21 Parts of American Culture That Non-Americans Couldn’t Believe Were Actually True

Imagine that somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 percent of the pop culture you consume comes from France. Just about every movie you watch, song you hear and game you play is all about French people and how they have gourmet meals in public school cafeterias and have to do weird word math to count numbers past 70 and smoke like it’s Mad Men up in there. It’s gotten to the point where people are so sick of the French that they started making fun of them, and you assume most of it, including what you see on TV, is exaggerated. And then you find out it’s all true.

That’s the experience of many foreigners in the United States. From our Big Gulps and ubiquitous brands illustrating a little too perfectly our foremost sins of gluttony and greed to the parts of everyday life we never even think about, like the cracks in the doors of public bathroom stalls, there are symbols of American culture so wacky that people in other parts of the world just assume they’re jokes. And they listed them all when user Shelleton8 asked r/AskReddit, “Non-Americans of Reddit, what is the craziest rumor you heard about America that turned out to be true?”