"Free Toilets Everywhere": 30 Interesting Facts About The US People Understand Only After Visiting

We don’t have to tell you that traveling is not only fun, but also a meaningful way for a person to spend both their time and money. In fact, Eric Weiner in this National Geographic article argues that traveling should be considered “an essential human activity.” 

He explains that it’s not natural for humans to be sedentary, because “travel is in our genes.” After all, ever since the beginning of humanity, since hunter-gatherer times, moving has been inherent to people. 

Back in the hunter-gathering days, people moved out of convenience, for safety. With humanity evolving, more purposes of traveling opened up. Now, people travel for work, for relaxation, for exploration, and many other reasons. And all of them are equally significant. 

Traveling brings a lot of benefits to one’s life. For instance, it can open up career opportunities that wouldn’t be possible if a person stayed in one place. Or language learning in a cultural setting, instead of simply doing it theoretically. Not to mention personal growth and lasting memories. 

There’s also another benefit of traveling – learning about cultures and gaining appreciation for diversity. At the same time, some people shy away from traveling to certain countries because they believe they know too little about the culture. They’re scared of getting negative attention from locals due to their cluelessness about certain important things. 

But do you really need to be a country’s cultural expert before going there? Well, technically, you do not. The thing is that every country is different, which means that not every country has strict cultural rules they expect even of tourists. Yet, reading up about it at least a little before visiting a place is always helpful - better to be in the know than be completely oblivious. 

Simultaneously, sometimes you can’t simply learn certain things about a country without visiting it. Some things become apparent only by practice, not theory. Let’s take items on today’s list as examples. 

Granted, all of them are solely about the United States, but we just didn’t want to jump around from country to country and decided to focus on only one place. The fact that there’s a whole viral Reddit thread about this exact topic helped us to fulfill this vision. 

As the submissions in this list reveal, apparently, there are plenty of things you can’t fully comprehend before setting foot in the US. Like the distances between places – you can understand they aren’t short, but only when you have to travel them, it daunts you how great they really are. 

Similarly, with sizes of things, from packages to houses – it’s something you have to witness firsthand to understand, no retelling will ever do it justice. Without spoiling much else, we leave you to learn about the rest of the things yourself. Just don’t forget to upvote and maybe share additional examples, if you have any!