Rather than hijacking Heather's post, I'll ask my question here.
The pay toilet has long since disappeared from American public life, but is still common on Europe, a fact which often strikes visiting Americans as barbarous. I feel similarly about paying high prices to drink water in European restaurants. Other surprises I have found in my travels—for these are first-world, modern, and wealthy countries—is home refrigerators the size of those in U. S. college dorms (and no separate freezers), severely restricted laundry hours in apartments (sometimes as infrequently as once every two weeks), and the scarcity of clothes dryers.
There are, of course, many more things I've found delightful in all the countries we've visited, but the question of this post is: What do visitors to the United States find barbarous or bizarre here, that we accept without a second thought? To some friends visiting from Brazil it was being required to stop at red traffic lights even when there was no visible cross traffic. To others I'm sure it's the lack of clean and convenient public transportation. The Swiss must be shocked at the unreliability of schedules here.
What can you add to the list, dear foreign readers and those who have friends from other countries?
