In the US, there's a good chance you haven't even left your state either

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

"We've redecorated this building to how it looked over 50 years ago!"
- Favourite fuckin comedian

Here in Australia, during the 80's, 90's before widespread internet. There would be several European's who needed rescuing each year as they decided to try and walk between major cities, because it looks close on a map.
I remember one German guy who needed rescuing while trying to walk from Sydney to Adelaide...that's 1200km away...in a straight line.
- Joke’s on him for wanting to go to Adelaide, honestly.
- Also in Europe if you get hungry you can pick mushrooms, skin a boar, or pop in to a town. In Australia you got... witchetty grub
- Lmao just looked on a map, and it's quite easy to see that that distance is comparable to walking from Great Yarmouth to St Davids.... twice
In the US, 100 years is a long time.
In England, 100 miles is a long distance.
Lol, that's great.
I've also heard of Europeans planning vacations in the US, expecting to see New York, Florida, Texas, LA, etc. without realizing how much travel that is.
- I met a foreign exchange student in Australia. I asked what they were planning to do for their break.
  They'd recently taken up surfing, and couldn't decide if they wanted to surf the east, west, north, or south coast. So they had decided they would stay in Alice Springs, basically in the middle of all of them, and do day trips to each one.
  I didn't have the heart to tell them that to get to the nearest ocean from there takes about two solid days of driving. Add another day to get to a beach with decent surf.
- Found out the same between Tokyo and Okinawa. It's like flying from Washington DC to Miami. "Just take a train," is 32 hours, plus time on a ferry.
  Not a really a day trip, even though it "seems like Japan is a small country."
Canada has a highway that goes between the most easterly and westerly points of the country. If you drove from end to end, stopping only for gas and drive through meals, it would take you about a week.
- The most easterly and westerly points on the mainland. You're not getting from Vancouver Island to Newfoundland by highway.
That guy just have been a huge idiot, I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people know how far away New York and Los Angeles are from each other.

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

New York City has entered the chat.
- Hawaii checking in. If a highway shuts down, book a hotel on the side you're on.
Need some more trains.
- there is traffic ahead of us

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

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

Now we need somebody from Siberia to tell us how they can drive for 5000km and never leave their federal subject (I had to look that up, it's what the different regions of Russia are called)
- I'm not Siberian, but from what I've gathered from the talks of people who lived there, is that people in far east Russia have a weird sense of time and distance. You might be in in the middle of fuck nowhere with the closest living person being like a 100km away from you, but when you call them with some any dumb questions like "Hey do you happen to have a bottle opener?" they respond with "Sure, I'll be there shortly" and then they do indeed arrive... in 4 hours. It's as if they don't have places to be, and it's totally okay for them to spend an entire day driving to a shop or to friend to lend them a screwdriver. It's especially baffling to people who lived their entire lives within ~40km Moscow's ring road and they hear stuff like "Minsk? Sure, that's like a hand's reach away - only 720 kilometers. I'll drop by on the weekend".

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

People say ‘whenever’ instead of ‘when’ and I want to clock them for it.
eta: I’m specifically disparaging the southern US states here. They just flat-out use words wrong, and I can say that now that I’m too far away for them to kick my ass.
- Except the guy you're responding said 'everywhere'
  Thanks for sharing though.

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

Great way to look at it.

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

Yeah, define 'driving' lol
You can drive for 30 hours and still be on the same highway in the same state in Australia.
- Damn, I thought the 22 hours to cross Ontario was long.

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.

