20 interesting observations that I brought from the States and the Valley

A year and a half ago, I first went to the USA. At that time it was the fulfillment of my dream. I am an IT person, and therefore my whole professional life is somehow connected with the States. I use the technique invented there, I follow with interest the novelties from the Valley and the successes of Elon Musk. I try to study their culture and understand them, because I sell design and software to the west. And the most delicious and rich customers, as you know, come from the States. I’m not talking about the films where skyscrapers or Disney characters I grew up in are constantly glimpsing.

In short, then it was incredibly interesting for me to see with my own eyes everything that I had been watching for so long through the TV screen and monitor.
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This year, for my trip to the States, I chose a completely different goal - together with the directors of IT companies, we go to the Road Show for new orders . But it will be another story. And in this article I will tell you about the 22 most amazing things that I remember from the last trip. Go.

Cult of the national flag

№1. In the US, a lot of American flags. When I went to the American embassy, ​​I was struck by how many flags there were on the walls. “Window dressing,” I thought, like the portraits of the presidents here. And figs there. There are as many flags in the States as in the embassy. And on flagpoles, and on houses, and on tables, and on walls. Even in the subway! Americans really love their flag.

Cool cops

№2. The police in reality behave as in the movies. It always seemed to me that American policemen were exaggeratedly shown in films. Hands on the belt, in front of the sunglasses, in the mouth of the gum, a conversation with a bulging jaw, so that it seemed cooler. So here. They really are. ) Not all of course.

American girls

Number 3. Our girls are prettier. For my taste, of course, but in the United States I saw really beautiful girls only in Las Vegas. And they worked there, i.e. after casting. Here it is.


Girls in Los Angeles

Internationality

№4. During my first trip to the USA, I was afraid that they wouldn't want to talk to me because of the accent. I have a clear Russian accent. However, when I arrived in Florida, I realized that this is not a problem, because Hispanic Latinos live there, many of whom speak English even worse than I do. Some even live for years without knowing English, they have enough Spanish)

The valley is generally international. Try to find a photograph of a Native American, not a Hindu or Asian)


Usual mitap in Silicon Valley. Guess who was born in America?

On the excursion to the Grand Canyon we were driven by a Spaniard, we paid the Chinese for the ticket to get into the territory of the Indians, and this all happened in America) It was because of such a hodgepodge of nationalities in the USA that we were very tolerant of the accent. There are just a few indigenous left)

Contrasts

№5. The staff is truly different from the state, and these differences are immediately noticeable to the naked eye. For example, Texans are less fat than Floridians. California is more international. There are so many Spanish-speaking Florida students that English is hard to hear. In California, the police are not visible, and New York is completely bombarded by the police, it is on every corner. (Although this may be due to the fact that the Pope came just in time for my trip.)

№6. USA is different from Europe. Given the level of income, you expect that you will come, everything will be clean, green, well maintained. And figs there. There is Florida (Orlando, Tampa) is really the same well-groomed like Germany. The roads are clean and without holes. And there is Boston, where the sight of a peeing bum in the storefront of a shopping center has not shocked any of the aboriginal people passing by. Apparently, the usual thing.

Conferences and entrepreneurs

№7. The topics of presentations at a business conference, as well as conversations on the sidelines, differ in spirit from ours. The questions discussed are very similar and the topics of the reports sound approximately the same with our conferences. But if the same question “Where can I get loot?” Runs through all the reports in our country, in the USA it is rather “How to find your calling? / What is your passion? ”. And it is with this “passion” that everyone rushes and measures them. And it creates some other, more pleasant atmosphere in which you want to be.

№8. At the American conferences on the first slides “about yourself”, it was not the business success and regalia that was shown, but the photos of you with children. IT geeks explain it as a joke: “If you show a photo with 3 children, this proves that you have had sex at least 3 times in your life”)

№9 . Americans love the essence, and therefore simplify. If at our conferences, when a person is mentioned, first of all they call his position, in America this is the essence of his contribution to the common cause. For example, not “Director of Public Relations”, but “PR-guy”. Therefore, in cases, you often hear that the sales-guy, has teamed up with the product-guy, turned out to be a startup, then they began to look for a strategy-guy, etc.

On this topic, a small case:

When I went to the conference for the first time, to the question “What are you doing?” My self-presentation was: “We are a design studio specializing in IT. We do everything that is displayed on the monitor screen: icons, websites, interfaces, splashes, logos, etc. Comprehensively close the graphical needs of software developers or it-services. ” And somewhere in the middle, the interlocutor fell asleep) And then one American summarized: “Aaa, I understand, are you UI-guys?”. In short, now I introduce myself that we are UI-guys ...)

