and I know I'm opening myself up to getting hundreds of very very passionate
comments telling me that I'm very stupid for this hey guys what's up it's Kelly
again and welcome back to my channel a few weeks ago I talked to you guys about
some weird habits that my German boyfriend has and now it is my turn to
talk about my weird American habits that drive Misha crazy and the first one is
eating and drinking on the go I don't know if it's just because Americans have
a more rushed lifestyle or we have longer commutes or we're constantly
doing long road trips but Americans are always eating and drinking on the go and
I didn't even realize that this was a weird habit in other countries until I
started dating Misha and we were traveling around Germany together to go
see different cities and on our several hour drive I would stop at like a gas
station coffee shop on the side of the Autobahn to grab some coffee with the
intent of bringing it back into the car or sipping it while driving somewhere
and Misha would always order for us and for the first couple trips I didn't
think to tell him to get the coffee to go because I thought it was normal and
therefore just assumed but as it turns out it's not normal and therefore it's
not assumed and so Misha was always getting the coffee to drink there at the
gas station coffee shop instead of to go and this was just insane to me because I
was like man I just want to get where we're going like I just want to drink
the coffee in the car but it was equally insane to him to take the coffee into
the car because he would never eat or drink in his car and also he looks at
drinking coffee and going out to eat as like a very social thing and so because
of that there's more formalities involved for him it's a bit more
structured than what like I'm accustomed to and we go back and forth
on this sometimes I win and we get the coffee to go and sometimes Misha wins
and we will say and drink the coffee instead and actually I didn't think
about this until I started talking what like this really is a difference between
the US and Germany because I feel like in the u.s. when you go to a coffee shop
and you order coffee it is either assumed that you're getting
it in a to-go cup or they will ask if you want it to go or for here and I had
multiple experiences in Germany of going to a coffee shop ordering coffee and
they just assumed I wanted to drink it there and would as a default serve in
an actual mug so the default in Germany was to sit and default in the u.s. is to
go number two is small talk Americans are famous for their small
talk and this is a cultural trait that I have truly honed I am constantly getting
into full conversations with complete strangers anywhere and everywhere whether
it's the grocery store line an elevator randomly on the sidewalk at a bar it
doesn't matter I'm going to be engaging with strangers at some point during my
day and probably the most extreme example that I can give you guys is when
we were in Vegas recently we rented a slingshot to be able to drive to the
Grand Canyon and back and whenever we got back into the city we were sitting
at a red light on the way to the rental place and the woman in the car next to
us rolled down our window to ask us about the slingshot and then she and I
just like went into a full-blown conversation about the value of homemade
gifts that is like how random these conversations are we were in a street in
vehicles still talking to each other about a topic that I don't even know why
we were talking about that and after that conversation ended Misha just like
looked at me and shook his head and laughed and said but he always says
which is why do you keep making friends with complete strangers because this is
like a normal daily occurrence for me and it's so weird to him because in
Germany you just don't really do a lot of small talk and so he doesn't
understand why I'm doing it and he definitely doesn't understand why I love
it as much as I do but it has been really fun for me to see
him engaging in some obligatory small talk since he's been in the u.s. with me
and he just doesn't really like know how to handle it so he always comes off
kind of awkwardly because he doesn't understand why
this stranger just suddenly decided to strike up a conversation with him using
cards to pay for small purchases in my video where I talk about Misha's weird
German habits I brought up the fact that he uses cash to pay for anything and
everything no matter how much or how little it costs because in Germany cash
is very much king there in fact there are so many places in Germany that won't
even accept card they only take cash because it is so much more highly
revered for many reasons that I'm not gonna get into in this video but
Americans are very different in this regard
much like the Swedes and the Dutch Americans are more prone to use their
card for payments mine Americans might even be on the more extreme end of the
scale with this because I see people paying for like a $2 coffee with a
credit card or it's nothing for me to pay for like an 85 cent bag of pretzels
with a card as long as the store doesn't have like a minimum purchase requirement
like threshold I'm probably going to use my card to pay for it more specifically
I'm going to use my Apple pay because it takes literally 2.3 seconds for that
transaction to go through it's the fastest way I can pay for something and
it is so super convenient when I just have my Apple watch on and just put it
against the sensor and automatically I've paid for what I want
Misha hates this because it is so completely different from what he's used
to and what he's done in his entire life and whenever we were living in Germany
my tendency to use card payments would sometimes caus issues because the
place wouldn't take a card and I wouldn't ever have cash on me because I
just never got used to the Cash is King thing in Germany or the card machine
would take a really really long time for the transaction I don't know why it is
so much longer for card payments in Germany compared to the US but it is but
I love it because I hate carrying cash especially coins so carrying the euro
coins was truly like an event for me I also think that it's way faster like I
said although maybe that's just in the US and not in Germany and then I
like that I can review my bank statements and see every single purchase
that I've made because I'm able to see exactly how much I paid for something
because I don't keep receipts I don't know anybody that does that or maybe I
want to refer to like the exact date that I purchased something and that's
there on my bank statement and it actually helps me to assess whether or
