The rebates

Americans have this thing they call mail-in rebates: when buying an item x for $40, you can mail them the proof of purchase and they send you $10 for example. The whole operation is just a way for them to borrow some money from you during the time between the purchase and the time you cash your rebate check. With big volumes, I can see why it can be interesting for them. I even saw cd cases for free after rebate ($9.95 with $9.95 mail-in rebate)!
The point where I get lost is when it comes to immidiate rebates, those are substracted from the price directly at the register...

Mailboxes

The two first places where I lived here in the US were apartment complexes. I was surprised by the mailboxes because they were locked. I mean by that that you needed a key to open it even to drop something in it! It seemed pretty weird to me that a friend could not drop something, for example. But then, I thought it was just a particularity of these complexes and that regular house-mailboxes were "normal".
Now that I live in a house, I am still surprised but at the contrary: there is no lock at all! Anyone can get my mail. That is pretty scary when you know that it is common here to send sensitive documents trhough the regular mail (credit card, driver's license,...).
In Belgium, we have mailboxes with a slot where you can drop the mail but through which you can't extract it. It's simple, efficient and safe. I don't get the idea behind the mailboxes here. Especially considering how people are afraid of crime here. They have 2 or 3 locks/bolts on each door but none on their mailboxes?

The unbearable lightness of being anonymous

I seem to think of cultural shock as losing one's anonymity. There is great comfort in being anonymous in a crowd, which we only realize when we lose it. You preserve your anonimity because you know the drill. When you don't, then you need to reveal yourself. The moment you open your mouth, they will know you are not one of them. When you ask a question about a simple task, like how to open or lock the door, there you are: the stranger. So many things you otherwise do without thinking or nobody noticing become these sources of potential embarrassment.

When you are able to get by anonymously is when you start getting over the cultural shock.

American cars and trucks

From my european point of view, american cars are absurdly big. What Americans call SUVs often look like assault tanks. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, check out this or this. I just don't get what is the use for such huge cars, I never see one full anyway. I find it definitely scary to see young inexperienced drivers with such vehicles, my "small" (small vehicles in the european sense don't exist here) doesn't stand a chance in a collision against those trucks.
And that's not all, I live in Texas, land of the pickup truck and home of the most absurd of all (on the 3^rd picture, guess which one is mine?):
How can one even load that? It's higher than the shoulders!

US keys and locks

All the locks I had ever come across before coming to the US worked the same way: you have to make a complete turn in one orientation to open, and a complete turn in the other to lock. Nobody had told me about the US locks: you need only a quarter of turn to open or close, and you have to come back in the initial position to get your key out. I learned it the hard way: the first time I had to get in my apartment by myself, it took me 15 minutes! I was desperately trying to make a complete turn, not knowing that I had unlocked the door within the first 10 seconds!

Water

I generally just order water to drink when I go out. I found this to be more complicated in Belgium. Unless specified the waiter assumed that I meant sparkling water rather than normal water, so I quickly learned to be more descriptive. They only serve bottle water that you pay the same price than a soft drink!

Root beer

Root beer is a soda (not a beer at all) commonly found in the US and in Canada. It's very sweet. In Belgium, the only thing I ever known that tastes the same was a medication to use when you have an injury in the mouth. Root beer really tastes like medication to me (and I guess for Americans, it's the other way around). I even brought a 12-can pack of root beer home once, to let people have this once-in-a-lifetime experience: the first root beer. I have to say that they all told me that it was also the last! Some didn't even want to taste it when they smelled it.
I went back to Belgium a second time more than a year after and found, still there in my father's fridge, a can of root beer that I wasn't able to give away the first time.

The way we write numbers

I had some trouble with numbers here in the US. The 1 is just a vertical line and there is no horizontal strike at mid-height in the 7. My belgian-french 1 looks like a 7 to Americans. That caused so many glitches before I re-learnt to write. Especially because the numbers I had to fill in forms are prompt to confusion: my date of birth is 05-07-1977 (which I would write 07-05-1977) and my address was 1601,Holleman, TX 77840,... And so I had my checks sent to 7607.