Aniruddh Chaturvedi, a junior at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania who is from Mumbai, says he’s found some thing about America surprising since moving here.
Chaturverdi said on Quora that he finds surprising:
-The way stores price products, such as one can of Coca-Cola costing $1 but 12 cans costing $3
-Soda being cheaper than bottled water
-Unlimited refills on soda
-How you can return pretty much anything within a certain period of time, even without a specific reason for doing so
-The “pervasiveness of fast food”
-How expensive fruits and vegetables are when compared to fast food
-Huge serving sizes
-An almost-classless society. “I’ve noticed that most Americans roughly have the same standard of living. ”
“Everybody has access to ample food, everybody shops at the same supermarkets, malls, stores, etc,” he said. “I’ve seen plumbers, construction workers and janitors driving their own sedans, which was quite difficult for me to digest at first since I came from a country where construction workers and plumbers lived hand to mouth.”
Chaturvedi is studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon, which is located in Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.
In a follow-up email expanding on his thoughts to Business Insider, Chaturvedi said that he also finds surprising:
-How nobody talks about their grades
-How people are “highly private about their accomplishments and failures,” whereas in India people flaunt their riches and share their accomplishments with everybody else
-How shopping isn’t fun here because no one will act as a “personal shopper” in stores
-The strong ethics and integrity of people, including taking pride in hard work and usually not cheating. “This is different from students from India and China as well as back home in India, where everyone collaborates to the extent that it can be categorized as cheating.”
-How rich people are thin and well-maintained, while poor people are fat.
“This stems from the fact that cheap food is fatty, rich people don’t eat cheap food — they tend to eat either home-cooked food which is expensive or eat at expensive / healthy places,” Chatuvedi wrote. “Unfortunately, it is expensive to be healthy in America.”
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