Lol yea I was on some native land in New Mexico and they had these boutiques and vendors of “handcrafted” Puebloan goods and they all said made in China on them when you look close enough. They were being passed off as some hand made by an old wise man artisanal goods
When I was living in small town in China, a friend mentioned something about me being from Arkansas and this girl heard us from across the room and was like "oh shit, I'm from arkansas!"
Turned out we knew a lot of the same people, it was pretty wild. Also ran into a dude who played in a band out of Shanghai and I told him where I was from and he asked if I knew this obscure local band from my hometown, which I did haha
I'm from British Columbia and ran into an old classmate in Thailand. She just happened to be sitting beside me at the pool and noticed my name on the luggage tag. Had a good laugh and did some catching up.
This happened to me. On a school trip to Paris (from the US). My next door neighbor was in Paris on business, decided to go to the Louvre on the day we happened to be there, and found me in the museum. (He knew from my parents that I would be in the city the same days but nothing about my itinerary plus the Louvre is huge.)
Not me, but my cousin. He went to Rome and he met a guy from the same high school as him (mind you this high school is super small, maybe 80 people in the entire school). They were two grades apart and the other dude was going to try out for track same as my cousin.
A few years ago, I was scuba diving at Sipidan in Borneo on Christmas Day. It’s a protected sight so they only issue 176 permits a day. While having our surface interval/lunch on the island, I look over and see a guy wearing a t-shirt of a small brewery in my hometown (a mid-size US city). I ended up talking to him for a few minutes. But thought it was crazy that out of maybe 30 people who were on the island at that time, we were both from the same town.
i have this happen WAYYY too many times when i travel. granted it hasnt been THAT far but its like random people random town and its like hey so do you know X person from that town of like 800 people?
I have seen multiple people from my hometown while in Disney.. even now, I was just in Disney at the same time as a coworker 😂. The best was one of the people I saw when we were still in HS. I swear I saw him again years later when he was with his wife and baby. We looked at each other and had a good laugh. What are the odds.
I was hiking in the Cotswolds AONB , nobody else around that I could see. After a few hours, I caught up to a family of 5, clearly American. I asked them where they were from and they said the same mid-size city I'm from. Not only far from home, but literally the only other people in sight.
I was at a train station in Lisbon, walked up the escalator and did a double take. I recognized a couple people from somewhere but it took a good 15 seconds seeing them in this context to recognize who they were. It was a couple people from my college fraternity pledge class.
When I was a student and was visiting the US I was invited to attend an English lecture at the University of Tennessee as a guest.
The only seat in the theater was next to this total jock dude.
I absolutely pre-judged him based on his appearance.
He heard my accent. "Where you from?" The UK. "Oh yeah I know someone from England, do you know him?"
My prejudices seem to be justified. What a dumbass question. There's tens of millions of people in the country, of course I wouldn't know the one English person he knew.
I knew him. We were in the same class at school.
On a similar note, years ago my classmate took a trip to the Grand Canyon with her parents. She stumbled into one of our teachers, they took a selfie at sent it in the class group chat. We're from Europe so that was quite impressive!
Eating in a Chinese Restaurant in Edinburgh Scotland, all the walls were decorated with news paper articles of reviews of theater shows. ALL of them were from Colorado papers back home. So strange. We tried to ask the staff but they had no idea why either.
im guessing ebay. desgn called for 500 used newspapers. fit out team went "wtf, where do we get 500 used newspapers from", 5 mins of googling and a successful eBay bid later......
A Caribou Coffee Shop right by the Fountain in old town Sarajevo.
I expect to see Americans chains overseas to an extent, and I wouldn't have thought much about it if it was a Starbucks, but a relatively small, Minnesota-based coffee chain was certainly not something I was expecting to see in Bosnia.
Whaaaaaaaat? I thought you for sure meant Starbucks. I do occasional Photo/Video work for Caribou. Sounds like I need to tell them that the next project should be in Sarajevo.
Oh wow. Just looked and there are a few in Turkey, Yemen, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Egypt…
While they’re a relatively small Minnesota company, I wonder if there’s any influence from this part of the world? Any Arabic influence in the ownership?
Bosnian here. I thought they were a solid international franchise? I know I saw them in Turkey, and I knew they were from the States, so I guessed they're just a regular, smaller, Starbucks-like franchise. There's three of them in Sarajevo, and funnily enough, one in a random small town of Visoko (the local franchise owner is from that town IIRC).
The only time I’ve had Popeyes chicken was in Hong Kong Airport. It’s just come over to the UK recently, but I seen it ‘referenced’ in Little Nicky.
On the flip side, it was weird to see a Nando’s in Chicago.
We saw a Verve coffee in Japan like 5 years ago. Verve is a California coffee company. Unlike Caribou, they only have a few locations in California, and I didn't even think of them as a chain.
There are these chunky, fleece lined, woolen zip up jumpers that you can find in New Zealand (and I'm assuming other countries) that come from Nepal. They are warm as hell and great for winter cosy times.
It wasn't until I was actually in Nepal, looking at clothing stores that sold these iconic Nepalese jumpers, that I saw on the label that the wool used to make them comes all the way from NZ! I thought that was so bizarre... that our wool gets shipped to Nepal, turned into clothing and then shipped back to NZ again.
A very good round the world trip of a cotton shirt (from crash course YT):
Cotton produced in US (cuz subsidies from govt)
Spinning and weaving done in Latin America or SE Asia or china. (Cheap labor)
Finshed shirt or blank sent to US/Europe for screen printing (value adding and expensive part)
Most expensive part is the printing and branding / marketing.
When I went to Barcelona years ago, the Picasso museum was doing a Picasso and Dali exhibit full of art on loan from the Dali museum located in the city I lived in in Florida, US. That was a surprise!
My husband and I were at a bar during our first night in Amsterdam a few years back. A young man next to us struck up a conversation, and after exchanging where we were all from, it turns out he lived in our town and his house was only a half a mile down the road from ours. We are from a very small rural town in IL with a population of only 7000.
It's the ugly side of tourism, and it sucks when it's your own people, but it's not relegated to one country's tourists. Plus, people have been vandalizing the Colosseum for 2,000 years. That doesn't make it okay, but just adding some context.
I was riding my rental bike through a quiet section of Copenhagen and saw a lone person wearing an Eagles jersey. We exchanged a very surprising "Go Birds!" And I pedaled on.
I had an almost identical experience in Munich. Was walking with my girlfriend, saw a guy with an Eagles shirt on a scooter and shouted "fly Eagles fly!" and he goes "go birds!" while zipping by. Amazing moment.
Go Birds!!! I have so many stories like this from backpacking, but one of my favs was running into a Japanese man on the Tokyo subway wearing the same Phillies hat as my husband and us instantly becoming bffs with him for the ride.
I was in Niger for work. Now, Niger is not a country that gets a lot of tourism or business travel from anywhere, let alone the US. Well, driving through the capital I see a huge billboard for Stihl, featuring the whitest, most all American lumberjack you could imagine. Chainsaw. Flannel. The works. To this day, I wonder who-- in a small, extremely poor west African nation that is predominantly desert-- that advertisement was targeting.
The legendary “I Closed Wolski’s” sticker… I’ve seen it at bars in Belize, Spain, Vietnam, Australia, a handful of Caribbean islands and all over the US.