Number 10. We have assumed that the Internet is the lot of the young. If you look at the participants of any Internet parties, infobusiness courses, etc. - these are people 25-40. In the US, this is not present. For example, I was very surprised by this grandfather, who came to study internet marketing with me:


His legs are no longer worn normally, but he came to study internet marketing, Karl! What have you achieved?

The trust

№11. In America, they do not care about security credit card numbers. If we have a chip, pin-code, CVV code on the cards, then in the USA, if you want to buy something, you are given a piece of paper where you fill out all credit card data, immediately give the goods, and then manually remove the payment from your credit card .


Order form. Enter all the credit card data yourself so that we can write off as much as we want.

And while no one cares, two points:

One side of the transaction, giving CVV, gives a technical opportunity to write off as much money as possible from his card, and not as much as agreed.

And the second side of the transaction gives the goods without checking the correctness of the data. In fact, nothing prevents you from filling out such a questionnaire with left data, getting the goods and disappearing.

I suspect that Americans do not even think that such options are possible. Not scared children ...)

Fat Men and Food Cult

№12. There are not so many fat people in the USA. Honestly, I expected more from “the fattest nation in the world.” Rather, a lot of fat and well-fed, and frankly fatty little.
But if there are fatties, then it is Fatty with a capital letter! For example, we at Universal Studio observed a girl who is so fat that she does not walk by herself, but goes to a small electric handicapped machine. At the same time, she was not embarrassed by the fact that her butt did not fit on the seat, but spread out evenly around the edges, and the yard was +32. She held the steering wheel with one hand, and with the other hand she crushed a leg of turkey the size of a pork ham.

Americans are very “politically correct” to the fatty. Therefore, they have more and more. A few examples:

- During a trip to the Grand Canyon, one of the stops was a village in the style of the wild west. There you could try on the coffin for yourself.


Why do you think such guys as in the photo in this “coffin” can be folded into three? )

- Only in American amusement parks in front of the entrance to the roller coaster are “seat probes”.


In order not to disgrace yourself on the hill, before entering, sit on a chair, check to see if the seat belts fit together on your paunch.

Who rides a roller coaster will understand: there is a mounting with a large margin. But in the USA there are those to whom this stock is not enough. Therefore, you can go in advance, sit down and check that the belts are closed on you!

- For example, a regular double room in the United States is not like we have 2 beds 90 * 200, and 2 King Size beds. King Size is a double bed, only more. In a double room, our 4 ordinary people fit easily. (Swingers can easily save on hotels))

- In hotels, Americans care not only about big priests, but also about small ones. And it's cool)

Transport and roads

№13. Separate conversation - public transport. I always wondered why, in youth comedies, the ultimate dream for a teenager at 16 is his own car. Everywhere we have absolutely normal to do with public transport, and the car is more for going out of town or as a status thing (they say the most wealthy people in traffic jams in Moscow;)). In Europe, everything is the same, only humanly and conveniently: if the bus is written at 5:53 pm, then it will be exactly at this time, and not + -15 minutes like ours.

So, in the US, all wrong.

The first bus service is not developed at all. For example, in order to get to Disneyland from our hotel in Orlando by bus, we would have to spend 2.5 hours according to Google calculations! The same way by car is 15-20 minutes. In Silicon Valley, there are no buses at all. Or a car, or Uber. Everything.

Secondly, everything is so far that you cannot reach on foot. Supermarket in 3 minutes walk from home seems familiar to me, and there it is a great rarity.

Accordingly, for a teenager, his own car, even if it’s just a wreck, means that now you can go on a date with a girl yourself, and not ask for a folder to throw). And I understand why he so wants a car.

In general, in the USA, cars are quite a big problem. There is even a separate series “Adam spoils everything” about this: https://carambatv.ru/mcelroy/adam_3_auto/

For the sake of justice, I want to say that in Boston and New York everything is quite good and possible without a car. This is another coin in the piggy bank of state differences from each other.

№14. Since the car is for the American Must Have, their interchanges are pretty damn big. I was always amazed how such an intricate outcome might be needed:


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It turns out that you may need)

№15. I never forgot where I parked the car ... Before I went to the USA. Parking there is so huge that it is a real problem. There are even special applications for a smartphone, where you, leaving your car, put a GPS point on the map, and when you return, the GPS navigator allows you to return to the same place) By the way, before traveling to the US, I highly recommend to download it. Seriously.


