Have you ever moved to another country?

amadeus

Serenity now
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If you have, is there anything that you didn’t expect that was different from your home country?

I got the idea for this when I thought about gas stations: in America, at least where I’m from in America, they always sold drinks, candy, milk, toiletries, lottery tickets, etc.

But here in Japan, they just sell gas. Maybe they’ll have a Coke machine.

I think one of the reasons for this is that a lot of gas stations are still full-service, where attendants come out to fill up the tank and wipe the windshield. But even self-service gas stations don’t have anything.

It wasn’t something I ever would have thought about, but it surprised me the first time I was here.
 
In Mexico you have to pump up and store your water from a well or have it delivered in a truck. Water heating is done with gas which you also have to buy and store yourself (or you can remove the eye burner from the boiler and burn whatever you want to get a hot shower)

Oddly enough you don't have to pump your own gas, it's done by an attendant.
 
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I lived in England (London mostly) for three years - as a student, up to getting my degree.

It could have been far nicer, but I was 18 when I started, and pretty much lost.

Even so, London was great. Would have been better without the Londoners English people of course :p
 
England seems like a nice country, but I’m torn between stereotypes. One is Merry England, green pastures stretched out with friendly, mild-mannered people. The other is a postindustrial wasteland populated with petty criminal antisocials and drunk soccer hooligans.

My apologies to England for not knowing enough. :undecide:
 
England seems like a nice country, but I’m torn between stereotypes. One is Merry England, green pastures stretched out with friendly, mild-mannered people. The other is a postindustrial wasteland populated with petty criminal antisocials and drunk soccer hooligans.

My apologies to England for not knowing enough. :undecide:

it's mostly the latter

Actually, I think that only the latter exists...
 
Yeah Japanese gas stations are meh but people don’t drive as much and they’re nowhere near as common as Family Mart or 7/11, where you can get all your combini goods.

I vastly preferred the Japanese convenience stores to American gas station-cum-convenience stores.

Lived and worked in Tokyo for a year. I miss that train system too, damn... the chillest commute I ever had.
 
If you have, is there anything that you didn’t expect that was different from your home country?

Rural Philippines.

Cash only society. Check are accepted nowhere. I only use them to deposit my US money into my Filipino bank. Then there's a hold for 35 banking days for them to clear. Only the biggest stores accept credit cards.

Gender-specific jobs. Men are the drivers and construction workers. Women are the cashiers and teachers. Cops can be be either gender, but policewomen work only in the police stations.

In the US we had municipal police [LAPD, NYPD etc] and state police [CHP]. The Philippines only has the Philippine National Police [PNP] and the elite National Bureau of Investigation [NBI]. There are no police academies. Rather colleges have criminology majors.

Noise ordinances (if any) are not enforced.

One can negotiate how much property tax you will pay.

Two-tiered pricing. If a foreigner is involved, the price will be higher.

No separation of church & state & commerce. Catholicism is taught in public schools. The workday begins with a prayer. At 3 p.m., work stops for prayers.
 
If you have, is there anything that you didn’t expect that was different from your home country?
I got the idea for this when I thought about gas stations: in America, at least where I’m from in America, they always sold drinks, candy, milk, toiletries, lottery tickets, etc.
But here in Japan, they just sell gas. Maybe they’ll have a Coke machine.
I think one of the reasons for this is that a lot of gas stations are still full-service, where attendants come out to fill up the tank and wipe the windshield. But even self-service gas stations don’t have anything.
It wasn’t something I ever would have thought about, but it surprised me the first time I was here.

What a massive culture shock lol !
There must be a lot more then just gas station ?
 
It’s common knowledge in America not to drink the water in Mexico. I suppose having it brought in my truck circumvents that problem of tap water.

Is that ported-in water used throughout the whole house, as in the shower and washing machine too?

Yeah. And the only way to get water pressure is to store it in a tank on the roof. You usually can't drink it. Your drinking water is another thing you have to buy.
 
What a massive culture shock lol !
There must be a lot more then just gas station ?
Starting from around the 1970’s and 1980’s, convenience stores. Before that there were also many independent neighborhood shops.

A lot of the small independent stores have closed over time due to competition from both convenience stores and large supermarket chains. Until 2000, Japan had the Large Stores Law, which regulated the construction of new stores above a certain square meterage. The law initially gave a lot of power to local business owners in shopping districts, so the construction of new large stores often met with fierce opposition from them.

I believe one unintended consequence of the law was that really only the largest regional and national chains were able to go through the process of wrangling support for the stores. Sometimes this would take years of negotiation and planning; one such store I know of was finished I think 11 years after its originally scheduled opening date.