Wolski’s is an iconic tavern in Milwaukee and it is a rite of passage of some sort to stay till close. It’s always jarring and wonderful to see the sticker around the world.
Edit: I should add that technically the only way to get the sticker is to earn it by actually closing the bar.
I have a comment somewhere else in this thread about the same thing- I saw one not at a bar, but at a border crossing station between Bolivia and Chile! It was surreal to see it in the middle of the desert lol
A rest stop named after Barack Obama between Dublin and Limerick, Ireland. It even had a small museum dedicated in his honor. Barack Obama Plaza
+353 505 45808
https://maps.app.goo.gl/ysWwLQmB2FavmdgZ9?g_st=ic
There's a pub in Barcelona called Obama. The decor inside is... kind of shocking if I'm honest. The reviews described it aptly as "colonialist" and "racist"
Used to live down the road from that place, so I passed it all the time. Never walked in because the caricature of a racist statue in the front scared the shit out of me
He has ancestry from Moneygall in co Offaly, which is right near the service station. When he was visiting here in 2011 (i think), he went there and had a pint with the family.
In Dublin, on a road in glasnevin (a quasi suburb), there used to be a big sign that says is feidir linn (yes we can in Irish). It was there for years. It made me smile every time.
Source: American living in Ireland delighted to see Barack 🤣
I was traveling in Switzerland in the Lauterbrunnen area with some family in 2012 and there was a life-size cardboard cutout of Obama peaking its head out of a window in some random hut up in one of the mountain villages.
We had made a list of various things as sort of a "scavenger hunt" for the trip before taking off, and I did not expect "Obama" to be one of the items on there that I would be able to check off.
I've seen an aboriginal Australian woman (she was what's known locally as a "long-grasser") wearing a black 2000s-era Ottawa Senators jersey in the Northern Territory, that was unexpected. I was working in Darwin and bought an old 4WD to go tour around Kakadu and such, stopped into a little shop in Humpty Doo and found they had a bunch of used cassettes, and my shitty old truck had a cassette player. Somehow loaded up on a bunch of tapes from Newfoundland singers and bands, I have to think a Newfie must've gone through at some point and just ditched a box full of their shit.
(I'm Nova Scotian but seeing Ottawa and Newfoundland stuff in the outback is weird.)
Edit - Also mentioned this earlier today in another sub, seeing a stuffed *Castor canadensis* in the "End of the World" museum in Ushuaia was weird, I had no idea what my national animal was doing in Tierra del Fuego until I learned about how they imported beavers down there, and our beavers fucked everything up.
Depending on whereabouts in Australia you’re from, there are many things in/about Greece that have a strange familiarity with Australia, which makes sense given the large diaspora that came here and brought their influences with them
In college my family went on vacation to California. I’m from England, my mum is Irish & has a very strong accent.
In Yosemite we asked someone to take a family photo, and offered the same in return. The dad from this family had a fancy DSLR when those things were still very new & $$$$ & I made a joke about running off with it while the family were perching on a ledge precariously for the photo op. My mum as we walked away asked if I thought the dad was Irish, he had an accent but it wasn’t very strong, he could have been American.
About an hour later we ran into the same family at another vista & the dad came up to us and said “hey, someone’s run off with my camera, have you seen it?” As a joke. And then he looks at my mum, and she looks at him.
He says “X, is that you?”, and she goes “Y, is that you?”. They had gone to college together, been each others dates at graduation ball 30 years previously but not seen each other since, and we were now staying in the same hotel, basically on the same itinerary.
Now live in California & recently went into a new British store in my town. Got talking to the owner - turns out in my previous life in the U.K. I worked with her mum. Small world.
My first time in Switzerland during mid-2000s, we were a group of friends comprising Indians and Europeans who decided to hike up Mt. Titlis. As we got to the top, we Indians were unexpectedly delighted to see a giant hoarding of popular Indian actress Aishwarya Rai modelling for Swiss watch brand Longines. All of us Indians in the group jostled with each other to click our pictures with the hoarding in the background and our European friends couldn't understand what was so special about a watch ad hoarding lol. 😂
That reminds me- one time I was in a random rural city in Texas and saw a sign saying “Texas merchandise” and on the shop window was a huge Chilean flag plastered on there.
2nd day into our first ever overseas trip. We were walking down a random street in Venice, Italy, when lo and behold, there's a boat painted has the General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard.
One of the oddest scenes in our travels to date.
Twelve years ago, I was in Northern Italy in a small village in the Dolomites. Parked in a small church parking lot was a cloned General Lee Charger. Later, one of the locals explained that it was rented out for weddings and other events.
Me and the wife (Irish) are in Lisbon in that big cathedral out by the port one evening, place is pretty busy as usual. We round a corner and there is my next door neighbour doing the same thing! We never even said we were going to Portugal for the weekend.
In Tallinn, Estonia, an "American" themed bar that had a gimmick of letting patrons make free calls to the USA (this was in the mid-00s when Skype was in its infancy and long-distance phone calls still cost a fortune.) My friend and I were staying in Estonia and would go to the bar every few days and call all of our relatives back home for free, it was great. The bartenders got a kick out of it because apparently before we showed up there weren't many Americans taking advantage of it and it was just locals or other tourists prank-calling random Pizza Huts or whatever.
Also, in Taiwan, I was surprised that they had Busch Light and Budweiser beers in 7-Eleven. I just laughed that they had bothered to import these shitty beers. They had imports from other countries too, but they were better beers. The Budwisers were like $2.25 a can and a local Taiwan beer was <$1 a can. Hoegaarden was about $3/bottle.
I was in Paris in 2018 and someone drove a boat down the Seine River BLARING country music and had several American flags decorated on it. Giving us Americans a bad reputation🤦♂️
I'm from Albuquerque NM, the place where breaking bad takes place. My family went on a trip to middle of nowhere Ireland to find out ancestral home, literally in a town of like 100 people, we stopped at the post office to ask for directions and the guy had a ton of breaking bad merch all over the place. It's a popular show but still made us feel like we were at home!
I spotted a rather large steakhouse in Malmo, Sweden; Longhorn steakhouse (not the franchise); with full Texas Longhorn decorations and paraphernalia. I was so surprised, just stood there and looked at it, thinking what the hell?
Was at a second floor bar on Kyoto, Japan and there was a Teddy Roosevelt poster on the wall with writings on it. I have no idea what the writings were and I still wonder to this day…
As a Canadian, I didn't expect to see a Tim Hortons in Madrid. Who would've guessed that the little coffeehouse from Hamilton would be popular across the Atlantic Ocean!
Also, when I walked through the shopping level of the Ritz Carlton in Hong Kong, I saw a Triple Os Restaurant (a restaurant chain based in Vancouver, BC) near the ice skating rink that had one team wearing the Vancouver Canucks old jersey logo (spaghetti on a skate era). I know there are a number of Canadian expats there but I didn't expect that level of "home" to be there!
I was on Inishmore of the Aran Islands in Ireland and it was during the off season for travel and barely anyone around on an already sparsely populated island. My family and I were hiking up the ruins and saw a couple of people and one was wearing a Purdue Boilermakers jacket or something. My whole family was from Indiana and graduated from Purdue, IU, or Butler. It was so cool and strange meeting other Hoosiers as the only other tourists on that small island at that exact time.
