MagicBez

I bought some to take home - next time I have a house party they're coming out. We can all put on baseball caps and yell "spring break" at each other - it'll be just like the USA!

This may sound odd but as a British child who watched an awful lot of American TV I was actually expecting all of my "it's just like TV" preconceptions to be wrong and was quite surprised when several turned out to be true. I stayed on a college campus for a week or so and there were actual frat parties with people doing keg stands and those awesome red cups that you only ever see in films that I assumed came from some Hollywood props department. People were wearing special hats and badges for their wacky frats, it was thoroughly surreal. I visited a small town that looked so similar to the one from Back to the Future it really confused me, also houses with porch swings! and American flags flying! I know this will sound stupid from the perspective of someone who lives in the USA but to me actually seeing stuff I assumed wasn't really common surprised me.

Possibly more what your after I was really suprised by the amount of homelessness in San Diego, it's one of those cities that's always winning best place to live awards and suchlike and just looks so pretty that it was a real shock to see that level of poverty (not the USA but I was also surprised by how much skag there was in Vancouver).

...I may think of some better examples in which case I'll edit them in later.

EDIT Also I think I was expecting New York to be a lot 'harder' than it was, people were actually very nice, I work in London though so my scale may be off.

EDIT2 I said this in another reply but thanks to the Wire I also expected Baltimore to be super-tough and mean, it wasn't, it was all lit up and friendly.

Favourite state: South Dakota. Least favourite state: Wyoming.

Reasons:

South Dakota is beautiful and we happened to drive through it at the same time as the Harley Davidson 'Ride Home' celebrations so all the motels were booked up and full of bikers (all of whom were very friendly by the way). I ended up talking to a lovely lady with massive Dolly-Parton hair who owned a small independent (and fully booked up) motel who let us stay in her RV for $20, it was parked, unlocked, round back with a full tank of gas and was amazing. The next morning I got to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger elected Governor from the driver's seat of an RV with a front-mounted television in one of the most surreal moments ever. She said we could check out whenever we wanted and just told us to leave the keys in it.

Also WallDrug, I really, really love Walldrug - plus literally every person I met was incredible with many unironically wearing cowboy hats (I'm a sucker for the idealised mythology of the 'Old West'). One of my biggest regrets is not buying a pair of cowboy boots from what (they told me) is ths largest cowboy boot store in the World but I was out of cash so had to make do with a T-Shirt.

Everyone in Wyoming is rude and they have no reason to be - the first time I drove through Wyoming someone at a gas station was oddly rude to us and then later at a diner (I believe a Perkins) we got a waitress who had clearly had a bad day and was just super-grumpy and unpleasant throughout (I reduced her tip to a mere 10% - which as I understand it is a pretty bold statement in the USA). This created an in-joke that everyone in Wyoming was rude based on those two interactions (and how nice people in the USA generally are to visitors).

Then years later we returned to stay in Yellowstone for a few days (which is mostly in Wyoming), everyone in Yellowstone was lovely but whenever I got talking to them they were never actually from Wyoming. Once we left (via Grand Teton) and reached non-park Wyoming we immediately had a run in with a mega-angry truck driver who drove on our ass, followed us for ages, tried to cut us up and generally acted like a maniac. At one point he pulled ahead of us, pulled into a dirt layby and then chased along the side of the road literally shaking his fist at us and screaming! I honestly kept expecting to see him at every stop we made like that Twilight Zone episode.

...it was at this point I decided that Wyoming is actually populated exclusively by mad and unpleasant people who live in beautiful scenery and have no reason to behave that way. I literally haven't met a nice Wyoming native outside of a National Park yet. Afton's giant antler-arch couldn't make up for it.

1) I only met a couple of Texans and they weren't wearing cowboy hats so I'm not sure they were proper. We were there in summer so Dallas felt like a bizarre, glassy, ghost town. Texas is on my list of states to spend more time in - Austin in particular has a bunch of stuff I want to see (though I'm aware Austin's a bit of an oddity by Texas standards)

2) The UK should adopt: calling the ground floor the first floor, pretzel M&Ms, more 24 hour stores (that last one is starting).

The US should adopt: Roundabouts, outdoor drinking, brown sauce

3) I do feel a bit skinnier when in the US, especially when buying clothes, that said the US seems to have hubs of very fat people (like Disney World) while other places people seem entirely healthy.

People are more religious, and more up-front about it (I never thought there'd be a market for religious t-shirts until I visited the US) but I think that's true across a lot of things - people in the US will wear political T-Shirts too, It can feel like religion and politics are more like supporting a football team in the States than adopting a certain philosophical/political position.

I don't think ignorance is any higher than elsewhere in the World, in fact on aggregate I'd say it's lower than the global average thanks to widespread internet and news. That said the media does feel very US-centric, understandable given how huge the nation is though.

Stupid - no, I mean you'll find stupid people, but you could've found them anywhere.

4) I'm not sure about the average view - I'd guess: friendly, not too good with nuance, loud and boisterous? (not my views - going for a stereotype here).

Yeah, no quicker way to spot a US toruist than a Nalgene bottle and the Canadian flag patch they put on their bag so they can pretend to be Canadian if things get sketchy.