Italian Oddities

This week's visit to Italy helped us reflect on some of the cultural differences between living in the US and abroad.

We found many interesting things in Italy:

1. When you receive change back after paying, it is always placed on the counter (not in your hand).

2. Italians smoke a lot.  We got pummeled with second hand smoke:

3. In Rome it appears that you can park just about anywhere...check out a few of the worst parking offenders that we saw:

4. In addition, Italian drivers are crazy.  There is not much use of signals or traffic laws, but extensive use of the horn.  Despite that, there are more fatalities/100,000 cars in the US than in Italy:

Here are a few other interesting comparisons that may be surprising from a few countries that we have visited:

Beer is expensive in Norway!

Gas is way cheap in the US:

Actually, everything is expensive in Norway: