[Image description: a stock photo of a woman holding an apple in both hands. If you are not from the United States, the apple is fucking huge, at least according to my British friends. If you’re from the US, it’s normal.]
^ That? Is a normal-sized apple. Three apples at the supermarket = about 1 ¼ pounds. (That’s about four-tenths of a kilogram.) According to my friend from Bristol, this is FREAKISHLY large. I sent him a photo of one of our so-called “lunchbox-sized” apples and his response was “that’s a normal apple. WTF do you think a full-sized apple is then” and I just about gave him a damn heart attack sending him a picture of a regular one, which covers my entire palm and then some.
–Our milk takes like three or four weeks to expire. No, I am not shitting you. Same friend and I had an entire argument over Sherlock because of the “she’s been gone at least two days, the milk’s gone off” in the second episode, with me insisting that was too much bullshit to be believed and him insisting that no, milk goes off in 3-4 days, what kind of freakish Frankenstein milk am I drinking. ( @rowanthestrange, paging you for this conversation.)
–American cooking: “look! I put three cans in a pot and added ketchup!” If you can do closer to “from scratch” than this, people will look at you with fucking awe. I make a salsa for company parties that’s functionally “chop things and put them in a bowl, do this at certain times for three days so all the flavors meld right” and people think I’m some kind of wizard, and, in spite of the fact that you should not be able to fuck this up, they always always always do in fact manage to fuck it up when trying to recreate it.
--I have never had British bread, but I have been told by multiple British friends who’ve been to America that our bread is almost as sweet as British cake. Same with our milk–apparently it’s weirdly sweet.
–we have to refrigerate our eggs.
–apparently we say aluminum weird? (I personally think Y’ALL say it weird, but whatever, again, Rowan can confirm we have had entire arguments about this)
–schedule. We say it so the first bit is like “school,” WHICH MAKES SOME FUCKING SENSE.
–a certain subset of Americans just being like. Wildly obsessed with historical reenactment. And I’m not talking about the douchey Confederate ones, either. There are like entire groups that go out and dress as Ben Franklin and do “I’m standing on a literal soapbox teaching you about the Founding Fathers” stuff at Fourth of July festivals and stuff. I’ve met some of them. They use historical sewing tools and methods. Can you imagine sewing an entire fucking colonial dress and all its undergarments, by hand, with a bone needle?! FOR FUN?!?
–timezones. There are seven time zones in the United States (Eastern, Central, Mountain, Arizona, Pacific, Alaska, Hawaii-Aleutian) . If you’ve ever seen an American commercial that says something like “at 8PM Eastern, 7pm Central,” it’s referring to the two easternmost timezones.