I’ve only been abroad one time, and there were little gecko/lizard things everywhere, climbing up walls and scurrying across roads, and nobody cared. I was constantly fascinated but to the locals they’re just kinda there. Bonus question to anyone who visited the UK - was there anything that fascinated you but I’d be taking for granted? Pic unrelated.
The church in the town from when OP lived in the UK.
TBF it did take me a moment to parse too.
I feel like it’s 80% the expense. If most rock was like that everybody would be looking for boring sandstone.
Climate stuff comes to mind. Big storms, it being sunny almost all the time, and -30C. There’s other climates that are similar, of course, but I guess most people don’t live in them, because visitors remark on it. Europeans tend to be gobsmacked by the amount of empty space there is between human structures, too.
A lot of pests people think are everywhere are just nowhere to be seen because of the cold. That’s more something that’s missing, though.
Free healthcare and French labeling, for the Americans. I’m not sure if they think the money is cool or just stupid.
TIL!
Hmm, is Antarctica bigger than the Sahara?
Good question!
I would guess not widely, just because rich people get around, and standards of luxury are more interconnected than that.
In the past, you have things like spices being worth their weight in gold in Europe, and cheap in India. Or how the Inuit prized wood because it didn’t grow anywhere they lived. Aluminum was a luxury metal originally, and there’s stories about Napoleon using it for cutlery as a step up from silver.
That’s still pretty good, Europe was yet to really recover from the collapse of Rome at that point. I’ll just call it rounding up.
In a list, after an em dash, and you’ve got four different points in time going on on two islands. It’s all technically correct, and there’s only the one way to interpret it that makes sense, but “the British town” would have improved readability.
Also, it’s a crying shame more people don’t know about NZ animals. Some of them are pretty unique.