4mo ago

What in your country/area is totally normal but visitors get excited for?

I've only been abroad one time, and there were little gecko/lizard things everywhere, climbing up walls and scurrying across roads, and nobody cared. I was constantly fascinated but to the locals they're just kinda there.

Bonus question to anyone who visited the UK - was there anything that fascinated you but I'd be taking for granted?

Pic unrelated.

481 comments

The lack of a speed limit on our highways. Some people come here just to drive on a boring frigging highway.
Bonus question to anyone who visited the UK - was there anything that fascinated you but I’d be taking for granted?
Double decker buses maybe. I found them pretty cool compared to the boring buses we usually have here.
Edit: Also, urban foxes. I saw foxes maybe three times in my life before going to London, where they're basically seen as a nuisance.
- no speed limit is annoying as fuck. there is absolute chaos on the autobahn because of it. everyone drives at different speeds and dangerous manouvres (like tailgating, driving 200 kmh on a full road or in the rain) are common occurances. i hate driving in germany. we are an idiot nation when it comes to driving and cars in general
  
  Yeah, I could do without it. When it's really empty, it can be nice to go 180 for a bit, but more often than not, it causes the kind of problems you mentioned.
  
  Driving 200 kmh is also incredibly wasteful
  
  For the people who need the adrenaline rush we could reduce the driving speed on the Autobahn but add something dangerous to the car. Maybe add a random chance for the airbag to activate or tires to explode.
  
  So one fact that I like telling people in America and they dont fully understand: I have 2 speeding tickets in my life and both come from the autobahn
  
  it actually creates a lot of traffic jams too. The differences in speed and the goal to drive even faster produce hard braking moments which have a chain reaction. Especially in rush hour, where it matters, we really don't get anywhere faster.
  We are stupid for not limiting speed
  
  Imagine drivers 10x worse and that's the USA.
- We had bendy buses for a brief moment.
  
  Now those wouldn't actually be exciting to me as a German, that's the type of bus I rode to school on. :)
  
  i NORCAL they are basically on the most of the lines that travel the longest routes.
- Also, urban foxes. I saw foxes maybe three times in my life before going to London, where they're basically seen as a nuisance.
  I didn’t know they were common in London but I also saw a fox when I was there. It just went through people‘s yards and stopped in the middle of the street to look at us.
- Urban foxes are in every city. Foxes and coyotes. You just dont see them often.
  
  Coyotes are only a thing in the Americas, I'm pretty sure.
  
  Anecdotally I would say that London specifically, rather than the UK as a whole, has either an unusually high population of foxes or a unusually bold one. I've never seen so many out in the open as there

When I visited the US I was excited to see squirrels running around. We don't have squirrels where I'm from. We took pictures.
It must have looked like we were excited to witness a cloud in the sky.
- I saw my first chipmunk last week and I totally screamed oh shit there's Alvin! in my heart.
  Don't let your inner child die!
  
  I still remember my first chipmunk encounter. I heard the little guys before I saw them and wondered “who the f is out here playing laser tag in the woods? ”
- I was a bit excited that the US squirrels are gray and large, we have smaller red ones in Germany.
  
  If you really want to see huge squirrels check out a US college campus. They're so fat!
  
  We have grey squirrels in the UK, although they're not native. They're responsible for the decline in native red squirrels, you rarely see them now unless you go to particular areas.
  
  We have different colored squirrels in some regions.
  https://wildlifeinformer.com/types-of-squirrels/
  You'll need and extra SD card next time you visit.
  
  American squirrels can be aggressive. I was eating an apple one day and I kid you not, a squirrel jumped at me and took it from my hand.
  
  and the german ones are really skittish too.
  Those i saw on the canadian campus just lay next to the side walk, chilling. Fat and grey
  
  I wonder where you visited! Grey squirrels are rare where I’m from in the US, 90% brown in midwest
- I love when people see deer here in North America. You'd think they're seeing a unicorn, when it's just some plain ol' mule deer.
  
  Forest rats.
  
