Foreigners experiencing America...

Foreigners experiencing America...  Here's another great collection of the impressions that foreigners have upon living in America.  For some of them I have a personal flip side:

A Bangladeshi: “America is literally HUGE. My home country is roughly the size of Florida, one of the fifty states.”  The flip side: sometimes I've been amazed just how small an entire country can be.  One can drive across the entire country of Estonia – anywhere – in just a few hours, often on terrible roads.

A Russian: “President doesn’t automatically become the richest person in the country.”  This is a great reflection of the assumption of corruption that every Russian I know has.  Not just Russians, either – people from many countries are like this, because it's what they're used to: Indians, Mexicans, Saudis, and many more...

An American, on his South Pacific friends: “They also assumed that you could run into ultra famous people.”  When I was first exploring Estonia, in the early 1990s, this happened to me repeatedly.  The typical experience was that I'd walk into a small-town shop, the clerk would figure out I was American, and would immediately start asking questions about movie stars with the assumption being that I knew them personally.  When I tried to make them understand that I couldn't possibly know them, the most common reaction was disbelief.

Nationality not identified, but Scottish name: “In Nordstrom, when a sales assistant says 'Can I help you?' s/he actually means 'Can I help you?' and not, say, 'You’re distracting me from my phone. Can you please leave?'”  The flip side: as an American I've often been shocked at the poor service I've received in other countries when visiting shops and restaurants.  My thoughts, upon being the victim of this, are always “How the heck do they stay in business, with help like this?”   But it's so prevalent that you have to accept it's the norm...

A Swede: “Bank checks are still used and mailed in envelopes.”  The flip side: I was astonished, when first doing business in Estonia, that our employees would actually travel to a bank with their bills in hand, and work face-to-face with a teller to transfer money (what we would call electronic funds transfer, or wiring) to pay them.  Checks existed, but were something rare and completely inaccessible to ordinary people.  There were many differences in how our financial systems worked – leases, rentals, checks, credit cards, consumer credit, etc., etc., to the point where I found it was safer to assume that nothing worked the same way there as in the U.S...