The Small Pains of Everyday Life in the U.S.
5 more questions about America from my Danish husband (that I just can't answer)
Life is in the detail, they say. And since my husband moved to the U.S. from Denmark his life has been nothing but learning little details of everyday existence in America. Some of them he enjoys (hello, smiling strangers) and others drive him nuts. It’s amazing how much I could re-learn about the country I thought I knew well with a set of fresh eyes.
Surely, learning a whole new way of doing things in your 40s can be frustrating. And my husband still addresses his frustrations to me, as if I alone were responsible for the way things worked, or didn’t work, in America.
Here are a few of my recent favorites.
1. What the hell is a quarter of a mile?
Unlike Europeans with their simple metric system, where everything revolves around liters and meters, here in America we like to keep things complicated.
I had to use Subway sandwiches to teach my husband about feet and inches: “Small sandwich — half a foot; big one — a foot.” He dutifully noted. Now, whenever he has to measure anything, he thinks of a Turkey sub.
Driving is a whole other story.
“What the hell is a quarter of a mile!” my husband yells at the GPS.
I Google frantically: “It’s 440 yards.”
“Yard? What the hell is a yard!”
Google: “One yard equals 3 feet.”
Husband: “Three big sandwiches?”
We miss the turn.
And then there are beverages.
“It’s a gallon of milk, but a liter of juice, and a quart of coffee creamer?” my husband asks, as he pulls his hair out in the supermarket. “I give up!”
And since there was no analogy I could think of to help him learn Fahrenheit (“Only in America and Belize!”), in our family, we still speak Celsius. He did, however, learn one thing living in LA: 100 degrees is very hot.
Needless to say, my husband still doesn’t know his weight in pounds.
2. Why so much ice?
“Why did they put so much ice in it?” my husband used to ask me every time he ordered a beverage in America.
I guess when you’ve spent most of your life in a cold country, the last thing you want is more ice. But, frankly, nowhere in Europe, even in the southern parts, have I seen so much ice as in America.
“Don’t people understand they’re paying for ice cubes in their drinks?” my husband wondered.
It’s a good question. Why do we pay four dollars for a cup of ice with a bit of coffee on top? To his relief, I taught my husband a simple trick of asking for “light ice” everywhere he went.
3. Why do I have to tip for a takeaway coffee?
We know how Europeans feel about tipping. It’s just a foreign concept to them or a personal choice at the very least. In my husband’s home country of Denmark, tipping can even be seen as rude, implying that a person doesn’t make enough money as it is. Because in Denmark, they do. As this popular story explained, even their McDonald’s employees make $22/hour.
My husband barely learned to let go of the extra 20% from every restaurant meal he ate, when he noticed that even registers at our local coffee shops and cafes started asking for a tip. He muttered something under his breath, as he pressed the “No tip” button.
“Was that supposed to make me feel bad?” he rightfully complained afterward.
“Do they really expect us to add a 20% tip for a cup of already overpriced takeaway coffee?”
I wondered what the employees themselves thought.
I feel my husband’s pain. The tipping obsession in America has gone too far.
4. Why is our daughter’s bed a hazard?
Every time we leaned down to pick up our daughter from her old crib, we faced a large bright-colored sign warning us that babies have suffocated in these beds. The same goes for her otherwise pretty stroller and her car seat, both of which are ruined by ugly non-removable stickers.
“How stupid do they think we are?” my husband asks, as he dutifully hangs a blanket over the warning label in our baby’s bed, shaking his head in wonder.
Danes are oh-so particular about the way things look and make us feel. Everything they touch turns into coziness.
I myself got used to labels warning me about potential dangers every step of the way in America. But permanently slapping those on children’s toys and furniture is where I draw the line. After all, childhood and parenthood should not be spent in constant anticipation of danger.
5. Why are there layers of (dirty) bedding?
The bedding solution in Europe is simple: a duvet, also known as a blanket, which is inserted into a duvet cover. The latter is used daily, then washed regularly and put back on. It keeps things simple and clean. The American layering system has never appealed to me personally. And to my husband, it’s a nightmare.
Luckily, our European bedding needs are solved by a trip to IKEA. Yet, when it comes to traveling, he inevitably gets frustrated with hotel beds.
“This is disgusting” my husband complains during our first road trip, as he lifts a blanket (or is it a comforter?) covering the flat sheet he’s supposed to sleep under.
“Do you think they ever wash these?” he asks, hoping I’d say yes.
I explain that the idea is to use the always-clean flat sheet to protect yourself against the washed-sometimes-comforter on top. This only works in theory, of course. In reality, you wake up with the sheet on the floor and the comforter on your face. Yikes!
Sure enough, my husband ends up spending the night shivering under nothing but a single sheet, after losing his battle with American bedding layers.
Frustrations aside, there is definitely never a dull moment in our life in the U.S. As long as you have some sense of humor to get through the day, you’re okay.
All so true! I especially relate to the frustration of ever expanding tips, the excessive and huge blocks of ice in every drink, and the sheet below the blankets! I smiled a lot reading this article. I will never figure out the system to measure liquids/beverages.
Long ago in my youth (late 50s, early 60s) there was a movement to get America on the metric system. We learned it in class, and it seemed to be moving along slowly. The thing that killed it was gasoline (petrol) pumps. Replacing all the bits in them was deemed too costly, and the whole idea was scrapped. This country has a long history of deciding whether to do something based on how much it will cost to do it. What is almost never considered is the cost of NOT doing it.