religious reasons but as “worker’s rights” thing. One shopping mall near me tried to extend shopping hours on some days during summer and all the workers complained and threatened a strike. No one wants to work on Sunday here, they prefer to spend time with friends and family.

            • Totally understand and to be honest I wish we had that here (Dystopian States of America). People deserve the dignity of spending time relaxing and with their families. It was just a culture shock for me the first time, and now I know to plan better when I’m in Europe. But. yeah the idea that things should be closed or prohibited so that “you’ll go to church more” is obviously idiotic. Where I live, Alcohol sales were banned on Sunday even though everything else was open. They changed the rule recently, but only if a bar/restaurant/retailer specifically gets a “Sunday sales” license (apart from the other one for the rest of the week) and they can’t sell until after noon; ostensibly because of course everybody should be in church before then. Stupid-ass Bible Belt eyeroll

              • When I lived in Poland everything was still open on Sunday and when I moved to Spain everything was suddenly closed and I had 0 issues adapting. I’m sure it’s an issue when traveling but once you make that mental switch it’s super easy to plan around it. I remember having discussion on reddit later and people form Poland coming up with the craziest reason why they need the stores to be open on Sunday (like “I’m disabled so I drop food all the time and what I’m supposed to do when I drop my last food on the floor and it’s Sunday?”… IDK, buy more food on Saturday?)

          • It gets stricter the further south you go, where people are more religious. In bavaria shops close earlier and can’t sell alcohol after a certain time either. Overall the country is quite religious though, and especially historically has been extremely so. And something like a sunday where almost no one has to work isn’t without benefits, so it won’t just go away. Even shops being open on saturday past early afternoon was something that was only allowed in the early 2000s iirc.

        • True, although I would hope you would expect that leaving the state

  • Vancouver/Edmonton to Australia (Sydney then southwest Victoria).

    It gets properly cold here - it’s not hot an sunny everyday like they advertise to us overseas. Aussies also don’t use insulation in their houses so having to deal with single digit temperatures inside the house makes me die a little everyday.

      • There are minimum standards…now. That builders and developers were dragged kicking and screaming to (“just throw another reverse cycle aircon on mate, she’ll be right”).

        I’ve never lived in an insulated house. I’ve never lived more south than the subtropics and the coldest a house had been inside is 6 degrees C with a floor surface probably lower than that. The people down south have probably suffered more than me in some homes.

    • Single digits in Celsius though, right?

      Does it even still get to more than -12c/9f in the skiing towns over there?

  • South to Midwest USA - the thunderstorms are less frequent, but way more violent. Also, cheese curds.

  • moving from SA to Europe, I did not expect that I could feel hotter in Europe. I was naively expecting 4 months of snow coverage

  • When I moved from the west coast of Canada to the east coast, I was surprised how different the clouds and the sunrise looked. There are like, a lot more fluffy clouds, and the sunsets are more vivid across the entire sky.

  • Just how antisocial people can be, they often feel dead inside to me. Rarely smiling, very little low effort social interaction. It eats away at my soul.

    The inaccessibility of anything in the DIY and construction side of life if you don’t own a business in the industry. I was used to doing woodwork without the need for a table saw, now I can’t get a simple piece of wood cut accurately without being a building contractor or having my own kitted out workshop. I loved working with aluminium and used to buy from suppliers, now it’s inaccessible to me.

    • I’m half way on this, I was just talking to my buddy about this. The last three years I worked pretty much by myself and I think it took a toll on me. Though when I’m in Japan it’s a strange paradox, I feel so comfortable. Maybe because the interactions are minimal and that’s all I can handle after seeing 1-3 people a day.

      • I’ve spent most of my adult life alone, and those small social interactions are what pulls me through. Here you get looked at like there’s something wrong with you if you greet someone when walking past them in the street.

        • Oh yeah I sort of get that. I was having a good evening going home to see my girlfriend, went to grab a few beers after work at the gas station and smiled at someone. The guy got pissed and said “what are you looking at removed?” I was like where did that come from. And I’m not scrawny or anything, especially compared to that shrimp.

            • That why I like staying in Japan and Korea.

              I guess the “slur” got modded out but I think it should have been left in to show what I mean, instead of a man looks at another man having a good evening and smiles, then gets called a slur. Some of these mental gymnastics are exhausting. It’s something that happened to me in person, I don’t know why it should be turned a blind eye to… was it necessary to censor it?–I mean I’m new here.

  • Since physical places wasn’t specified, how much nicer the threadiverse (Lemmy) is compared to Reddit, way less toxic from my experience.

  • The way it changed my mental perception of how far apart buildings are. I moved from North Carolina to Massachusetts, and distinctly remember that the first time I went back to visit the city I grew up in, I had a reaction along the lines of “wtf, did like a bomb go off here or something?” upon seeing it, because I’d become used to buildings being taller and closer together and suddenly by contrast the parking lots with scattered short buildings and wide roads reminded me of those pictures you see of cities after a war or disaster, where there’ll be a few buildings relatively intact looking surrounded by flattened grey.

    Every time I go back there now, I get a really eerie feeling because even though for the most part, the buildings haven’t changed at all, the place feels as if they have, like everything has been squashed vertically and stretched horizontally.

    • Opposite to you, going back home feels cramped and I miss being able to buy beer at the grocery store. Food’s always great though.

  • Stopped drinking almost entirely, because moving also meant finding new friends (who prefer other activities than drinking).

  • Eye contact / greetings between strangers

    *in the USA

    I’m originally from the south where everyone wears plastic smiles and waves in passing and all that.

    Then I went to the northeast where it’s more eyes on the horizon. A smile and a wave is met with a raised eyebrow or a sneer, and friends commonly show their comfort with each other using insults.

    Then out to the midwest where zero eye contact gets you stared at, but heavy eye contact is taken as a challenge. It has to be just the right amount, and I’m still trying to figure it out after years.

      • Yes. I debated whether I should specify or if it’d sound dumb / be obvious.

        Now I see I should have, since I made Rothe sad

      • 4 days

        The amount of US defaultism on lemmy saddens me. I thought I had mostly left that behind on reddit those years ago.