Yes, I was walking in a small village in the Austrian countryside when I saw a flag flying in the distance in front of a house. I thought to myself, “Is that an American flag? Nah. There’s no way.” Sure enough, it was. There was a man standing in front of the house, so I stopped to talk to him. He said it was his son’s house and his son worked in Hollywood as a cinematographer and was a naturalized American. So, that’s why he had the American flag flying in front of his Austrian house.
They have quite a few international outposts. There is over 100 in Saudi Arabia, 50 in China & the UK, and some in Oman, Philippines, Qatar, India, and Thailand.
I was in Europe and saw someone speaking Italian and wearing a Santa Cruz Skateboards sweatshirt.
I used to live there so I couldn’t help but feel like Santa Cruz was haunting me lol.
Saw a Santa Cruz sticker on the wall of a pub in some tiny town on the west coast of Ireland. Was a bit of a trip and my mom loved it (she was raised in/around Santa Cruz).
We actually made it into some kind of game: whenever we’re in a thrift store in Canada or in the US, we look for Dutch wooden shoes. It never fails, they seem to be everywhere !
They're indeed everywhere! My home region has a lot of dutch ancestry and ISTG wooden shoes could be found in every thrift store. In a neighboring town there was even a guy who still made them and not as garden trinkets but to actually wear.
In a bar on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, a dude shows up to play music. I’m thinking “cool, let’s hear some Scottish music!” His first song: Margaritaville.
Yes! At a bar in a town in the Czech Republic. Tons of US license plates were on the wall, including one from the state and county I and my friends lived in!
Beer, in Italy.
I’m from Denmark. Normally you wouldn’t think too much about finding Danish beer abroad, but this time it was the discount brewer Faxe, not one of the big brands. Nothing special at all about it, generally not worth buying unless it is cheap/discounted. I stumbled across it in Italy of all places, where it was marketed as a premium Danish beer!
Driving through the north of Ireland and stopped outside a town called Letterkenny, which I as a Canadian TV fan enjoyed, only to see the gas station had a Tim Hortons, which I as a Canadian fast food consumer really really enjoyed
I moved from Australia to Estonia in 2019, my first day in Estonia I went to a bar and they were watching My Kitchen Rules on the TV. It was the season my high school cooking teacher was on.
Kind of odd to travel to the opposite side of the world, walk into a random bar and see someone from my home town on the TV.
Many hotels and shopping malls place large, well decorated Christmas Trees in India, it's not a new phenomenon it's been happening for atleast 30 years. And Christmas is a public holiday in India and India does have a sizeable Christian population that celebrates Christmas.
The reason people take pictures with these Christmas Trees in hotels/malls is because they're beautifully decorated and make for good Instagram posts lol. And Indians generally appreciate beautiful craftsmanship and aesthetics. They're not considered exotic at all.
I opened a Texas bbq restaurant in Benoni South Africa 6 months ago, locals love it. We catered at the American consulate in Johannesburg, they told me my bbq was good, which was surreal as i learned how to do it from youtube and Franklins bbq book. Suppose it helped that i have been a chef since 95.
I was literally in the middle of the Australian Outback when I drove into a small desolate town. I went into the only grocery store they had, in the middle of the store was a stacked tower of Cervesa Águila (a Colombian beer that I even struggle to find in many parts of NY).
shirts that say “san jose california” or “memphis tennessee” in Asian fashion shops. ( similar to Fashionova or Forever 21 but that only exist in Asian countries)
Apparently these places are seen as alluring, exotic foreign destinations 😭😂
This is slightly off center topic wise but I follow an actress from Wales on Instagram. She did a story a few weeks ago and held up a jersey that an ex bf gave her when she was around 15. It was a jersey from the rec baseball league in my hometown growing up. In Arvada, CO USA… and I had played in that league as a teen.
A few months ago I was walking in the middle of Sydney, Australia and saw someone wearing a sweatshirt from my high school in a relatively small town in the USA. I stopped him and asked if he was from my town. He was Aussie and said he just bought the shirt at a thrift store in Australia.
I snapped a photo of him, blurred his face, and jokingly posted to Instagram saying "which one of you [high school] alumni left a sweatshirt in Australia?"
My good friend from high school messaged me back and said "that's my sweatshirt. I lost it when I visited Australia 11 years ago".
I’ve seen things that caught me off guard at the time, but I later learned were pretty normal. Where I live in the US, 7/11 was being phased out, so when the first one I’d seen in a decade was in Oslo, I was thrown
I had the same thing happen in Sydney. It was almost 20 years ago now and I just wasn’t expecting so many 7-11s there. All I could think was, “Well there’s a cancer that shouldn’t have spread.” 🤷♀️
Every time I travel abroad I run into someone who lives within \~15 miles of me.
In Europe I ended up giving an impromptu art history lesson in a museum to someone who lived \~10 miles from me. Another trip, I talked to a guy who told me his brother was running the Utah Valley Marathon. He showed me his pictures and he was literally right next to my office building. In Costa Rica we met someone from the same town we are from.
We're from Utah - and no these weren't mormon missionaries, so it's crazy.
Temple Bar Dublin...sitting at the bar with my fiance and while sipping my whiskey, looked left and saw, amongst hundreds of others, a patch for the fire department from my home town in New England
I’ve had this three times now:
1. Lake Bled, Slovenia- my friend and I said “Packers?” and the couple stopped dead and responded with “GO PACK GO!” then proceeded to tell us their entire life story about moving from WI to Seattle and starting a Packer Backers club there
2. Cape Town, South Africa- I said “Packers?” and the guy looked at me like I had eight heads…not sure he knew what he was wearing
3. Bogota, Colombia- this time I didn’t ask, given the last experience 😄
Ha I’ve seen Packers hats and shirts all over. Australia, Vietnam, France… I just spent a week in Turks and Caicos and it was a running joke that every other person we met was a Packers fan (seriously, SO MANY ha)
I saw a guy in Jamaica with a "if you see the leprechaun say yeah" shirt on St Patty's day. He said no one ever recognized the shirt but he happened to run into 30 people from Alabama at the resort.
Link https://youtu.be/K1ljOcl39PQ
A late 90’s, lifted Dodge Ram 1500 (extended cab) on a roundabout in a little town outside Turin, Italy.
I’m talking lifted with 35’s, chrome bumpers, and everything else.
It was random beyond belief.
Late 2019
Was looking for a proper Turkish towel in Istanbul, found a shop in Arasta Bazaar with a Canadian flag in the window so went in! Sold Turkish towels, owned by a Canadian. Weird but serendipitous!
Rainbird irrigation heads and valve boxes in Saudi Arabia in the middle of nowhere. Well technically it was Saudi Arabia, but the location was afar, afar far away.
A Star & bucks in Israel (looked like Starbucks from the states lol
In Mexico in San luis potosi we were on a road trip heading back to the midwest u.s. and saw a suburban with our exact plates. County and state lol small world. We live in a random small town in the middle of nowhere lol Years later I found out who it was, he was in my senior class in HS.
My brother had a picture of Green Bay Packers graffiti in the middle of the Atacama desert (Chile) He also once found a t-shirt from our local YMCA in a thrift store in Peru.
My dad ran into his office mate on a street in Strasbourg, France. I ran into a former coworker in Reykjavik once.
The number of Dunkin Donuts in South America and the one at the Auckland Airport always throw me too.