  Totally me in the US! Deers in Europe are stuff for natural parks!
  
  I've seen deer just wander through my yard in town
  
  I always lived in states where deer hunting was a pretty common pastime. The first time I went to a zoo in South America, I cracked up when we got to the display of white-tailed deer.
- Chipmunks did it for me. They look and act so much like cartoon critters I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
  
  I love chipmunks! Such a big squeak from such a tiny body, plus I love their pointy tails :)
- When I visited Canada from the US, my extended family and I drove in separate cars, thereby arriving at separate times spread out over a few hours.
  Every group of us took basically the same picture when we arrived because we'd previously only seen brown squirrels and there was a solid, dark black one running around in the back yard.
  
  My parents' neighborhood is ALL black squirrels. I thought they were rare until they moved (only 30 minutes from where I group up) so I was quite surprised to see dozens in their yard
- I love this and was about to post something similar because my family met a family from Australia at Disney World and the little girl was SO excited about the squirrels. It was adorable.
  I live in the Midwest, so squirrels are just always there.
  
  Used to work at Disney World. Can confirm the squirrel amazement. (And I worked at Animal Kingdom, the squirrels occasionally got more attention than the actual zoo animals. Although the local ibises hanging out with the spoonbills were still cool.)
- I grew up in rural US, squirrels everywhere. Still fascinated by them! Moved to the southwest, was sad there weren't trees and squirrels out here. Then saw my first (closely followed by like a dozen more out in the area) ground squirrel! Some touristy areas they will line up all cute doing tricks for scraps of food. They've learned our oohs and aahs generate treats.
- Oh wow. I saw a squirrel once in Catalonia. Wonderful sight.
- My wife is from the Philippines. Squirrels are a thing you have to visit the zoo the see.
- Mirroring what others have said - at a nearby university that has (had? sigh) a large foreign student population, some folks actively feed the squirrels. For several weeks at the beginning of the school year, you could very easily spot new students by who was out taking photos and getting mobbed by these squirrels that are way, way too comfortable getting close to humans.
- I'd guess people from monkey countries feel the same way about them impressing us. They're in similar niches and everything.
- No squirrels? You from Greenland? Antarctica?
  
  Israel

These fellas

On the flipside, when I was in Japan some old guy mocked me for taking a photo of a no littering sign.
- Hahaha that sign is so charming though
  
  And it's another example of "if you don't want me to do it, don't make it look so fun".
- Someone Japanese said you were taking too many pictures? Haha, that's ironic given what they're like abroad.

I was visiting my friends in centrall europe and one if them wanted to show me the local speciality. We travelled 45 minutes by car and other 45 minutes by foot to look teeny tiny swamp. It was line 4m² and It was protectect area. My friend was really proud to show it to me.
I live in country where 26% of our landmass is swamps and wetlands...

Depositing bottles.
Put them into a machine, and it gives you money back 🤯
- Honestly this needs to be more of things in the States. And the deposit cost needs to go up.
  If companies were forced to retake their garbage, we'd see far less pollution.
  
  It's not just that, they wash and reuse the bottles (without melting them down or anything)! Amazing stuff.
  They're finally starting to put more stuff in them here opposed to plastic bottles, and I'm so glad for it.
  
  In Finland the deposit for bottles of one litre or more have a deposit of 0,40 €.
  (And what many foreigners don't understand is that we are not anti-recycling, so it's not a problem that the deposit is inside the prices you see in the shop. So, if you see 1,59 € as the price of a bottle of lemonade, 1,59 € is what you pay. Many countries have a system where the deposit is added to the price so that people would think more negatively about it and they'd sell more of the bottles with the text "NO DEPOSIT!!" on them, so people coming from those countries are easily confused by not having to add anything to the prices in their heads.)
- Nun weiß ganz Deutschland, dass du hier bist
- I'm in this picture and I don't like it.
  But, yeah, seems like such an obviously good idea and it works so well. Why can't we do that?

