Have you ever surprisingly seen something American while on vacation abroad?

43 comments

  1. I was drunk in Paris one time and figured out that my bartender was the sister of a close friend from college in California, does that count?

  2. Split, Croatia. The downtown is basically entirely within an ancient Roman fort, so seeing mundane normal American things anywhere in Old Town Split is wildly jarring

  4. Seeing a Ram 1500 in Portugal shocked me.

    Can’t imagine what it costs to feed that thing over there

  5. Went to Reykjavik and encountered:

    A Chuck Norris-themed bar that was actually quite nice.

    A giant bald eagle and American flag mural. No idea why it was there, but cool.

    A bar on the main drag that, by my recollection, was literally called “The American Bar.” It was fairly normal, except for the fact that (in the year of our Lord 2016) it was loudly blaring early 00’s *Disturbed* into the street. I don’t mean they were playing it loudly inside, I mean they had speakers playing it outside, loud enough to be heard a block away, *before dinner time.”

    So that was weird.

    Also a Taco Bell in Dubai.

  6. Yeah. In the 80s I traveled to Ireland. I landed in Shannon and did some road tripping around. It was .. just so stereotypically Irish. Old guys with tweed hats, their sheep and border collies on the roads, etc. I didn’t really have any preconceived ideas so I was surprised how quaint and awesome stuff was.

    Then I drove to Dublin. It was a like a mall with Victoria’s Secret and American stores. Both ends of the spectrum surprised me.

  7. Watching kids and adults play baseball in Japan and Croatia, talking to my Uber driver in Kyiv about the American Football league (not soccer) that he played in, in Kyiv (before the war)

  9. I once found a US Postal Service mailbox at the edge of someone’s property in the countryside of Tuscany, Italy.

    It’s forever a mystery to me.

  10. Passed by a bar in Porto, Portugal and there were expats that were setting up a Fourth of July bbq outside.

    Went bar hopping in Seoul and ended up playing beer pong in an American style dive bar in Itaewon.

  13. A grocery store in Dunedin, New Zealand that had an American section within its foreign foods aisle that was almost wholly devoted to peanut butter.

  14. I saw a decomissioned American police car in the UK, but it didn’t have any lights or decals removed like you would see here.

  15. I was in Thailand years ago and the old Thai ladies working at the hostel I stayed at were listening to old American country music lol

  18. A 4xe Jeep Wrangler in a French village. Cool to think those cars are made just about an hour from me

  23. In rural Kyushu in Southern Japan I saw an American school bus in a parking lot. It had the name of some town in California I’d never heard of before still painted on the side.

    A Boy Scout uniform from Wabash, Indiana in a thrift shop in Seoul.

  24. In the heart of old town Jerusalem there’s a “Roll Tide” Alabama souvenir shop.

    In some city in southern China I ran across an Indian restaurant…and I don’t mean naan bread and curries, I mean Apaches, Cherokees, and Navajos. (It was basically a steakhouse.)

    There are also tons of 7-11s and knockoff KFCs in China (and really throughout Asia) which I’m used to now but the first time I saw it surprised me because those chains struck me as so quintessentially American.

  25. Hooters in Shanghai. I had the joy of explaining the double entendres to my work colleague

  26. I once visited the home of a friend’s family (his aunt and uncle and cousins, who were from Tennessee) in Efrat, in the occupied West Bank. It was a pretty weird place in general. I remember having a moment of displacement in time and space standing in the kitchen of this giant American McMansion in the middle east, looking at the Efrat Little League schedule attached to the fridge with a magnet.

  27. I was browsing around a small used bookstore in London. There was a radio playing but it was news, not music, so I tuned it out and wasn’t really thinking about it until they announced the time and I realized it was 5 hours too early. Turned out I was listening to WBUR, an NPR station in Boston.

  29. I was in Fukuyama, Japan doing some shopping and I saw a small random ramen shop by the station and decided I would have dinner there on my way back. When I came back a few hours later I couldn’t find the ramen shop and walked around the area a couple times.

    I gave up and decided to go to my regular ramen place when I saw an [Old West cowboy saloon](https://images.app.goo.gl/ksRnFPckLYk5XtE6A) restaurant selling [“American burgers”](https://www.boogiebuns.com/food-menu). I hadn’t had a “real” burger in almost a year ([MOS Burger](https://images.app.goo.gl/KqhTrbT8q7P7Urp19) doesn’t count) so I had to go there immediately.

  30. Saw a Ford F-150 in Reykjavik, Iceland. It looked huge compared to the other cars. It took up the whole width of the street.

  31. Five Guys in the main square in Aachen, at first it felt so much out of place, but then turned out to be the only place with a free WC

    A friend went to Israel and saw a Michigan Wolverine shirt at a flee market in Jerusalem

  32. Kreuzberg in Berlin is the closest approximation to a “Little America” neighborhood I’ve experienced

  33. I stopped in a little roadside shop in the Scottish Highlands over the summer. They were playing Shania Twain and George Strait and Reba McEntire. Country music must have taken 20 years to travel across the Atlantic, judging by the choices.

  34. Seeing a five guys in the old quarter of Sevilla was a surprise. Seeing a Taco Bell down the street was an even bigger surprise.

  36. A Denny’s in Japan was so strange but welcome to me lol. Also cheesecake and Longhorn steakhouse in Dubai

  38. I saw a Ford Raptor in the middle of Zürich and a Hummer H3/H2 (don’t know which) in the middle of London. Definitely looked wildly out of place.

    I also saw a little ad in a bar in Berlin saying that they were showing the Super Bowl on tv. The picture they used was someone from the Air Force Falcons, so not even NFL. I bet they just googled “American Football pics” and picked the first one

  39. I was at a Scottish family’s farm in the highlands on the Fourth of July.

    They threw an impromptu Highland Games for us, with haggis hurling, caber tossing, dancing, etc.

    The coolest thing is the grandad hung a big US flag from the barn. It took us a second to realize why it looked odd. It had 48 stars. It was pre-Alaska and Hawaii. The flag was from grandpa’s time in WWII in France. He traded a Union Jack for a US flag with US GIs.

    He had never flown the flag but he busted it out for us on the Fourth of July.

  40. Ran into Ben Foster while grocery shopping in Yerevan, Armenia. The first thing I noticed was his iPhone headphones, though, and I was almost as surprised to see those as I was to recognize him.

  42. First time I was in England I turned on the TV in my hotel to see what stuff was on the tube in England. The TV comes on and…. the Simpsons?? Ferfuksake!

  43. My home stay family in Japan wanted me to feel welcome so they took me to a place called Steakhouse Bronco Billy. The decor was full on western, with haystacks, wagon wheels, barrels and cowboys XDD

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