not I'm staying on my budget plan because I can look to see if I am paying
more than what I've allocated in a specific category like entertainment or
food so I find a lot of value in having all of my transactions recorded on my
bank statements and I know I'm opening myself up to getting hundreds of very
very passionate comments telling me that I'm very stupid for this or that
Americans don't have true freedom because we're tied for our credit cards
and we don't use cash but I guess Americans like many other countries
outside of Germany are just more comfortable paying with card and trust
their banks more I am thinking about doing an experiment though where I take
a week where I pay for everything as I normally would and compare it to a week
where I use only cash to see if my spending habits are influenced at all by
using just cash if that's something that you guys would be interested in me
vlogging let me know in the comments I think it could be a lot of fun or it
could be very boring so let me know my road rage now I don't necessarily want
to use the term road rage because when I hear road rage I think of like an overly
aggressive and very angry person just going psycho on the roads and that does
not describe me I'm more of an irritable driver who will occasionally do a
passive-aggressive maneuver out of resentment for another driver I just
don't think there's a word in the English lexicon to cover that exact
description maybe the specificity of the German language lends itself to having
such a word and if you do know a word in German for that please let me know in
the comments because then I will learn something new and use that word probably
on a daily basis anyway I feel this is like a really normal thing in
the u.s. unless I just happen to be friends with the only Americans who do
this but it drives Misha crazy because he just doesn't want to hear me narrate our
drive and explain why a guy just poorly maneuvered through a four-way
intersection or tell a car that can't hear me who's driving in the left lane
and not passing any cars to get over to the right lane like it just it just
drives him crazy and I get that and I've gotten a lot better but I do still have
some room to grow all right last one thankfully because the Sun is coming for
me and it's gonna get really weird here in a second but the last one is
frequently going out to eat now I looked up some statistics on this before
sitting down to film this video and I found that the average American will
spend more than half of their food budget on restaurant meals and that this
is on the rise which to me is not surprising at all now I grew up in a
family that rarely ever went out to eat in fact my parents still don't ever go
out to eat unless they're traveling but as soon as I left home and got my own
job I steered in the complete opposite direction it's not that I don't like
cooking cuz I do like cooking fairly enough but I hate grocery shopping it is
my least favorite chore or errand to run I hate it and also by the time I'm done
with like a full day of work I don't feel like cooking so I'm really
susceptible to giving in to ordering some delivery or grabbing something on
my way home just so I can relax more when I get home with moving to DC this
habit of mine has dramatically worsened because DC is an extremely
social city that really thrives on networking over drinks or a meal so now
I have a legitimate reason to abandon my kitchen to go out to a fun restaurant
and really it just becomes a give-and-take where I'm giving up some
monetary discipline in exchange for some social reward or some potential
professional benefits but by default Misha doesn't see like the benefit to me
going out to these types of events instead he just sees me going to a
restaurant and a lot of money on a meal that I could
have made at home for a fraction of the cost so to him it's really weird
all right so while I was editing this video I realized that there are two more
American habits that I have that drive my boyfriend crazy that I want to share
with you guys cuz I just did them so for number six I hyperbolize all the time
and I realize that I do that is I use the most extreme version of what I'm
feeling so instead of saying I'm hungry I'll say I'm starving instead of saying
I'm tired I'll say I'm exhausted even in my youtube videos I'm always using words
like weird and crazy and I've realized that how I mean those words and how I use
them as an American is not how non Americans perceive those words weird is
just another way for me to say different And Misha hates and I guess they shouldn't
use the word hate Misha doesn't like how I hyperbolize all the time because it
really cuts down the range of what I'm trying to say I totally get how this can
be harmful when communicating with someone because if you're always using
the most extreme and exaggerated way to express what you're feeling then it's
hard to tell what's important versus what's not important so because of my
habit of hyperbolizing Misha tends to call me his little drama queen because
everything sounds like an emergency because I'm always exaggerating
everything in fact I think I just hyperbolized like 18 different times in
the past minute just talking to you guys now so you can see it's a pretty bad
habit and I probably should work on fixing that and number seven the real
last have a I'll go over in this video is always posting on social media I'm
sure it's not surprising to any of you that someone who is willing to put
themselves out there on YouTube probably posts on social media a lot I'm always
uploading photos on Facebook and Instagram I post YouTube videos every
single week and I'm constantly trolling the comments section of my videos
and Misha even asked me the other day how I can be so comfortable with
spontaneously posting on different social media platforms because of how
frequently I do it and I recognize that because I'm on
YouTube I might not be the best example for which to base the average American's
use of social media so I'll put it to you this way Misha has 250 friends on
Facebook and of those 250 friends about 10 are Americans whom he met through me
and those ten Americans post so much on their Facebook pages that it completely
consumes Misha's feed his German friends just
hardly ever post on Facebook and it's not like there's a different social
media platform out there that Germans prefer over Facebook they just don't put
themselves out there as much as Americans do and I think it goes back to
this idea that Germans are often more concerned about privacy than Americans
all right guys that's all I've got for you today I hope that you enjoyed this
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