The first time my cousins from FL visited Canada, it was July. They were surprised there was no snow. So, we took them over to the rec centre and they saw a small pile of snow out back. They were thrilled.
It was dumped out of a Zamboni.
- Grew up in Ontario and it was always fun as a kid to grab some of the shaved ice behind rec centres to throw at your friends when it was like 33C out
- My aunt is a teacher at one of the poorer schools in LA. She says every once in a while they'll arrange a plow to bring a load of snow down from the mountains and dump it in the parking lot for the kids to play in it for the afternoon until it melts

Bikes! I live in Copenhagen and they're everywhere of course. I love seeing people at a big train station taking pics of cycle parking being overfull
- At a train station in Amsterdam, there were so many bikes parked you couldn't count them. And it wasn't a major hub. I just stared in wonder.
- Same, im in The Netherlands.

Leaves.
Yes, tree leaves.
Each fall when they start changing color flocks of tourists come up to gawk at them.
- This is what I was going to say.
  In the late 1800s when Jasper Cropsey was exhibiting landscape paintings in the UK, folks didn't believe that his colour palette was accurate
  https://collections.brandywine.org/objects/2656/autumn-on-the-brandywine-river
  
  Wait hang on, the UK has heaps of trees that go that colour every year
  
  Yup I live right near the Brandywine. PA gets beautiful fall colors! They're also great along the Delaware up near the Water Gap (but I'm biased because the Delaware is my favorite river) :)
- When I was a kid we hosted two Trinidadians as part of an exchange in the Autumn and they'd never seen the leaves falling - they were worried that all the trees were dying off. This isn't a "stupid foreigner" gag, it was probably just the thing that shocked them the most. They loved the trains and the narrowboats.
  
  I had a similar experience with an exchange student who visited in february. She very worriedly asked why our trees didn't have any leaves and was amazed when I said that just happens in winter and they come back.
  
  They probably have foliage that always stays green until it dies.
  So I can kinda understand where that sentiment is coming from.
  
  One of the guys that came for our February wedding was truly alarmed at all the dead tress. I couldn't figure out why he was saying that, but he was a tree guy so I went with it.
  10 years later I figured it out. He assumed none of the trees dropped leaves because Florida. Some do, some don't, some stay yellow all winter and drop in the spring. It's not even consistent within species.
- We visited DC in the fall last year. It took us close to 2 hours to walk from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial statue because my wife was taking pictures of all the trees along the way.
- I just moved to New England and this will be my first fall here. My property is completely surrounded by 50'+ trees. I'm sure it will get old quick.
  
  Especially if you need to rake them up etc.
- To be fair it's very pretty. I get that one
- Michigan, or New York?
- Man.. I'm in east Tennessee.
  Folks just roll up to look at the leaves.. and I'm like.
  Eh. Not much rain this year so they are pretty drab looking currently..
  But you still see tons of people taking photos on their phones that they'll never look at again. Haha
- Every region is different in that regard.
  Maybe youre just numb to the view.
  
  Told a lady I had just moved here (NW Florida).
  "Oh honey you'll love it here! We have four seasons; green, green, green and brown."

I grew up in Portsmouth, England. Some my friends would come to school from the Isle of Wight on the hovercraft service. We all thought the hovercraft was pretty cool, but I only recently found out that it's the only commercially operated hovercraft in the whole world.
- Is it still operating? For some reason I thought it stopped quite a while ago. Or maybe that's the one that used to cross the channel.
  
  Yeah, still running like normal: https://www.hovertravel.co.uk/.
  
  Yes it is! Costs £20 if i remember correctly
- I grew up in Gosport and enjoy the looks I get when describing that we needed to get a ferry across the harbour if we wanted to go to a club like Walkabout. I hear the overnight ferry stopped running so you're screwed trying to get home late now.
- I was in pompy 2 years ago and yes i found the hovercrafts cool. I didnt know that fact! Thanks! I wonder if my boyfriend from pompy knows that fact too.
  Fratton is quite scary though ngl
- There used to be one across the channel but it was discontinued some time ago. I took it once. It was cramped and noisy, but fast.

