How about the same but about the world? If I gathered together all the places I visited, all documentaries I watched and all conversations I had it adds up to a mere glance at a myriad of different worlds. Every single small region in the world has more history and social and natural structures than any fantasy book. Living is like pulling individual pixels from a 4000000000000…000k photo which then changes every second.

My brain explodes sometimes, but the idea of fractals helps. There is still immense value in perceiving this small collection of pixels as they build up to more and more connected structures.

Icelandic lichen liquor. Tastes like forest.

We will not. If anything COVID taught me people will actively fight against anything that minimally hurts their comfort and entrenched vision of reality.

This time we were taken by surprise and governments were surprisingly quick to act and impose things and we were lucky to have a 90%ready tech developed precisely for this kind of event (mRNA vaccines were in late stage of development in 2020, they just speeded up finishing touches, trials and roll-out).

In 2023 the general vibe is " we know that lockdowns, mask mandates, travel bans were the right thing to do, but we also know we won’t let them happen again". So it’s better to stay quiet, do nothing and act surprised when the next pandemic hits. Except this time those in power will know that mitigation won’t float and societies will happily sacrifice the old and the weak on the altar of economy.

On an unrelated note, “climate mitigation” will probably never happen.

And between Egypt and Ethiopia due to the latter building a dam on Nile

Amazon

Okay now I’m stretching the OPs idea a little bit, but America is big.

How people live in South America never needing to learn other language than Spanish and plausibly never interacting with a foreign language outside movies. I spent some time in Chile, the place I lived in had a nice janitor. He did not speak English, I only knew a few loose words in Spanish so communication was… peculiar. Only after 2 months of awkward interactions he realised, that I probably am not Spanish native speaker and it hit me.

When your entire life in a continent where everyone speaks flavours of Spanish or Portugese, you can have successful, international career only in Spanish, participate in all kinds of rich culture only in Spanish and all signs and labels are only in Spanish, huge majority of tourists speak Spanish… it is not immediately obvious, that people may not speak Spanish.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not dunking on “dumb spanish speakers”. There are ton of places in Europe where people disregard English, where it’s famously hard to communicate in anything other than the local language, but the fact, that other languages exist is apparent to everyone once they learn to read. Awareness that people actually speak these languages is the most natural knowledge from ground school as we learn that “Germany speaks German. Italy speaks Italian” etc. A perspective which does not involve being in constant proximity to numerous foreign languages felt like something that made no sense to me in the past until I actually came into contact with it.

funny that you say that, not all Europeans are stuck in the same nationality for 10 or 30 generations back, maybe not even majority.

My great-grandmother was German, never learned the language of what is now my nationality. My grandmother and her child (my parent) didn’t speak German and have never subscribed to German nationality, neither do I (but I speak a little bit German though becouse of school not because of family). Maybe it’s because the identity of the place I live in is as strong as Germany’s so it’s a simple choice. But for a country, whose entire schtick is “'Murica fokk yea” I am sometimes baffled how much this ancestral identity matters among people who are supposed to benefit from the whole thing (white middle/upper classes).

My experience is from Canada, but Canada is in America so it should count:

• insane amounts of empty space. It’s one thing to know that in America several hours drive doesn’t count as “far away”, another to experience it.
• guns. Not like in “them americans only shoot themselves”, but like in “any hardware store carries full gamut of weapon-adjacent accessories and it’s normal” wtf mates, you can’t keep your murder machines confined to murder machine shops? We manage to do it with porn and sex toys in Europe (at least my part of it), sure you can too with guns?
• malls. We do have malls in Europe. I still don’t get them, but it is a choice to go there. Where I lived in Canada it was the only shopping option. Why not corner shops? These suburbs waste a ton of space, no one has ever thought in a capitalist brain “hey let’s put a shop closer to the people and charge them more because they burn less fuel and waste less time to get here”?
• And a very specific nitpick: calling places “european” like a point of pride while in fact they are rather not. Quebec City and Montreal I think both pride themselves on being “the most europe-like cities in north america” and… they’re not europe-like? Like, ok, the old town is nice, but that’s it.

One which you won’t be able to unlearn: “Kid” as a word for a child derives from a word “kid” which meant young goat. We’re literally calling human children “goat children” and it’s not even mocking.

The same thing happened in Swedish, the common word meaning “boy” or “guy” - “kille” is a shortened “killing” - young goat.

“Poultry” though

Scooter. Not an electric one. I had a thought once “hey I did ride one in childhood, maybe it can be a bit of nostalgic fun from time to time”. Got myself the cheapest Chinese thing I could find, “no point investing too much into a fad”.

Turned out a scooter is absolute peak urban mobility. Short distances become much shorter. Mid-long distances become short. Granted, for a longer trip somehow the time gains diminish, probably because it’s not as efficient as a bike. But a scooter isn’t a long-hauler. It’s there to zip through an empty mall. It’s there to be folded up in a second and brought into a bus or a shop without being a hassle. It’s like 3-4 kg, not too fast for sidewalks but fast enough for bike roads, extremely easy to stop, doubles as a cart when carrying bags of groceries home.

The chinese one broke after 1 season because I was riding it everywhere. Then I got myself one from a better company, I chose it for small weight and portability. It’s technically children’s thing but I’m well below weight tolerance and also smol so it’s easy to handle. It’s already like a 5th year and whenever it’s not raining or too cold I ride it for shopping, errands, leisure walks, to work… Almost daily.