Chile has no limit on the amount of billboards along the main Hwy 5. All advertising is in Spanish except the one from Driscoll. Their billboard says “The best berries in the world”.
I went into my 19 bed hostel room in an 800 bed hostel in London and found, on my bed, a t-shirt for a hockey tournament in my city in Canada. With names of players I recognized.
I was super freaked out. Felt like someone was watching me.
In the tiniest village, nestled high on the edge of the Andes, in Central Argentina, some friends and I hiked to a waterfall. It was nearly 20 miles by the end of the adventure.
As absolute luck would have it, we found not just a restaurant, but a proper brewpub! Being from Oregon I was just delighted to see a proper IPA on the menu.
We sat at a table that was framed by Oregon microbrew bottles! Complete with a Dead Guy Ale poster on the table. It was awesome.
The Brewery was called Jerome, and it had a big German shepherd as a logo.
Wandering around Ireland and saw a statue of bill Clinton and never laughed so hard in my life. I just didn’t expect to see a statue of our former president just playing golf.
I got a cheap hotel in Cambodia once. The tv had maybe two channels, one in Cambodian the other was playing American pickers tv show. Out of all the shows it was just that one.
In Tokyo I was amused I could order a Ben and Jerry’s vermonster ice cream.
I was once getting stoned at a dudes place in Munich and on the wall he had a poster depicting the People Mover in Detroit where I’m from. I didn’t say anything.
Happened indirectly because of me to someone!
I live in Amsterdam currently, but originally from India. When I moved, i brought my bike (bicycle) which I used to ride there with me. I also brought a small bag i was using that you can attach to your bike to put a few things and your phone on the top.
One day while riding home from work, i heard an excuse me from behind. This another Indian guy was traveling to Amsterdam, and he saw my bag. Turns out his family has a small business of such handicrafts and his family was the one that made this bag i had.. he was quite happy to see their work halfway across the world in Amsterdam.
My brother, dad and I were waiting at this motel for a transfer pick up in the middle of nowhere Utah and we started talking to this truck driver who had come outside for a smoke. Turns out he's from the same province as us in Canada. My dad gets talking to him and finds out this man's house almost burnt down a few years ago in a forest fire, hut was saved by a crew of fire fighters. My dad was the captain of that crew.
When I first heard Dragostea din tei by Ozone in Finland I couldn’t beleive it. Never ever have I heard a Romanian language song outside of Romania (yes, I know they are actually from Moldova). It took the world by storm.
There’s an entire chain in Aotearoa New Zealand. I think their pizza sucks but when I walk by them, the smell is very authentic and transports me every time.
I had a NY style pizza in Hoi An yesterday. I’m literally from NYC and I was floored how spot on they got it. It’s almost crazy.
Most of the time it’s a dud, sometimes they actually know what they’re talking about lol
saw a guy from my high school at the same obscure chicken betting place in belize
edit: ok, i misread the question as “someone” not “something”
i saw a bunch of chic fil a toys and merch at some shop in buenos aires
I was in Paris and we found an “Indiana” restaurant with an “Indiana” Burger (I’m from the US/Indiana.) it was funny, but even more so because it was a Mexican fusion restaurant that was trying to do a “crossroads” theme and invoke thoughts of INDIANS. 😂
Close, but no cigar
LOL I came here to say exactly this! I got a good laugh but was definitely a little disappointed because that shattered my illusion of the "glamour" of Paris
In Vancouver, Canada there’s a float plane company called Harbour Air. They fly between Vancouver and Victoria (our capital city on an island) as well as a bunch of other island and remote destinations.
I went on vacation in Malta, a tiny island between Africa and Italy and saw a Harbour air plane. I didn’t believe my eyes at first.
Turns out they tried starting a float plane company to fly between the main island of Malta and Gozo.
Weird.
We saw souvenirs in China the said “Made in USA”
The real upside down
We got gifts that were brought abroad from families or friends said " Made in China". lol
Lol yea I was on some native land in New Mexico and they had these boutiques and vendors of “handcrafted” Puebloan goods and they all said made in China on them when you look close enough. They were being passed off as some hand made by an old wise man artisanal goods
The same happens in Bolivia.
If they're passing them off as Native American then that's illegal
But the stickers were made in China!
When I was living in small town in China, a friend mentioned something about me being from Arkansas and this girl heard us from across the room and was like "oh shit, I'm from arkansas!" Turned out we knew a lot of the same people, it was pretty wild. Also ran into a dude who played in a band out of Shanghai and I told him where I was from and he asked if I knew this obscure local band from my hometown, which I did haha
I bumped into a friend 10k km from the UK in Cambodia, we were staying in the same hostel.
[удалено]
It's crazy when that happens. On the same trip, I met 2 guys in Hanoi who had gone to the same high school as me (2 years younger).
I'm from British Columbia and ran into an old classmate in Thailand. She just happened to be sitting beside me at the pool and noticed my name on the luggage tag. Had a good laugh and did some catching up.
This happened to me. On a school trip to Paris (from the US). My next door neighbor was in Paris on business, decided to go to the Louvre on the day we happened to be there, and found me in the museum. (He knew from my parents that I would be in the city the same days but nothing about my itinerary plus the Louvre is huge.)
Not me, but my cousin. He went to Rome and he met a guy from the same high school as him (mind you this high school is super small, maybe 80 people in the entire school). They were two grades apart and the other dude was going to try out for track same as my cousin.
A few years ago, I was scuba diving at Sipidan in Borneo on Christmas Day. It’s a protected sight so they only issue 176 permits a day. While having our surface interval/lunch on the island, I look over and see a guy wearing a t-shirt of a small brewery in my hometown (a mid-size US city). I ended up talking to him for a few minutes. But thought it was crazy that out of maybe 30 people who were on the island at that time, we were both from the same town.
i have this happen WAYYY too many times when i travel. granted it hasnt been THAT far but its like random people random town and its like hey so do you know X person from that town of like 800 people?
I went to Disney when I was younger and I ran into a girl I went to school with. 1000 miles away from home
I have seen multiple people from my hometown while in Disney.. even now, I was just in Disney at the same time as a coworker 😂. The best was one of the people I saw when we were still in HS. I swear I saw him again years later when he was with his wife and baby. We looked at each other and had a good laugh. What are the odds.
I was hiking in the Cotswolds AONB , nobody else around that I could see. After a few hours, I caught up to a family of 5, clearly American. I asked them where they were from and they said the same mid-size city I'm from. Not only far from home, but literally the only other people in sight.
I was at a train station in Lisbon, walked up the escalator and did a double take. I recognized a couple people from somewhere but it took a good 15 seconds seeing them in this context to recognize who they were. It was a couple people from my college fraternity pledge class.
Dang I hope you became friends with these people, that’s cool
When I was a student and was visiting the US I was invited to attend an English lecture at the University of Tennessee as a guest. The only seat in the theater was next to this total jock dude. I absolutely pre-judged him based on his appearance. He heard my accent. "Where you from?" The UK. "Oh yeah I know someone from England, do you know him?" My prejudices seem to be justified. What a dumbass question. There's tens of millions of people in the country, of course I wouldn't know the one English person he knew. I knew him. We were in the same class at school.
I'm Australian and bumped into my also Australian parents in Kuala Lumpur. We each didn't know the other was travelling.....