I moved to the midwest USA 15 years ago and I still can't get over the trees screaming at me. It's deafening but no one seems to care.
The trees are silent where I come from
- Em, what?
  
  https://youtu.be/VEqtlaa5iWI?t=13
- I live in Cincinnati and I care. I find the cicadas incredibly annoying. Not only the noise, they also leave their shells all over the place and walking down the sidewalk creeps me out. crunch crunch crunch
- We have cicadas in Provence, but only when I moved to southern Japan did I understand the meaning of the adjective deafening. They must be a different species. I had to actually scream to my partner to be heard.
  
  must be a different species
  They are! Japanese cicadas are more shrill than the ones found in other parts of the world, and even the different subspecies within Japan have different frequencies they shrill at. I swear the cicadas in Okinawa were more ear piercing than the ones around Tokyo when we visited, but my family didn't believe me :')

Lakes. My small city has 330 lakes. There are more lakes in Canada than the rest of the world combined.
- Ontario has lakes bigger than some countries
- Sudbury, Ontario?
  
  Yup. Geographically not north, but we get labelled north anyway.

To answer OP's question, I'm American but spent a few years in the UK. Things that fascinated me included:
How green it is (being from Texas this was the first thing that stood out to me)
The shear amount of history that is just everywhere (I remember eat lunch at a park and reading a sign about how it was the site of a huge battle during the war of the roses)
Pubs (man I miss going to my local. We really don't have 3rd places in the US anymore)
- The history. Jesus fuck, it's the history. I swear in the south we talk about things from the 1920s like that shit is ancient. Meanwhile in the UK you're just casually staying at a hotel that was built in the 1600s.
- Yes, the amount of ancient history anywhere across the pond is fascinating. You're walking in the same place as people from books and movies. I guess that we're writing somewhere near the beginning of the local historical record is interesting in it's own way, but there's just not as much to say about it.
  
  When I was a kid I got in the local library and looked at their copies of the maps of our city going back maybe 2000 years. A few things had been there that long, the high street and the cathedral, couple of other places. You could see how the town had grown, and sometimes contracted - it got hit hard a few times by plague, fire, and war. The maps didn't go back further but the place had been occupied much longer, way before the Romans came.

I'm lucky enough that I see these little guys on a regular basis.

The first time I went to London, the size of the Ravens caught me off guard. I couldn't get enough of seeing those things. We only really see Grackles in South Texas that regularly and they're half the size, so I'm sure I was the weird bird guy that day to many people.

I live in the Canadian prairies.
One time I was flyin' down the highway and I noticed a man with car parked on the shoulder, staring out into a farmer's field of flowering Canola.
I stopped because I could think of no reason other than he's had car trouble, and is staring off into the distance trying to figure out WTF he's gonna do now.
He explained to me that he wasn't having car troubles, that he was on a visit from Hong Kong and it's the first time he's ever traveled outside. He told me that from the structure of the city and sky rise density, he'd basically never seen a patch of sky or open land. The biggest patch of sky that he'd ever seen would be about the size of a 2 packs of cigarettes held at arms length.
Woah.
And here we have the joke that the terrain is so flat and monotone that you can watch your dog run away for 7 hours.

Kinda the opposite of the question, but I'm a USian and I was super excited when I saw some European countries have public bathroom doors that didn't have tiny slot that you could see through while I was pooping.
What the fuck are we doing over here? Besides the letting fascists take over thing.

Deer. They are so common in this area they practically press the walk button to walk across the street. “hi bob. You gonna eat some more grass today. Yup ok. See ya later.”

