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
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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.