I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some pocket money before coming home, while by foot that’d be rather time consuming.
Quite a lot of friends from outside of Europe either can’t ride a bicycle, or were learning it as adult after moving here, though.
edit: the high number of replies mentioning “swimming” made me realize that I had that filed as a basic skill pretty much everybody has - probably due to swimming lessons being a mandatory part of school education here.
Pronouncing local place names. Lots of scattered areas here with place names that are spelled like other places names (for example we got a town called Egypt, a town called Binghamton, etc.) except that they’re all pronounced differently. For example, we have a town called Leicester, named after the actual Leicester, and locals tend to raise an eyebrow when someone asks “how do you get to lester” (that would be the normal way to pronounce it)?
“Who’s Lester? Is he the new guy in town?”
“What? No, the town.”
“That’s Leesester, not Lester.”
“I’m sorry, wut?”
I of course just add to the confusion if I’m the one to break the news, as I have a Kiwi accent, which is atypical around here. So it becomes a “what do you know” kind of interaction.
There’s a place in Colorado called Buena Vista, yes, named in Spanish for good view. The locals all state that it’s Spanish. But they want it to be unique, so no, it’s not pronounced bwena. It’s fucking pronounced byunah. They literally know they’re pronouncing it wrong, they claim that it’s Spanish, and then they still say you’re pronouncing it wrong if you actually say it correctly.
Where I live basically every location is some combination of “French, native American, English, Scandinavian”, “pronounced natively or not”, and “spelled like it’s pronounced or not”.
The fun ones are the English pronunciation of the French transliteration of the native word.
Ruairidh: “Rory”
Featherstonehaugh: “Fanshaw”