Raccoons.
The tourists visiting Mount Royal park in Montréal are often charmed by the raccoons. Enough so that they feed them and some even let the raccoons climb on them. The city tries to warn people but they obviously ignore the signs. So now we have gangs of raccoons begging for food near the two most popular view points.
I go camping in provincial parks and the same seems to happen there. It's obviously also locals doing this but, people feed the raccoons, they come back, they harass you for food, they can carry rabies, and it's annoying as hell. I watch people hiking and camping in other countries, like the UK, and I'm constantly jealous that they can keep their food and cook near their tents. Doing this here will result in frequent annoying visits from raccoons (if not bigger animals).
- For your consideration.
- I've seen raccoons and white tail deer in a zoo in Mexico. They are both nuisance animals in the PNW. But then again I loved watching Mexican racoons everywhere (coati). Guess we all like seeing new and different animals.
- Rabies. Once symptoms appear, the result is virtually always death.[1] The time period between contracting the disease and the start of symptoms is usually one to three months but can vary from less than one week to more than one year.[1]
  Symptoms can include:
  undefined
  
  anxiety seizures confusion hyperactivity hallucinations strange behaviour and general agitation fear of water (hydrophobia) fear of fresh air or drafts of air (aerophobia)
  Once symptoms appear it's too late, you are fucked
  I hate Trash Pandas. But at least in the West Coast of NA I don't have to worry about fucking the rabies. That shit scares the ever living shit out of me.
  Exceptionally rare case below but still, holy fucking NOPE
  Rabies with an incubation period of 19 years and 6 months.
  G Iurasog, A Rosenberg, N Opreanu
  A woman was bitten on the leg by a rabid dog in September 1945 and was admitted to hospital for antibiotic treatment, details of which were not available. In March 1965 she developed rabies, which began with pains at the site of the original bite. At autopsy no Negri bodies could be found, but there were inclusions in the cytoplasm and nuclei of the neurones of the diencephalon, glial cells and vascular endothelium. Rabies developed in rabbits inoculated with autopsy material. No history of a more recent animal bite could be obtained, and there was no rabies in the latter place of residence of the patient. The authors therefore conclude that this was a case of rabies with an incubation period of 19 years and 6 months. D. J. Bauer.

The locations of past atrocities (N. Ireland).
Not even joking. It's a huge part of our tourism industry. It's like those Jack the Ripper tours in Whitechapel. Living here, you barely even think about them, but visitors act like they're meeting Taylor Swift when they spot a bullet hole, bless 'em.

School mass shootings. For some reason the rest of the world loses their minds over them.

I'm originally from the Orlando area and worked for Disney for a while. Tourism folks there pass stories around and have their own folk tales of sorts. Your question reminds me of one of them.
Central Florida has anoles, little lizards, absolutely everywhere. A woman was working the front desk at a hotel, and a couple comes up to check in. She tells them the room number and hands then the key. A few minutes later the husband runs back up to the desk and tells her that "there's an alligator in our room!" "An alligator?!" She replies and they both rush to the hotel room, where she finds the wife screaming and pointing at the couch. "The alligator is under there!" The front desk worker lifts up one end of the couch and spots a four inch green anole. She catches it and sets it outside.
OP, I've never been to the UK, but don't you have hedgehogs? How common are they?
- Not OP, but can confirm we have hedgehogs and they are adorable.
- I typically see one about 4 times a week, no clue if its the same one or not, they all look pretty much the same.
  Its very very very common to see them flattened in the roads though, which is a shame.
- Hedgehogs are far less common than they used to be, unfortunately. I haven't seen one for years. A friend who lives in a more suburban area has one living under their shed, and she (the hedgehog) is such a creature of routine that my friend's family will often gather near the window to watch her potter around on her nightly walk
- The anoles are one of the few things I miss about living in Florida. There are lizards here in Kentucky, but they're more elusive.
- I nearly stepped on one the other day. They only really come out at night, and I was walking home across a dark park. You don't see them very often, I think I've seen maybe 3-4 in my life.
  Other wild animals like squirrels are super common. I've also seen plenty of foxes and sometimes badgers.
- I visited Tampa many years ago and I was the anole guy for the trip. I like reptiles and was completely elated to see them running around everywhere. My host for the trip didn't get my excitement.