Furthermore, American companies had long complained that the Large Stores Law was effectively a way to keep out foreign competition. Toys ‘R’ Us was probably the first one to get around this, becoming quite successful in Japan’s toy retailing. On the other hand, French hypermarket Carrefour’s entry into Japan was an unmitigated disaster of not studying the local market and building their stores largely along the same lines as their French domestic counterparts; Carrefour lasted only a few years before selling its stores and license to AEON Group, now Japan’s largest retailer by far.
 
Rural Philippines.

Cash only society. Check are accepted nowhere. I only use them to deposit my US money into my Filipino bank. Then there's a hold for 35 banking days for them to clear. Only the biggest stores accept credit cards.

Gender-specific jobs. Men are the drivers and construction workers. Women are the cashiers and teachers. Cops can be be either gender, but policewomen work only in the police stations.

In the US we had municipal police [LAPD, NYPD etc] and state police [CHP]. The Philippines only has the Philippine National Police [PNP] and the elite National Bureau of Investigation [NBI]. There are no police academies. Rather colleges have criminology majors.

Noise ordinances (if any) are not enforced.

One can negotiate how much property tax you will pay.

Two-tiered pricing. If a foreigner is involved, the price will be higher.

No separation of church & state & commerce. Catholicism is taught in public schools. The workday begins with a prayer. At 3 p.m., work stops for prayers.
Some (a lot) of this sounds like Japan! I've never written a check in ten years, and I don't know what I would do if I got one. My bank is the post office. All of my non-cash payments for things like rent are done via bank transfers at the ATM.

Gender-specific jobs: I don't think there's a hard and fast rule for it, but traditionally the breakdown of the corporate structure was men were the sales staff, upper management, etc. and women were more in positions of receptionist, tea lady, etc.

The police are more decentralized with them being based out of each prefecture, though there is the National Police Agency that acts in a supervisory or coordinating agency. I can't say 100% though how all of that works. I've talked to them only a couple of times; legally, they can stop foreign-looking people and demand they produce their residency permits or passports but this has only happened to me once, and just by coincidence. I was outside my apartment when an officer was doing a rather routine survey of the neighborhood and recording who lived in what apartment. I had just happened to come home from work and he was waiting outside my door and asked who lived there. Me! :)

If you get into tax trouble, going to city hall or the local ward office usually results in some kind of either reduction or structured payment plan based on your income. I've never had this happen, though I did get hit with about $1,000 in unpaid city taxes once unbeknownst to me. They put me on a payment plan thinking I was somehow destitute (I wasn't... then! :lol:) but I just paid it off in one fell swoop. Saved me three more trips to the tax office downtown!

Church and state are completely separate. Some certain historical... reasons... yes. Nothing to do with the war, mind you. Just a totally normal swell of civic consciousness among the people.

Spoiler nothing to see here :
:shifty:
 
What a massive culture shock lol !
There must be a lot more then just gas station ?

I think this is more about what you don't expect, than rather what you expect ;).


A bit more than 7 years ago I moved from Germany to the Netherlands, and at the beginning of the year I moved from the Netherlands to France. Not the greatest culture shock between these. In my first week in NL I walked down the main shopping street of the city I was living in, and the biggest chains were all from Germany (ALDI, LIDL, German Telekom, Media Markt, etc). Various notable minor things:
- In NL you can buy prescription free drugs in the supermarket. In DE+FR you need to go to a pharmacy. And FR has a lot of them
- Apparently it's easier in FR to get blood work by your GP. At every second corner is a biomedical laboratory
- French GPs don't seem to have receptionists or nurses or anyone at all helping them, unlike in NL/DE
- FR has a baguette culture. At every second corner is a bakery, where you can also get sandwiches and salads. NL has no food culture, you'll have a hard time finding a real bakery. Germany is closer to FR, but not *that* much
- On a German market you can get some Bratwurst. On a Dutch market you can get fried fish. (IDK yet if you an get cheese on a French market, pandemic prevented that)
- Youth protection: While DE is known to be liberal with nudity, other things are more restricted. In NL, you could by hardcore porn in the Media Markt, there was just a big box with tons of it in it. In Germany, you'd need to have at minimum a closed of section with age control, but more likely you'd only get them in adult shops. In NL you can get some selection of sex toys in the pharmacy (my biggest culture shock; you see shampoo, wound patches, drugs, vibrators, nail polish... wait, what?), in FR in the bigger supermarkets, and in DE you'd never be able to see this, only in adult shops
- NL has obviously a bike culture. Which makes buses quite expensive, because not that many people are using them. in FR the buses are a lot cheaper.
- French people don't pick up after their dogs. A lot more dog poop in the cities here
- In NL you can pay by card everywhere (even at the market, mostly). In DE you'll need to have a major shop to have card payment. FR is somewhere in between.
- In FR your debit card is automatically a credit card. In NL/DE you need to separately apply for a credit card, and you might not get it, depending on your situation (I own now my first credit card)

That's the main things which come to my mind at the moment.

