It's the little things (III)

A third collection of differences we've noticed between here and back home:

In the USA people traditionally wear their wedding rings on their left hand. This tradition stems back to the day when people believed there was a vein that went directly from the 4th finger on your left hand to your heart, the "vein of love." In Austria, people traditionally wear their wedding rings on their right hand. The people we've asked why didn't have an answer, just that that's the tradition over here, but here is a wikipedia answer. Television commercials are shown between shows, or as a longer break during a movie. This makes watching TV a lot more enjoyable because you get to watch so much of the movie at once or the entire show un-interrupted. Maybe this is why soccer is not shown as a prime-time sporting event in the USA; there's no time for a commercial break for 45 minutes!Glassware has precise measurements on it. When you order a large juice you know you'll get 0.5 liters, and a small juice is 0.3 liters. At home, the size of the "large" and "small" glasses depends on the choice of the individual restaurant- you could get anything from a shot-glass size to a jumbo! They recycle everything here. The main difference is the bio-waste recycling. All the busses in Graz run on biodiesel which is made from recycled cooking oil. The trash room is disgusting, as David will testify to. Mostly because of all the bio-waste. The biomass is collected and treated to turn into compost for farmers, but the amazing part is that a byproduct of this treatment is electricity! Taxes are included in the price shown on the tag. This is nice because then you know exactly how much money you will pay for something and you don't have to do any silly calculations in your head to figure out if you have enough cash first. At the grocery store, you weigh and price your own fruits & veggis before going to the check-out (the machine spits out a price sticker which you place on the bag), whereas in the USA, the person at the checkout weighs and prices them. The traffic lights are a little bit more user friendly. When you're at a red light, just before it turns green the yellow light comes on to warn you to get ready. This makes driving more pleasant because less people are honking the second the light turns. (I once heard that the definition of "a New York minute" is the amount of time between when the light turns green and the person behind you honks.) Speaking of driving... all the cars are standard shift. Apparently it is possible to fine a random automatic here and there. Good thing we both know how to drive a stick-shift, otherwise we'd have some problems renting a car. Everything is the Metric system over here. 35 degrees is a hot day! At home, it sounds impressive when David says he's just over 6'-4" tall. But over here that doesn't mean anything to anybody. When he says he's 194 centimeters, then that impresses people! One thing we've noticed is that one cannot drive 20k without coming across a village. There are just no wild, open spaces. Not to mention, very few wild animals. As an extreme example, the population of Austria is 8 million and the population of Wyoming is 500,000. But look at the comparison of land mass (Austria is orange) and think of how open and wild Wyoming feels: Of course, you could spin it the other way and say there are 8 million people squished into NYC. But the main feeling we're trying to express is the lack of large expanses of un-populated land. The only place people don't live here are the tops of the mountains (but then, they do have huts up there!).