In Seattle there are tons of cherry blossom trees. People come from around the world to see them in bloom. Most the locals I know are like "fuckin cherry blossom petals getting on everything, making the bike lanes slick, getting all over the cars, have to clean them off everything, tourists blocking things to take pictures"
- And like you get one week of blossoms and poof they agreed gone lol
- I got the sense from being near the Hollywood sign that area residents would gladly blow it to smithereens if they could.

Italy. I've seen tourists (probably american by the looks and the words) cheering and in awe because, in cities, there are free public drinkable water fountains.
- UK here. Various right-wing governments have discouraged and torn out almost all the public drinking fountains on the basis they were being used by the homeless (they were also being used by everyone else, but ignore that bit). I've not seen much of Italy outside Rome but the water fountains there are amazing; just a simple gesture of mutual respect between humans.
- American here, I was over the moon when I visited Amsterdam and everywhere (even in stores) had water fountains that not only had clean drinking water to refill water bottles, but where so prominently displayed (we hide ours by the bathrooms, if we have any), and most where very artistic or at the very least matching the aesthetic of the store.
- I did that in Ulm!! Fountain i took water from
  People coming up staring for 15 minutes!!
  Then i walk away and they, like a scared animal, walks up to the fountain and checked it out from all angles and took a sip.

Winter. I guess it's different when you only put up with the endless darkness, cold and snow a week once in your life.
- Perth just had is coldest maximum temperature in 50 years: 11.4°C
  
  Also:
- I'm originally from Florida and I moved to Minnesota as an adult. It blew my mind when I realized it was colder outside than it was in my freezer. I was in college my first few winters up here and the first good snowfall a group of freshmen from more tropical climates (mostly southern China) wandered outside in awe to play in the snow and even after my first winter I usually joined them because I know when winter stops being magical it starts being miserable and I'd like to put off the misery until February or so.
  
  I don't think I've ever been tired of winter, and I've lived in Ohio most of my life. That said I've never lived somewhere that gets enough snow that it starts crushing the things from the weight of it.
  Summer? I'm sick of summer halfway through Spring.
  
  It blew my mind when I realized it was colder outside than it was in my freezer.
  That pivotal moment when you drive home from the grocery store on a frigid evening and realize, "It's so cold, I don't have to rush to put away the frozen stuff. In fact, I could just leave it in the car overnight if I really wanted to!"

Mountains. We got a lot of em
- I've lived in and around the Appalachians my entire life, and didn't understand why people were so fascinated with them until I went to Michigan and realized how irksome it was to me when they weren't there.
  
  Try Florida, flattest state in the union. You would laugh out loud at what I call a valley around here.
- Cute hills

My Polish wife was thrilled to see fireflies in Kentucky.
- I haven't seen fireflies in YEARS, but I was recently in Astoria, Queens, NYC, and there were fireflies all over the place! NYC would have been the last place I would have expected to see them.
  
  I heard that there was a firefly boom this year, I can't remember the cause though. It sure is nice though, reminds me of when I was a kid.
- They must be bright if she can see them from Poland.

Kangaroos, wombats and platypuses.
Kangaroos and wombats are dangerous when you're driving at night.
To be fair, I'm probably unique in my apathy toward, borderline dislike of, platypuses. When I'm out fishing and I see a platypus I pack up and go somewhere else because I know I won't be catching any fish.
- The possums even more so I'd say, especially in the cities.
  I'm actually not sure I've ever seen a wild platypus, and I haven't seen a wombat since I was very young, but I don't think I've ever lived in an area with them. Kangaroos were everywhere growing up in the bush though, in the backyard, school car park, sharp bend around a dark corner...
  
  I've been lucky enough to see a lot of animals in the wild, but platypuses always evaded me. I even lived by a river for a year, where everyone else saw them.
  About a week ago I finally spotted one in a nearby lake while going for a run. It was just happily swimming, diving, surfacing, repeat. I watched it for ages.
- I remember I was maybe 8 years old and lucky enough to go out on my dad and uncle's fishing boat. They were commercial fishermen, netting sardines.
  I was so excited when dolphins showed up, only to discover that not everyone loves dolphins when my uncle got the shotgun out. He didn't actually murder any dolphins that day but not for lack of trying.
  Suffice to say, I think most fishermen have a healthy dislike for other predators.
  