EDIT:
- In Germany there's a law basically forbidding shops to open on Sunday's and public holidays (or... at least was, not sure about the current situation). In NL, this is not the case, and stuff is open on Sundays and depending on the situation also on public holidays. Shops are certainly closed only on Dec 25 and Jan 1, on the rest they might be open. There's some culture difference there too, the German supermarkets in NL are more likely to be closed on public holidays than the Dutch supermarkets in NL. France seems to be somewhere in between.
- In NL/DE Dec 25+26 are holidays. In DE, we start already in the afternoon of Dec 24, which is an "inofficial half holiday". In FR only Dec 25 is a holiday.
 
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I think this is more about what you don't expect, than rather what you expect ;).
That's true! My family asked me at first how I could eat with chopsticks. Well, it was either that or don't eat! :lol:

- French GPs don't seem to have receptionists or nurses or anyone at all helping them, unlike in NL/DE
That's one thing I never thought of! There are no GPs here, every clinic is specialized though you do have the nose-ear-throat doctors and so forth. I have cards for a general hospital (great dermatology department), mental clinic, ENT clinic, gastroenterology clinic, and I think one or two others? Half of the cards in my wallet are from some medical thing or other. Not just because I'm probably a hypochondriac, but the division of medical labor here.

A few other things: convenience stores recently phased out pornographic magazines. I never bought any, but I might have glanced at the covers a few times when walking past the magazine section. Sandwiches here are generally an anathema to decent sandwich-loving Westerners: moist bread with cut-off crusts and lettuce and egg salad or whatever. Some of them even have fruit and whipped cream in them. Another culinary travesty is the spaghetti napolitan, pasta with ketchup.
 
Compared to Brazil:

-Gas stations are more comparable to US ones, though with attendents filling your gas. They're also practically the only places that sell food that are open during the early morning
-Water comes out of the treatment plant fully drinkable, but the pipes aren't necessarily the newest or most well-documented so a lot of people buy bottled water anyway
-Water heating is done by either gas or electricity
-Cash is generally preferred as payment, though the vast majority of places in the city accept cards, including street hawkers. However, the further you go into the countryside, the more cash-only places you see
-Jobs are segregated by gender for the most part
-There's municipal, state and federal police. Most cops you see on the street are Military Police, which are a branch of the national military and are run by the state government. They're the most likely to run clandestine operations. The state government also runs the Civil Police, which mostly deals with bureaucracy and detective work. Municipal governments from larger cities run Municipal Guards, which are also seen loitering around on the streets, often in conjunction with the Military Police. The Federal government runs the Federal Highway Police, the Federal Railway Police, and the Federal Police. The Federal Police is responsible for not only federal crimes but also immigration and customs control, maritime patrols, and crimes that span multiple states in general.
-Noise ordinances are mostly non-existent
-Unofficial two-tier pricing can sometimes happen, but afaik it's illegal and prices are usually written down somewhere the customer can easily see
-Church and state are officially separate but the state has historically maintained a close relationship with the Catholic church and now fundamentalist protestant evangelicals have a lot of political power
-Drugs here are bought at the pharmacy, though supermarkets sometimes have pharmacies inside. There are rumours that pharmacies are used for money laundering since there's so many of them
-There's bakeries everywhere and they all have coffee and small baguettes, as well as other breads and packaged foods depending on the bakery
-In a Brazilian market you can get deep-fried pastries with sugarcane juice
-Porn and sex toys are in adult shops only, nude beaches are very rare
-Brazil has a heavy car culture in general but bike infrastructure and bike usage are increasing, buses are very expensive but they're the only longer-distance transportation option for most people
-I don't see much dog poop around
-Debit and credit cards are separate
-Shops are open on Sundays and public holidays but usually close early
-Only 25th December is a holiday, though Christmas informally starts on the 24th
 
I’ve only ever had one run in with discriminatory pricing when a taxi driver said it would cost ¥4500 (about $40?) to go a few kilometers.

Now it was clear that I live here in the city and spoke in Japanese the whole time, but the guy still thought he could rip me off! I told him off and hailed another cab.
 
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