Man, in my neck of the woods, you can tell which town someone is from by accent. I'm not even joking or exaggerating. This is a rural area, with towns that are close in terms of driving distance, but that were originally formed by distinct immigrant groups. Even with TV amd radio kinda smoothing out accents in general, there's still plenty of difference.
As an example, there's a town maybe twenty minutes away where when they say yes and it's "yay-us". My town it's more yeah-s as a single syllable. Two towns the other direction, it's yeah-us. And that kind of difference is across everything, not just one or two words. The degree of drawl, whether or not you get elisions at specific places in words, it's all part of it.
- People from the dimwit town I grew up in pronounce garage as "gararge" it drove me insane. Also, the main attraction of the town is a gas station that sells ice cream.
I just doubt it when I heard this argument, here in Brazil even your neighbor have a different accent cause they are son of two German, Lebanese, Japanese or Italian descendants and you are from the same but your other parent are from another culture and then you are so lost you create your own accent that sometimes speaks one or the other holy shit I don't know who I am.
- Dude, I LOVE Brazilians. I went for a little over 2 weeks in July. People were so nice, respectful, considerate, and laid back. I want to spend a month there next time I go.
  Also, your bananas are on another level. I haven't eaten a banana in the US since I got back.
i never really thought of it a code switching, but that's an apt description. there's definitely "professional" me and "hometown-accent-in-full-force" me.
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.
Is this why I can hear my Finnish friend's "generic euro" accent when no one else can?
(She travels a lot and has a very, very weak Finnish accent, but a fairly strong "generic European" accent. None of our other European friends can hear it; the only people who can are American and even then it's inconsistent).
- That's a thing with us Europeans - especially if you don't want to perfectly adopt a British or American accent. This is when you end up with the "euro accent" - you're perfectly fluent in English, without the accent of your native language, but since its neither British nor American English, it sounds just the slightest bit different.
Also from IL, southern. Near StL. The accents change like a proximity ring the further or closer you get to downtown, and even then going Ozarks MO is still different from Troy IL.
- When I was in law school I did a deep dive on the formation of Illinois and ended up going down a big rabbit hole of the dialects of Southern Illinois. The reason different parts of southern Illinois have accents that sound so different is because a lot of people settled there from Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, and even thought towns were closish to each other the accents were very different because of the group of southern settlers. Super interesting. Where I’m from in Southern Illinois people have a very unique and unmistakable accent.
Ok, if you're going to talk accents, you have got to include Pennsylvania Dutch.
Everyone always talks about Southern accents, New England accents, Texas accents, Cajun, etc. Pennsylvania Dutch always gets left out, and I think it's a fantastic accent.
Doug Madenford is my go to example:
https://youtu.be/wjr2CexQ5V4
Because comparatively it doesn't.
Your country simply hasn't existed long enough pre industrialisation for a broad range of accents to develop.
- The US isn't a uniform age.
  You get more hyper-local accents like the Boston, Philly and NYC accents in the older US cities, and fewer in places that haven't been densely settled as long.
  Is there a difference between a Las Vegas accent and a Pheonix or Los Angeles accent? Honestly, I don't really know.
  Still, there's fewer hyper local accents and accents tend to be spoken over a wider area. Probably also because the US has had relatively large amounts of internal migration. Also, I assume average people travel further on average than they used to when wagons were the state of the art.
- Europeans have been settling in North America for 500 years. The United States being a young country has nothing to do with the evolution of accents and dialects. When the US was formed the Spanish had been in the Americas for 200 years, the French and English not much less, in addition to enslaved Africans who brought their own native languages to the continent and then were forced to learn English, Spanish, French, or Portuguese. That alone is more than enough time and groups of people for dialects and accents to develop.

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

Was it cold up there Margie?
- Oh, you betcha. Yah.
So Grand Forks to Grand Rapids or there abouts eh?
- Just about, yeah. Good ol' route 2.
Weird. It takes 6-7 hours to go from Minneapolis to the Canadian border.... So would you have been driving like Arrowhead to Morehead on back roads?

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

That's been banned now, right?
- It's always been banned. Just like pot.
- It's always been illegal.
  There is still a sign at the Portofino hotel in LA with the current record and it is definitely up to date.

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.

If you’re originally from the Midwest you get the opposite experience:
There are places that you can’t tell what town you’re in, for miles and miles, because buildings are everywhere, and there are no cornfields or empty areas to separate cities. Cities are just allowed to grow into each other in some places.
Road trips were always the thing that made me appreciate America for what it is. If my only experience of America was the one place I lived, I probably wouldn't like America as much as I do.
- I'm soooo interested in driving from Florida to Alaska. I might do it next year.
I once made a trip out west (I live near the East Coast) towards Yellowstone National Park. Some of the sights I saw were almost surreal.
As a Floridian, people from the Pacific Northwest might as well be foreigners to me. They are just very different from what I'm used to interacting with. They're usually chill, accepting, quite socially conscious, into peculiar hobbies, and wear a lot of black. That's uncommon here.
There's dozens of us out in the fields, dozens of us!

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

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

And yet high-speed rail is a foreign concept

I’d kill for public transport. No kidding, point me in a direction.
(Jk)
- Start by linking a city in Mexico with a smaller city in the US. The cities will prosper and other cities want to be connected.
  Don't forget that local public transport is needed or you need parking space for many cheap rental cars next to the stations until self-driving cars are available.
Alien might be a better word, but foreign is very accurate

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.

Tbf going from north east londin to south east london is like a 4 hour trip
- someone's going to bring up the Elizabeth line and I'm going to shit myself in rage

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.

This is what most people on Lemmy don't understand when they complain about cars in North America. Texas and California combined are the size of all of Europe. America and Canada are very large. In most situations we do need cars to live a normal life.
- Some countries in Europe, even small ones, have really crappy public transport so driving cars is still necessity. Poland and Ireland comes to mind.
- The size of the country/states isn't really the issue, right? You can cross Europe via train pretty easily, 4hrs London to Amsterdam, longer over land than Dallas to San Antonio for example, but I'd assume a normal life doesn't regularly involve driving all around the state. Most of daily life is just within a city or region, the size of the country is irrelevant there.
  There absolutely are major factors that basically force North Americans into cars, I agree, but I don't think size is an excuse for those factors.
  edit: This video talks about the 'North America is too big' argument in detail, but fair warning, the creator is a bit annoyed and crass at the start and talking about comments they get. You can skip to 2:30 to jump over it.
- Australia is roughly the size of continental USA, and I do fine without a car
- this is such a fucking wild logic, why would the size of your country have any relationship whatsoever to needing a car? Do you think the moscow subway is worthless because siberia is in the same country?
  Who in their right mind would even drive across the US? you'd take an airplane!
Yeah, I'm similar, living almost in the middle of the west coast in Oregon, USA. I can drive 20 hours south and only change states once. That's traveling 65MPH+ most of the time.