  Platypuses don't eat fish. They eat worms and yabbies and insect larvae. I don't know why the fish stay away from them, but they do... Maybe the platypuses are territorial as they're competing for the same food? 🤷
- Was at the RACV park in Inverloch (VIC) last weekend. Lots of kangaroos and wombats roaming around - one was being given space while it crossed over the bridge lmao. We love that everyone is chilled and everything was so quiet and peaceful.

The tides at the Bay of Fundy. Highest tides in the world but you have to watch it for 12 hours. Tourist flock there and the locals don't understand the appeal.
- I peeked at a timelapse or two. Holy shit, 17 meters ? I've never heard of this. I remember from my holidays in Brittany learning that they have 6 meter tides, and here in Mayotte we have about 4 meters tops which already seems like a lot.
  
  The time lapse are cool, real time is freaking boring.

When I lived in the US, I lived in cities on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. People who weren't used to river traffic would get excited about riverboats and barges.
And people from other climates always got excited about snow. Even the slightest flurries were cause for celebration.
Now I live in the Andes, and the exciting things here that the locals take for granted (or even count as nuisances) are the volcanoes. I can see one from my apartment. Four years in, and I still admire it every day.
In the UK, the thing I thought was fascinating was just the sheer amount of history literally everywhere. Like, 2000-year-old stone monuments in people's sheep pastures. It made me understand how extraordinarily young my native country and my current home country both are.

Opposite: I (US-ian) was visiting friends in Germany and they took me on a bike ride in the woods.
“Look!!” (Bike sudden halt, stop and point into a tree with full arm) “a squirrel!”

A statue of a dog pissing into a girl's mouth. It's a fountain. Not kidding either.
- Ok. Need a picture of that.
  I'm not putting that into a search engine on works WIFI.
  
  https://share.google/images/Js3ivIvqEVhrGQzqr
- Northern Europe and bizarre statues, name a more iconic duo.

Having young men and some women ride public transport in full military get up including their military gun.
I've often overheard tourists talking about them with respect or feeling alarmed something crazy is going on. The funniest one, was an older American tourist asking them for directions and talking very, very, very respectfull to them. The scene was just to comical seeing a boomer being so respectfull towards 18 years old boys.
Meanwhile for us here it's the most normal thing in the world to see a bunch of recruits going home from training or going to their base by train. If anyone feels anything towards them, it's pity. Because most of them are just there because they have to and not because they want to.
For the second question: I really liked the English houses with their red brick facade. Generally a brick facade it's not something I often see here in Switzerland.

This:
- Photo was taken on the pin here, facing in the same direction as the camera. It is very pretty here.
  (Note: I cannot afford the two commas it takes to live here, I live in the Portland metro area.)
  
  Let's be honest, that was a humble brag adding a picture of a State Park.

Practically every house and apartment has (access to) a sauna. If not inside the apartment, there will most often be a shared sauna in the basement.
About the UK, I'm going to go a bit deeper and note that it was somehow eye-opening that there's a whole society that actually just daily drives English. For my whole life before the visits to UK and later US, English was the language of the internet and some specific international situations where it was most people's second language. Until well into my mid-20s, I basically didn't have real life contact with any community that would just speak English natively, despite speaking it myself fairly okay-ish.

Walking to a supermarket, riding your bicycle to work.

(Mostly) very good public transit in big cities and even in some smaller areas.
I personally still love to see the mountains. I grew up in a place scraped flat by glaciers in the US and seeing the mountains on a couple of sides of me every day here in Japan still feels really neat and inspiring, even a decade in.