Parking at Universal Studio in Orlando. Approximately one tenth fit into the frame! places.

№16. In the US, there are no familiar road signs. Instead of using my favorite icons (who knows what I do , he will understand)), they write everything that can be written with text. And the very thoughts that are written on the sign are very effective, as for me. For example, under the traffic light is written the “cost” of the passage to the red light. And here is a sign that within the small town we saw:


What do you think what sign makes you go quieter - this, or our standard circle with the number 60?

№17. The roads in the USA are of high quality and equipped with reflective elements on the asphalt itself. As a result, at night the road itself can be seen very far away and it seems that you are driving along the runway.


At night, the road can be seen very far due to reflectors.

№18. Different advertising in the subway. If we advertise loans, where to eat, how to get rid of alcoholism and the evil eye, then they have new tits)



No. 19 Something, but the metro is better. All “our” subways where I was (Kiev, Kharkov, Minsk, Moscow) are better than the subway in New York. We have a cleaner, more interesting and understandable.

For example, the usual view of the walls of the subway in New York:





Number 20. People in the subway behave strangely at rush hour. If a train arrives, the doors open and there are already people standing there, those on the platform just looking at it. The doors are closing, the train is leaving, and waiting for the next one. I specifically do not write “filled car”, because In my view, there are 4 people at the door and the free space for standing in the center of the car I can’t call a “full car”. 50 percent ... But no one shouts, "Well, let's all breathe out" or "Che has become, go into the middle", just waiting for the next one.

Memory and show

Number 21. Americans honor the memory. I don’t know how to formulate this idea more correctly, but after walking around museums, it is felt that Americans have a different attitude to significant events. Instead of “destroy the impartial” and “forget about trifles”, the Americans follow the rule “create a museum and make money on it”)

For example, “revolution gidnost” took place in Ukraine. From the main street of the country, a monument to Lenin was demolished. A rabid crowd flew with hammers and smashed him into souvenirs. Some of them could then be bought on ebay. What can now be shown in the museum? It is because of this attitude in our historical museums so boring. What is interesting to a child, if half of the exposition is a photo, a form, yes, letters from someone there to someone there? Boring

An example from the USA. After closing the program “Shuttle”, the produced shuttles were no longer needed. Instead of destroying them, they were taken to space museums across the country. The shuttle Atlantis was brought to the space museum at Cape Canaveral and made a separate room dedicated to him. First, they tell you the story of the shuttle, tell how it was created, what difficulties they had, demonstrate the cosmonauts' things and the climax: under the solemn music, you see the shuttle itself. Real, not the layout. The one that really was in space! Cool?



Logical behavior, is not it? And what happened to our Buran? Not the pitiful plywood resemblance that stands in Moscow, but the fact that he flew in a komos? Significant historical event, planetary scale, and where is it now? Google for fun ...

Number 22. In the US, love the show and the attitude to this concept is different from ours. We all live normally, but when you want to have fun, they go to a special fun place at the concert, which is now called “show”.

In the USA, however, the element of the show is being tried to bring to the ordinary life those who are able to do it are very much valued.

For example, this is how cows are sold in Texas:

www.facebook.com/RelaxVideoFun/videos/1354579581272578/

And this is how a small businessman advertises his business: www.facebook.com/vancoachlimoman/videos/10153406697895933/

As he himself explained his behavior to me: “No one is interested in boring business, everyone wants a show”). About the same treshachok quite seriously sometimes twist on TV as an advertisement)

In museums, too, are trying to add to the exhibits show. For example, in the same space museum there is a command center room that was used at the time when the Americans launched the ship to the moon. Instead of simply gathering this room and putting a sign next to it, they hang the screen above it and start a movie about this event. We see the commander on the screen, who gives the order, and in this room the place where he stood at that moment is highlighted. He says, “Sergeant Adams, start the countdown,” and we see how Adams's workplace is highlighted and the switches that he pressed at that moment clicked. And so interactively, the whole procedure of launching a rocket is demonstrated both on the screen and in the command center that stands before you. Interesting.

Epilogue

The USA is really a many-sided and interesting country. You should go there at least once in order to see with your own eyes everything that you somehow see through the device screens.
I could not resist not to go to the States again. If you're interested too, let's go together .

An acquaintance told me: “After the 5th trip, the States cease to amaze and become quite ordinary.” So, I have at least 4 more trips until I stop, as a child, to be surprised at this country.