I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some pocket money before coming home, while by foot that’d be rather time consuming.
Quite a lot of friends from outside of Europe either can’t ride a bicycle, or were learning it as adult after moving here, though.
edit: the high number of replies mentioning “swimming” made me realize that I had that filed as a basic skill pretty much everybody has - probably due to swimming lessons being a mandatory part of school education here.
And that’s one of the reasons why a big part of the rest of the world think that the people living in the USA are rude. It’s not just about needless interactions, you don’t interact at all. No hi, no please, no thanks, no goodbye, no have a nice day, no sorry, no time. I’m glad I never learnt how to be rude and that’s not a skill I’ll try to teach my kids.
Having been to quite a few countries in Europe, I’ve heard more about UK tourists than USA tourists, although the few UK tourists I met were friendly.
The USA is a massive country with hundreds of millions of people. There are rude people, but there are also friendly people. It just depends on where you are (and unfortunately in some places who you are). Having been to Seattle, people were generally friendly, but you can’t blame the barista for wanting to get through the line that goes out the door and two blocks down the road.
Feel free to chat up the baristas if there is no line. Otherwise they just want to power through the rush of people and don’t give a shit about meaningless small talk.
I’m from Portland and my complaint is nearly the opposite; that the baristas try to be too friendly/chatty with me. I don’t want to talk to you, I want my goddamned coffee and once I’ve had that I might be inclined to chat.
I even tell my employees not to talk to me until after I’ve had my coffee.
Scarcely. This is the tyranny of small differences. Portland and Seattle have way more in common with one another than they do with any other big cities in the US. Sure, there are differences, but to the rest of the world they seem trivial.
It’s notable, for example, that even something so organic as Seattle’s “grunge” music scene actually had its roots in Portland with all of the proto-grunge bands, like Napalm Beach and Dead Moon that came out of Portland’s Satyricon in the 1980s.