OP, I want you to know that you are not alone, I am also a Brit who loves seeing all the wee reptiles scooting about when he visits places that have them. We barely have any here and they're fun tiny little dinosaurs!
Edit: actually I do have a proper answer too. I'm in Scotland, which has different trespassing laws to the rest of the UK. In Scotland you have a right to roam under which you can enter any outdoor land, other than that with crops and the immediate surroundings of houses, provided you do so responsibly. There are other reasonable exceptions but the point is that you don't generally need to check for access here. The rest of the UK is far more restrictive and I have found that visitors find it incredibly weird to walk through a field of grazing sheep or similar when trying to get somewhere
- The right to roam was something I found really charming and fascinating when I visited Scotland. We took a tour to see some standing stones and other ancient monuments, and I was shocked to find out that several of our destinations were in people's sheep pastures.
  Our guide was really strict about our not littering (duh) or feeding the sheep (which I never would have dreamed of doing). He said that in some of the more popular places, the farmers have lost livestock to idiot tourists feeding them whatever junk food they have on hand.
  
  Thank you for adventuring responsibly! I'm glad you had a good time here

I'm in Tennessee. The smokey mountains. They are wonderful... But pigeon forge / Sevierville/ Gatlinburg is just a touristy blight now.
There's much better places to go than there.
- Where would you recommend? We visited earlier this year and I found it overwhelming, though the abundance of family-friendly stuff was nice.
  
  Depends on what you want out of your trip.
  Townsend on the backside is nice. Cherokee (and has gambling) is nice Any small valley town in the range is going to be fine.
  But when I go, I tend to just go for the views and like one day in actual Gatlinburg. I'm from e.tn so the tourist stuff is oldhat for me.
  So I'll go get a cabin in the deep dark woods and just be "off grid" for a bit. But that's not what everyone does. There's a lot there to do that's not spend your money playing games / on trinkets.
- But some people apparently really want fudge, pancakes, and old-time photographs!

Evergreen trees. I know they're a big deal to people who visit but I grew up around them and think they're kind of boring.
- Just trees in general. I was ferrying around some VIPs from California once, and they were amazed at the endless miles of thick trees on both sides of the highway. Yeah, they're trees, they're nothing special. They grow everywhere, you don't even have to do anything.

I live in New York City. Apparently (based on how shocked they look) tourists come from places without: Gift Shops, Theaters, Rats, Black People, Buildings, or Walking.

I lived in London for a few years and it always amazed me to see foxes just roaming about. I still think it's cool.
I'm from another country, foxes are not really a thing here.

cactuses

Lived in the UK for a while - Squirrels, and the fact that the church in the town we lived in was built before ANY humans set foot in New Zealand

Whales, northern lights, reindeer

The ocean! So fascinated by it! I love it, but it is always there, waiting. No need to go to it. It will get you eventually.

Trees which change color in the fall

Niagara Falls. It's spectacular to visitors but for me it's right there so it's just a bunch of water falling off a ledge.
- As a tourist I was fascinated by the colourful lighting of the falls and the amount of tall buildings around. For some reason I used to imagine the Niagara Falls as a beautiful natural site.

Norwegian fjords. I live here, and to me it's mundane landscape.
- Slartibartfast won an award for those.
  
  Didn't they go out of fashion afterwards?
- Must be nice taking that beautiful scenery in for granted
  
  In a way yes, probably. But at the same time, it means you have one less awesome thing to enjoy on this planet.
- Aaaah 🤯

The Redlight district. Every city has/had them and for us it's just normal. As a kid I had to pass some of those windows to get to school.

What in your country/area is totally normal but visitors get excited for?

This is so mundane fried chicken for me, just comfort food in the Philippines, but no thanks to some influencers, tourists flock to this specific fast food restaurant expecting it to be some culinary treasure.

In Southern California it's got to be the palm trees. Nope, not the ocean, the beaches, the Hollywood sign, iconic neighborhoods and buildings. It's the palm trees. Out of state relatives and coworkers always gawk at and comment on the palm tree lined streets.
- Dude, they're frickin' tall. Those Southern California trees are something else.
  I was also fascinated by your beach-squirrels. I've lived near the ocean most of my life and I never saw beach-squirrels til I went to Ventura.
- They're the most worthless trees and they're about to die, too. I hope we replace them with native trees in all but the most iconic places.

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