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

This is among the best comments I've read on Lemmy, perhaps even the best.
Welcome to cob land.

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.

You can drive 13 hours (no stops) and only get from one end of Texas to the other.
- You can drive 15 hours and get from Imperial Beach, California, to Crescent City, California. Again, no stops.
  I'll bet someone could figure out a 36 hour trip across Alaska

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.

I-10 driving across Texas...
It's a shorter drive getting the San Diego, California to El Paso, Texas than from El Paso to Beaumont Texas on the same road.
- Texas likes to flex this by having a sign right when you enter from Louisiana saying that El Paso was 895 miles away or something like that.

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

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.

Without traffic you might be able to get Maine,new Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and maybe Pennsylvania, but that route would take you through/close to Boston and New York City, so there'll be traffic
I once spent 12 hours traveling across 3 states.
One state was gone in 3 hours, the next in about 5 MINUTES since it was just the tip, and the remaining 9 took me to the other side. Granted, at the time, the speed limit was 60 the entire way, and the vehicle was limited to 55 for the trailer.
- Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania?

only twice?

Yeah, the accent will change in the time it takes to get to the next village.

India: Drive for a few hours, completely different language, culture, food, dresscode.

Twice? Are you driving Stuart Little's car?

I just watched a similar segment on Taskmaster doing some regional American accents, everyone kind of defaulted to Texas
I watch a lot of British panel shows and am slowly starting to differentiate the accents. I can recognize some of them, but I couldn't tell you where any of them are from.
If I'm not paying attention, they all just sound "generic British" to me.
- Jimmy Carr’s laugh should have its own accent because wtf is that!

If I drive for 4 hours, I may be two countries away.

Slow your roll 'muricans. I got off a plane in Massachusetts and now I have to order my breakfast sandwich on whatever the fuck a bulkie is instead.

If I drive for 4 hours, I'd end up in the ocean.

We don't have that problem in the UK. Roundabouts.
- You've made me wonder if it would be legal to spend 4 hours in a roundabout without taking an exit.
- We don't have that problem in Sweden either. Not only do we have roundabouts, but we also have roads with turns in them.

4 hours in Canada means you left Toronto and you're still in Toronto.

4 hours gets you almost to Sudbury, what are you smoking?
- Sounds like you've never been to Toronto. You'll be lucky to get onto the highway in 4 hours.
You can drive from Buffalo to Toronto in less than 4 hours, and that includes the time it takes to cross the border. I've made the drive, and can confirm that it takes less than 4 hours.

2 hours? 30 minutes in some places.

OP hasn't been to New Jersey.

The Jersey Shore accent is fake. Don't believe the MTV lies.
Hung out with one of these MTV reality TV stars. She got drunk and the accent was gone. She sounded like a normal person. It's entirely forced.
- They're also not from Jersey. Or at least, I think most of them were from Long Island. I'm honestly not committed to remembering what few things I did at one point know about that show.

I think you mean the name for barms have changed twice!

Meanwhile in Canada, you'll be lucky to make it from one side of Toronto to the other.

There's probably a point in Toronto that is a closer drive to Ottawa than to the other end of Toronto.

One thing that came as a culture shock for me is that I'm used to driving like 4 hours to see relatives. And this is usually several times a year. Then I heard from some Britons that they have rarely visit their relatives who are only like a hour drive away. Really messed me up the first time.

I've heard similar things. Like, I've had work commutes that are an hour long before. (Not that that's healthy or ideal, but it's far from rare)
- And they say we should all just switch to electric bikes like in the Netherlands. I tried showing them a comparison of the states using a map but turns out "I am just being difficult"
I would make the point (not necessarily for an hour's drive) that the roads are often more tiring to drive on in the UK -- that is, they're not as flat, wide or straight as freeways often are, so require more concentration. Driving for an hour along Welsh country lanes doesn't feel the same as hitting the freeway for an hour. Just my two cents/tuppence

Baps are Shite way too big for your sausage and drier than all hell when you take a bite and get nothing but bread.

Morning rolls ftw.

I will die on this hill

ITT: americans bragging about having to pay absurd sums of money on a car so they can spend 4 hours per day driving to and from work, when in other countries that would be 2 hours on a train at like a 20th the cost

I'm pretty sure my father has only ever been in one state over, and that's to visit Vegas. I've been to multiple countries on multiple continents, and I'll continue traveling the world

How brave of you.

What a braindead take, everything in the second panel 100% also applies to the first. In fact, the us is more diverse like are you fucking kidding me???