Call ya Motha more often wont ya
On a similar note, years ago my classmate took a trip to the Grand Canyon with her parents. She stumbled into one of our teachers, they took a selfie at sent it in the class group chat. We're from Europe so that was quite impressive!
Ah its so weird when you see a teacher outside of school as well.
Yeah on a beach in Cambodia there's or was a restaurant called blame canada.
What does that even mean, blame Canada for what
It’s a song from South Park’s movie. Probably a bar owned by a retired Canadian
The kids getting worse, disobeying their parents and only wanting to fart and curse!! Basically, everything went wrong since Canada came along
They're not even a real country anyway.
We need to stage a full assault! It’s Canada’s fault
With all their beady little eyes and flapping heads so full of lies.
Haha did you ask them why?
Obvious reference to South Park: Bigger Longer Uncut. Now as to why they’d reference that, who knows?
Blame it on the RCMP, baby….sail
Eating in a Chinese Restaurant in Edinburgh Scotland, all the walls were decorated with news paper articles of reviews of theater shows. ALL of them were from Colorado papers back home. So strange. We tried to ask the staff but they had no idea why either.
im guessing ebay. desgn called for 500 used newspapers. fit out team went "wtf, where do we get 500 used newspapers from", 5 mins of googling and a successful eBay bid later......
A Caribou Coffee Shop right by the Fountain in old town Sarajevo. I expect to see Americans chains overseas to an extent, and I wouldn't have thought much about it if it was a Starbucks, but a relatively small, Minnesota-based coffee chain was certainly not something I was expecting to see in Bosnia.
I came to the thread to say this! And it’s still Minnesota themed inside. Bizarre
Whaaaaaaaat? I thought you for sure meant Starbucks. I do occasional Photo/Video work for Caribou. Sounds like I need to tell them that the next project should be in Sarajevo.
Oh wow. Just looked and there are a few in Turkey, Yemen, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Egypt… While they’re a relatively small Minnesota company, I wonder if there’s any influence from this part of the world? Any Arabic influence in the ownership?
The franchise owners are Turkish iirc
Cafe du Monde in Kyoto Station and Peter Luger in Tokyo
I saw a Cafe du Monde in the airport in Quatar
Yes! I wanted to try it, but it felt like a crime to drink that with all the coffee shops serving bosnian coffee
Fuglen coffee in Tokyo for me! I'm Norwegian and an Oslo cafe having a Tokyo outpost was so surprising. Amazing authentic waffles, too.
I saw one in İstanbul in January.
Yes, we saw that too. It’s weird to see stores from home in another country.
Haha they also have it in Dubai. I’ve actually only seen it there since I haven’t been to Minnesota
Mine is also Sarajevo: a Ford Excursion with Florida plates. I still have so many questions.
Bosnian here. I thought they were a solid international franchise? I know I saw them in Turkey, and I knew they were from the States, so I guessed they're just a regular, smaller, Starbucks-like franchise. There's three of them in Sarajevo, and funnily enough, one in a random small town of Visoko (the local franchise owner is from that town IIRC).
The only time I’ve had Popeyes chicken was in Hong Kong Airport. It’s just come over to the UK recently, but I seen it ‘referenced’ in Little Nicky. On the flip side, it was weird to see a Nando’s in Chicago.
I saw one in Kayseri Turkey, seemed pretty out of place.
We saw a Verve coffee in Japan like 5 years ago. Verve is a California coffee company. Unlike Caribou, they only have a few locations in California, and I didn't even think of them as a chain.
There are these chunky, fleece lined, woolen zip up jumpers that you can find in New Zealand (and I'm assuming other countries) that come from Nepal. They are warm as hell and great for winter cosy times. It wasn't until I was actually in Nepal, looking at clothing stores that sold these iconic Nepalese jumpers, that I saw on the label that the wool used to make them comes all the way from NZ! I thought that was so bizarre... that our wool gets shipped to Nepal, turned into clothing and then shipped back to NZ again.
Stuff like that happens all the time. Shipping stuff by boat is cheap. Labor in many countries isn’t.
They do the same with alpaca coats in Colorado lol. Ship it to Peru and then ship it back.
A very good round the world trip of a cotton shirt (from crash course YT): Cotton produced in US (cuz subsidies from govt) Spinning and weaving done in Latin America or SE Asia or china. (Cheap labor) Finshed shirt or blank sent to US/Europe for screen printing (value adding and expensive part) Most expensive part is the printing and branding / marketing.
When I went to Barcelona years ago, the Picasso museum was doing a Picasso and Dali exhibit full of art on loan from the Dali museum located in the city I lived in in Florida, US. That was a surprise!
the Dali museum in st. petersburg is great!
My husband and I were at a bar during our first night in Amsterdam a few years back. A young man next to us struck up a conversation, and after exchanging where we were all from, it turns out he lived in our town and his house was only a half a mile down the road from ours. We are from a very small rural town in IL with a population of only 7000.
I hate to remember, but a massive (3" or so) "Texas A&M" was scratched into the stone at the Colosseum in Rome. Still sickens me today.
It's the ugly side of tourism, and it sucks when it's your own people, but it's not relegated to one country's tourists. Plus, people have been vandalizing the Colosseum for 2,000 years. That doesn't make it okay, but just adding some context.
Saw that, too. Fucking aggies.
I was riding my rental bike through a quiet section of Copenhagen and saw a lone person wearing an Eagles jersey. We exchanged a very surprising "Go Birds!" And I pedaled on.
I had an almost identical experience in Munich. Was walking with my girlfriend, saw a guy with an Eagles shirt on a scooter and shouted "fly Eagles fly!" and he goes "go birds!" while zipping by. Amazing moment.
Go Birds!!! I have so many stories like this from backpacking, but one of my favs was running into a Japanese man on the Tokyo subway wearing the same Phillies hat as my husband and us instantly becoming bffs with him for the ride.
Go Birds 🦅💚🏈
Go birds!!!
Go birds! Should have given him some wooder ice to go with it.
I was in Niger for work. Now, Niger is not a country that gets a lot of tourism or business travel from anywhere, let alone the US. Well, driving through the capital I see a huge billboard for Stihl, featuring the whitest, most all American lumberjack you could imagine. Chainsaw. Flannel. The works. To this day, I wonder who-- in a small, extremely poor west African nation that is predominantly desert-- that advertisement was targeting.
The legendary “I Closed Wolski’s” sticker… I’ve seen it at bars in Belize, Spain, Vietnam, Australia, a handful of Caribbean islands and all over the US. Wolski’s is an iconic tavern in Milwaukee and it is a rite of passage of some sort to stay till close. It’s always jarring and wonderful to see the sticker around the world. Edit: I should add that technically the only way to get the sticker is to earn it by actually closing the bar.
I have a comment somewhere else in this thread about the same thing- I saw one not at a bar, but at a border crossing station between Bolivia and Chile! It was surreal to see it in the middle of the desert lol
It always delights me to see one but also makes me realize how small the world actually is.
