memes

Europeans think 100 miles is a long way, Americans think 100 years is a long time

Shit if you're in Los Angeles, you could spend 4 hours just to move 10 feet.

Pff in Australia I can travel over 2000km in a straight line and never leave my state, and it's not even the biggest.

I once drove for 10 hours in the UK and was still in the same town! That magic roundabout is very confusing.

Traveling across the US is like switching to an alternate dimension where everything is pretty much the same, but a few things are off. Like, Congress is the same, but suddenly there are dunkin' donuts everywhere and the land is weirdly flat

I remember this as, "Europeans think 100 miles is far away, Americans think 100 years is a long time."

You can drive for four hours and still be on I-5 in LA.

I hate that people treat the US as if it doesn’t have a wide variety of accents. I can drive an hour in any direction and the people sound different than where I live. A lot of states have their own accents, and there are regional accents within them. I live in Illinois and people from No. IL and Central IL sound completely different from people in So. IL.

Accents get even more differentiated the further North or South you go. PNW sounds different than NE. Etc. The real difference is that a lot of the accents in the US aren’t based on indigenous languages spoken in that region (even though some are), they’re largely based on the group of Europeans that settled in the region.

Americans are very very good at code switching, which is why I think a lot of people think there are only one or two accents.

Yesterday I drove 4 hours and went from northern Minnesota to slightly-less-northern Minnesota.

Try in Italy, you drive 2 hours and you need subtitles for understanding the tv series filmed in that city

My wife and I drove from North Carolina, to Wisconsin, to South Dakota, and back to North Carolina again as a cross country road trip. We drove over four thousand miles.

It was fucking bizarre.

There comes a point where your mind can barely conceive that people are still speaking the same language. I think your monkey brain must assume that once you're far enough away from home, then surely everything and everyone must be a foreigner.

And for sure, there are parts of the United States that seem to be literally foreign to one another, and there are parts of the Midwest that are such titanically empty swathes of corn fields and wind turbines that it seems like one has dropped into a parallel dimension.

But there's something kind of awesome, in the awe-inspiring sense of the word, that it's all one big country, one big union of people who have (more or less) decided to engage in one big human project all together.

I think everyone should have a chance to make such a journey. It really crams the concept of the scale of this country into your consciousness in a way that can't be done without actually covering the mileage, on the ground, for yourself.

In LA you have just completed your commute to and from work on a tuesday

And yet high-speed rail is a foreign concept

Lol try Belgium, where driving 20 minutes is a different dialect and 1-2 hours is a different language.

In Australia, you can FLY for 4 hours and still be in the same state.

Twice? There's at least four distinct accents between my house in north east London and my job in the south east of the city.

I'm a Canadian living in Korea and sometimes have to explain to locals that the reason I've never been to Vancouver is because I lived on the opposite coast and it would take a week to drive there. In Korea, aside from a few outlying islands, you can never be more than four hours away from anywhere else in the country.

We can't stop here, this is bap country.

I can drive 8 hours and still be in the same state. It’s weird, man.

(e: I mean no cities, avg 60mph the whole way. So weird.

Things were better back when you could sail around the world for years and never leave the Kingdom.

If you fell asleep at the beginning of a 4 hour drive where I live, and woke up at the end, odds are very very high that you wouldn't be able to tell any difference in the surroundings.

If you're in Los Angeles, you may not have left your county yet

only twice?

There are many states where you can drive more than 4 hours and not leave, but now I wonder about the reverse: what is the maximum number of states you can reach in a 4-hour drive?

Surely, the route has to be through many of the small states in New England. I think it would be tough to reach more than 5.