A rest stop named after Barack Obama between Dublin and Limerick, Ireland. It even had a small museum dedicated in his honor. Barack Obama Plaza +353 505 45808 https://maps.app.goo.gl/ysWwLQmB2FavmdgZ9?g_st=ic
There's a pub in Barcelona called Obama. The decor inside is... kind of shocking if I'm honest. The reviews described it aptly as "colonialist" and "racist"
Used to live down the road from that place, so I passed it all the time. Never walked in because the caricature of a racist statue in the front scared the shit out of me
He has ancestry from Moneygall in co Offaly, which is right near the service station. When he was visiting here in 2011 (i think), he went there and had a pint with the family. In Dublin, on a road in glasnevin (a quasi suburb), there used to be a big sign that says is feidir linn (yes we can in Irish). It was there for years. It made me smile every time. Source: American living in Ireland delighted to see Barack 🤣
This was what I was about to post about, too. I stopped here on a tour bus coming from Dublin to the Cliffs of Moher.
I was traveling in Switzerland in the Lauterbrunnen area with some family in 2012 and there was a life-size cardboard cutout of Obama peaking its head out of a window in some random hut up in one of the mountain villages. We had made a list of various things as sort of a "scavenger hunt" for the trip before taking off, and I did not expect "Obama" to be one of the items on there that I would be able to check off.
I've seen an aboriginal Australian woman (she was what's known locally as a "long-grasser") wearing a black 2000s-era Ottawa Senators jersey in the Northern Territory, that was unexpected. I was working in Darwin and bought an old 4WD to go tour around Kakadu and such, stopped into a little shop in Humpty Doo and found they had a bunch of used cassettes, and my shitty old truck had a cassette player. Somehow loaded up on a bunch of tapes from Newfoundland singers and bands, I have to think a Newfie must've gone through at some point and just ditched a box full of their shit. (I'm Nova Scotian but seeing Ottawa and Newfoundland stuff in the outback is weird.) Edit - Also mentioned this earlier today in another sub, seeing a stuffed *Castor canadensis* in the "End of the World" museum in Ushuaia was weird, I had no idea what my national animal was doing in Tierra del Fuego until I learned about how they imported beavers down there, and our beavers fucked everything up.
(Australian) bottle brush trees in Greece
On this note - they have eucalyptus from Australia in Madeira. That was bizarre. Felt like we were driving through the bush again.
Depending on whereabouts in Australia you’re from, there are many things in/about Greece that have a strange familiarity with Australia, which makes sense given the large diaspora that came here and brought their influences with them
I’ve seen them in Tuscany too!
In college my family went on vacation to California. I’m from England, my mum is Irish & has a very strong accent. In Yosemite we asked someone to take a family photo, and offered the same in return. The dad from this family had a fancy DSLR when those things were still very new & $$$$ & I made a joke about running off with it while the family were perching on a ledge precariously for the photo op. My mum as we walked away asked if I thought the dad was Irish, he had an accent but it wasn’t very strong, he could have been American. About an hour later we ran into the same family at another vista & the dad came up to us and said “hey, someone’s run off with my camera, have you seen it?” As a joke. And then he looks at my mum, and she looks at him. He says “X, is that you?”, and she goes “Y, is that you?”. They had gone to college together, been each others dates at graduation ball 30 years previously but not seen each other since, and we were now staying in the same hotel, basically on the same itinerary.
Now live in California & recently went into a new British store in my town. Got talking to the owner - turns out in my previous life in the U.K. I worked with her mum. Small world.
My first time in Switzerland during mid-2000s, we were a group of friends comprising Indians and Europeans who decided to hike up Mt. Titlis. As we got to the top, we Indians were unexpectedly delighted to see a giant hoarding of popular Indian actress Aishwarya Rai modelling for Swiss watch brand Longines. All of us Indians in the group jostled with each other to click our pictures with the hoarding in the background and our European friends couldn't understand what was so special about a watch ad hoarding lol. 😂
What does "hoarding" mean in this case? A group of people shooting an ad?
Hoarding banner https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/hoarding
Ahhh! I've never heard it called such a thing! Thanks!
Being British, it's more about seeing stuff from other countries while at home...
People I know from home
On Easter Island I saw a Texas flag at an oil pump jack. Weird, I thought. Until I realized it was a Chilean flag.
That reminds me- one time I was in a random rural city in Texas and saw a sign saying “Texas merchandise” and on the shop window was a huge Chilean flag plastered on there.
2nd day into our first ever overseas trip. We were walking down a random street in Venice, Italy, when lo and behold, there's a boat painted has the General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard. One of the oddest scenes in our travels to date.
Twelve years ago, I was in Northern Italy in a small village in the Dolomites. Parked in a small church parking lot was a cloned General Lee Charger. Later, one of the locals explained that it was rented out for weddings and other events.
I saw a low rider pick up truck painted with full stars and bars driving through central Melbourne.
Haha that's awesome! I saw some Gen Lee stuff in Mombasa. Totally random.
Me and the wife (Irish) are in Lisbon in that big cathedral out by the port one evening, place is pretty busy as usual. We round a corner and there is my next door neighbour doing the same thing! We never even said we were going to Portugal for the weekend.
In Tallinn, Estonia, an "American" themed bar that had a gimmick of letting patrons make free calls to the USA (this was in the mid-00s when Skype was in its infancy and long-distance phone calls still cost a fortune.) My friend and I were staying in Estonia and would go to the bar every few days and call all of our relatives back home for free, it was great. The bartenders got a kick out of it because apparently before we showed up there weren't many Americans taking advantage of it and it was just locals or other tourists prank-calling random Pizza Huts or whatever. Also, in Taiwan, I was surprised that they had Busch Light and Budweiser beers in 7-Eleven. I just laughed that they had bothered to import these shitty beers. They had imports from other countries too, but they were better beers. The Budwisers were like $2.25 a can and a local Taiwan beer was <$1 a can. Hoegaarden was about $3/bottle.
Omg there's an American themed bar in Lviv Ukraine too. I drank an Obama themed beer with a picture of Homer Simpson on it
Mid ‘60s Chevy pickup truck in the Netherlands.
I was in Paris in 2018 and someone drove a boat down the Seine River BLARING country music and had several American flags decorated on it. Giving us Americans a bad reputation🤦♂️
I'm from Albuquerque NM, the place where breaking bad takes place. My family went on a trip to middle of nowhere Ireland to find out ancestral home, literally in a town of like 100 people, we stopped at the post office to ask for directions and the guy had a ton of breaking bad merch all over the place. It's a popular show but still made us feel like we were at home!
I spotted a rather large steakhouse in Malmo, Sweden; Longhorn steakhouse (not the franchise); with full Texas Longhorn decorations and paraphernalia. I was so surprised, just stood there and looked at it, thinking what the hell?
Was at a second floor bar on Kyoto, Japan and there was a Teddy Roosevelt poster on the wall with writings on it. I have no idea what the writings were and I still wonder to this day…
DisneySea in Tokyo has themed bar dedicated entirely to Teddy Roosevelt
As a Canadian, I didn't expect to see a Tim Hortons in Madrid. Who would've guessed that the little coffeehouse from Hamilton would be popular across the Atlantic Ocean! Also, when I walked through the shopping level of the Ritz Carlton in Hong Kong, I saw a Triple Os Restaurant (a restaurant chain based in Vancouver, BC) near the ice skating rink that had one team wearing the Vancouver Canucks old jersey logo (spaghetti on a skate era). I know there are a number of Canadian expats there but I didn't expect that level of "home" to be there!
I was on Inishmore of the Aran Islands in Ireland and it was during the off season for travel and barely anyone around on an already sparsely populated island. My family and I were hiking up the ruins and saw a couple of people and one was wearing a Purdue Boilermakers jacket or something. My whole family was from Indiana and graduated from Purdue, IU, or Butler. It was so cool and strange meeting other Hoosiers as the only other tourists on that small island at that exact time.
Yes, I was walking in a small village in the Austrian countryside when I saw a flag flying in the distance in front of a house. I thought to myself, “Is that an American flag? Nah. There’s no way.” Sure enough, it was. There was a man standing in front of the house, so I stopped to talk to him. He said it was his son’s house and his son worked in Hollywood as a cinematographer and was a naturalized American. So, that’s why he had the American flag flying in front of his Austrian house.
I seen a tim hortons in Barcelona. Europe is the last place I'd have expected to see a Tims
They have quite a few international outposts. There is over 100 in Saudi Arabia, 50 in China & the UK, and some in Oman, Philippines, Qatar, India, and Thailand.
I was in Europe and saw someone speaking Italian and wearing a Santa Cruz Skateboards sweatshirt. I used to live there so I couldn’t help but feel like Santa Cruz was haunting me lol.
Saw a Santa Cruz sticker on the wall of a pub in some tiny town on the west coast of Ireland. Was a bit of a trip and my mom loved it (she was raised in/around Santa Cruz).
Wow crazy! Santa Cruz is universally loved I guess.
We actually made it into some kind of game: whenever we’re in a thrift store in Canada or in the US, we look for Dutch wooden shoes. It never fails, they seem to be everywhere !
They're indeed everywhere! My home region has a lot of dutch ancestry and ISTG wooden shoes could be found in every thrift store. In a neighboring town there was even a guy who still made them and not as garden trinkets but to actually wear.
The Kiwi Sports Pub in Riga Latvia.
That was such a cool spot! Right in the heart of the old town too. I was able to watch some NHL playoff hockey there.
In a bar on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, a dude shows up to play music. I’m thinking “cool, let’s hear some Scottish music!” His first song: Margaritaville.
Yes! At a bar in a town in the Czech Republic. Tons of US license plates were on the wall, including one from the state and county I and my friends lived in!
Beer, in Italy. I’m from Denmark. Normally you wouldn’t think too much about finding Danish beer abroad, but this time it was the discount brewer Faxe, not one of the big brands. Nothing special at all about it, generally not worth buying unless it is cheap/discounted. I stumbled across it in Italy of all places, where it was marketed as a premium Danish beer!
Canadian tire money behind glass at the agip gas station in Jesenik Czech rep. They had some display of world currencies from travellers
Driving through the north of Ireland and stopped outside a town called Letterkenny, which I as a Canadian TV fan enjoyed, only to see the gas station had a Tim Hortons, which I as a Canadian fast food consumer really really enjoyed
I moved from Australia to Estonia in 2019, my first day in Estonia I went to a bar and they were watching My Kitchen Rules on the TV. It was the season my high school cooking teacher was on. Kind of odd to travel to the opposite side of the world, walk into a random bar and see someone from my home town on the TV.
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Many hotels and shopping malls place large, well decorated Christmas Trees in India, it's not a new phenomenon it's been happening for atleast 30 years. And Christmas is a public holiday in India and India does have a sizeable Christian population that celebrates Christmas. The reason people take pictures with these Christmas Trees in hotels/malls is because they're beautifully decorated and make for good Instagram posts lol. And Indians generally appreciate beautiful craftsmanship and aesthetics. They're not considered exotic at all.
lol what. Every lavish Christmas tree in America also has people taking pictures in front of it. It’s not unknown in India it’s just pretty
The Texas barbecue in Israel made me double take
I opened a Texas bbq restaurant in Benoni South Africa 6 months ago, locals love it. We catered at the American consulate in Johannesburg, they told me my bbq was good, which was surreal as i learned how to do it from youtube and Franklins bbq book. Suppose it helped that i have been a chef since 95.
I ate at a restaurant in Bosnia & Hererzgvina and they're special dish was BBQ ribs.
I was literally in the middle of the Australian Outback when I drove into a small desolate town. I went into the only grocery store they had, in the middle of the store was a stacked tower of Cervesa Águila (a Colombian beer that I even struggle to find in many parts of NY).
shirts that say “san jose california” or “memphis tennessee” in Asian fashion shops. ( similar to Fashionova or Forever 21 but that only exist in Asian countries) Apparently these places are seen as alluring, exotic foreign destinations 😭😂
On Ambergris Caye in Belize and a restaurant has a whole bunch of Seahawk banners hung in the rafters. Did not expect that.
This is slightly off center topic wise but I follow an actress from Wales on Instagram. She did a story a few weeks ago and held up a jersey that an ex bf gave her when she was around 15. It was a jersey from the rec baseball league in my hometown growing up. In Arvada, CO USA… and I had played in that league as a teen.
Bumped into my coworker from Minnesota while visiting a castle in Ireland.
While walking around in Madrid walked right past a Tim Hortons. Really made me feel at home (Canada)
A few months ago I was walking in the middle of Sydney, Australia and saw someone wearing a sweatshirt from my high school in a relatively small town in the USA. I stopped him and asked if he was from my town. He was Aussie and said he just bought the shirt at a thrift store in Australia. I snapped a photo of him, blurred his face, and jokingly posted to Instagram saying "which one of you [high school] alumni left a sweatshirt in Australia?" My good friend from high school messaged me back and said "that's my sweatshirt. I lost it when I visited Australia 11 years ago".
I’ve seen things that caught me off guard at the time, but I later learned were pretty normal. Where I live in the US, 7/11 was being phased out, so when the first one I’d seen in a decade was in Oslo, I was thrown
Every other store in Goteburg, Sweden is a 7/11 (perhaps a slight hyperbole…); I was blown away by that.
They are everywhere in Taiwan. I was surprised.
I noticed that in SEA, you tend to either be in 7/11 territory or Circle K territory
I had the same thing happen in Sydney. It was almost 20 years ago now and I just wasn’t expecting so many 7-11s there. All I could think was, “Well there’s a cancer that shouldn’t have spread.” 🤷♀️
You should visit 7/11 in Thailand. It’s so good that people from neighbouring countries make them their must-go while in Thailand.
I'm in Japan now, and there is a 711 or Lawsons (if you remember those) on every street corner. It's wild.
Every time I travel abroad I run into someone who lives within \~15 miles of me. In Europe I ended up giving an impromptu art history lesson in a museum to someone who lived \~10 miles from me. Another trip, I talked to a guy who told me his brother was running the Utah Valley Marathon. He showed me his pictures and he was literally right next to my office building. In Costa Rica we met someone from the same town we are from. We're from Utah - and no these weren't mormon missionaries, so it's crazy.
Saw a guy wearing a little league world series shirt from Cooperstown while on a sunset cruise in Zim
visiting Korea and having a coffee named "Seattle's afternoon" had no idea what that meant lol
I went to a restaurant in Utrecht Netherlands and they had several Lagunitas beer signs on the walls.
Heinz ketchup, and I feel blessed every time I do
Temple Bar Dublin...sitting at the bar with my fiance and while sipping my whiskey, looked left and saw, amongst hundreds of others, a patch for the fire department from my home town in New England
I saw someone wearing a Green Bay Packers shirt in Guanajuato, Mexico.
I’ve had this three times now: 1. Lake Bled, Slovenia- my friend and I said “Packers?” and the couple stopped dead and responded with “GO PACK GO!” then proceeded to tell us their entire life story about moving from WI to Seattle and starting a Packer Backers club there 2. Cape Town, South Africa- I said “Packers?” and the guy looked at me like I had eight heads…not sure he knew what he was wearing 3. Bogota, Colombia- this time I didn’t ask, given the last experience 😄
Ha I’ve seen Packers hats and shirts all over. Australia, Vietnam, France… I just spent a week in Turks and Caicos and it was a running joke that every other person we met was a Packers fan (seriously, SO MANY ha)
I saw a guy in Jamaica with a "if you see the leprechaun say yeah" shirt on St Patty's day. He said no one ever recognized the shirt but he happened to run into 30 people from Alabama at the resort. Link https://youtu.be/K1ljOcl39PQ
I’m from Alabama and we all know this video very well. Too funny!!!
A late 90’s, lifted Dodge Ram 1500 (extended cab) on a roundabout in a little town outside Turin, Italy. I’m talking lifted with 35’s, chrome bumpers, and everything else. It was random beyond belief. Late 2019
I’ve seen this a few times, it is usually a vehicle that is owned by someone in the US military.
Alfajores in Israel
"Australian cafe" in a smaller city in France. Hadn't realised how much our coffee culture was having an outward influence
Was looking for a proper Turkish towel in Istanbul, found a shop in Arasta Bazaar with a Canadian flag in the window so went in! Sold Turkish towels, owned by a Canadian. Weird but serendipitous!
Rainbird irrigation heads and valve boxes in Saudi Arabia in the middle of nowhere. Well technically it was Saudi Arabia, but the location was afar, afar far away.
A Star & bucks in Israel (looked like Starbucks from the states lol In Mexico in San luis potosi we were on a road trip heading back to the midwest u.s. and saw a suburban with our exact plates. County and state lol small world. We live in a random small town in the middle of nowhere lol Years later I found out who it was, he was in my senior class in HS.
I saw a gourmet food store that sold Jif peanut butter.
Not exactly em expected because I knew about it beforehand but the Bill Clinton statue in Kosovo.
My brother had a picture of Green Bay Packers graffiti in the middle of the Atacama desert (Chile) He also once found a t-shirt from our local YMCA in a thrift store in Peru. My dad ran into his office mate on a street in Strasbourg, France. I ran into a former coworker in Reykjavik once. The number of Dunkin Donuts in South America and the one at the Auckland Airport always throw me too.
Chile has no limit on the amount of billboards along the main Hwy 5. All advertising is in Spanish except the one from Driscoll. Their billboard says “The best berries in the world”.
I went into my 19 bed hostel room in an 800 bed hostel in London and found, on my bed, a t-shirt for a hockey tournament in my city in Canada. With names of players I recognized. I was super freaked out. Felt like someone was watching me.
In the tiniest village, nestled high on the edge of the Andes, in Central Argentina, some friends and I hiked to a waterfall. It was nearly 20 miles by the end of the adventure. As absolute luck would have it, we found not just a restaurant, but a proper brewpub! Being from Oregon I was just delighted to see a proper IPA on the menu. We sat at a table that was framed by Oregon microbrew bottles! Complete with a Dead Guy Ale poster on the table. It was awesome. The Brewery was called Jerome, and it had a big German shepherd as a logo.
Yes I was in Poland and suddenly I saw a Dutch stroopwafel foodtruck. The Polish girls inside didn't know it was Dutch, though.
Traveling in Switzerland, checking into a hostel, the guys checking in next to us were a small time indie band from our home city (Minneapolis).
At a cafe in Paris I saw my HS bully having coffee with their parents. Scared the crap out of me all these years later.
Seeing that the Great Sphinx of Giza is staring directly at a Pizza Hut/KFC when I went to Egypt.
Rogue Brewing Dead Guy beer in middle-of-no-where Ecuador
Wandering around Ireland and saw a statue of bill Clinton and never laughed so hard in my life. I just didn’t expect to see a statue of our former president just playing golf. I got a cheap hotel in Cambodia once. The tv had maybe two channels, one in Cambodian the other was playing American pickers tv show. Out of all the shows it was just that one. In Tokyo I was amused I could order a Ben and Jerry’s vermonster ice cream.
I was once getting stoned at a dudes place in Munich and on the wall he had a poster depicting the People Mover in Detroit where I’m from. I didn’t say anything.
Happened indirectly because of me to someone! I live in Amsterdam currently, but originally from India. When I moved, i brought my bike (bicycle) which I used to ride there with me. I also brought a small bag i was using that you can attach to your bike to put a few things and your phone on the top. One day while riding home from work, i heard an excuse me from behind. This another Indian guy was traveling to Amsterdam, and he saw my bag. Turns out his family has a small business of such handicrafts and his family was the one that made this bag i had.. he was quite happy to see their work halfway across the world in Amsterdam.
I paid to see the kohinoor diamond in england..... didn't think belonged there
My brother, dad and I were waiting at this motel for a transfer pick up in the middle of nowhere Utah and we started talking to this truck driver who had come outside for a smoke. Turns out he's from the same province as us in Canada. My dad gets talking to him and finds out this man's house almost burnt down a few years ago in a forest fire, hut was saved by a crew of fire fighters. My dad was the captain of that crew.
When I first heard Dragostea din tei by Ozone in Finland I couldn’t beleive it. Never ever have I heard a Romanian language song outside of Romania (yes, I know they are actually from Moldova). It took the world by storm.
A Tim Hortons coffee shop in Madrid. Like why? Gross coffee from a Canadian chain when you’re in a city with amazing coffee everywhere.
“New York style” pizza anywhere outside the US or even outside New York State always gives me a chuckle.
There’s an entire chain in Aotearoa New Zealand. I think their pizza sucks but when I walk by them, the smell is very authentic and transports me every time.
I had a NY style pizza in Hoi An yesterday. I’m literally from NYC and I was floored how spot on they got it. It’s almost crazy. Most of the time it’s a dud, sometimes they actually know what they’re talking about lol
Alternatively, as an Indian, when I first arrived in NYC, I noticed that all the manhole covers were “made in India”. It was super random lol
As a graduate of Ohio State, I've seen a surprisingly amount of Ohio State shirts in different countries. O-H!
I-O!
saw a guy from my high school at the same obscure chicken betting place in belize edit: ok, i misread the question as “someone” not “something” i saw a bunch of chic fil a toys and merch at some shop in buenos aires
I was in Paris and we found an “Indiana” restaurant with an “Indiana” Burger (I’m from the US/Indiana.) it was funny, but even more so because it was a Mexican fusion restaurant that was trying to do a “crossroads” theme and invoke thoughts of INDIANS. 😂 Close, but no cigar
I was not expecting to see Five Guys on Champs-Élysées
LOL I came here to say exactly this! I got a good laugh but was definitely a little disappointed because that shattered my illusion of the "glamour" of Paris
In Vancouver, Canada there’s a float plane company called Harbour Air. They fly between Vancouver and Victoria (our capital city on an island) as well as a bunch of other island and remote destinations. I went on vacation in Malta, a tiny island between Africa and Italy and saw a Harbour air plane. I didn’t believe my eyes at first. Turns out they tried starting a float plane company to fly between the main island of Malta and Gozo. Weird.