How I was forced to marry my second cousin at 16, and when I finally couldn’t take it anymore when I was 23. I called my Mother begging her please let me come home he is gonna k*ll me, actively beating me as we are on the phone, all she could say was “Baby I can’t help you.” Then she hung up on me. Thankfully I made it out alive, nearly a decade later living a completely different life as a new wife and Mother.

One Christmas, we had to pretend my cousin wasn’t 7 months pregnant because her dad “didn’t know.” She was thin as a rail with a big beach ball belly. Denial was strong in that part of the family.

My uncle committed s***ide to escape the hatred of the family. He was gay and their "Christian" values said to treat him like absolute garbage because of it. After he passed my grandmother tried to destroy all of his things; they were/are apparently possessed by demons.

I was allowed to know him, though. He was still blood, after all. I loved him so much. Now the only memories of him that I have are playing Legos and solitaire in the computer room. I have a few of his things that no one will *ever* get their hands on. I'll just be over here, hanging with my demonic spoon rest.

My grandmother sadly had to enter a TB sanitarium when she still had a handful of children at home. A couple of older sibs moved back home to help raise them. Eventually my grandfather started seeing another (married) woman in their small rural community. (My mother always said that once her mom learned of the affair, "she just gave up" and died at the sanitarium. This was about 3 years before the advent of antibiotics that might have cured her.)

So now grandfather was widowed, his youngest two kids moved to town to finish out high school by themselves, and the Other Woman had a baby that was putatively her (still) husband's child. I don't remember if her husband died or they divorced, but by the time I came along, my grandfather was married to the Other Woman, and had been for decades.

He was the patriarch of our very large family, the only grandparent I ever knew, though surely he couldn't have picked me out of a lineup, along with his dozens of other grandchildren. Anyway, this side of the family was fun, gregarious, beer drinking, Catholic church attending, poker players. Once during a pretty lubricated family get-together, the Affair Baby, now a grown woman, said something like: "I just don't know where I belong in this family" (because supposedly she was no blood kin to any of us). My lovely Drunk Uncle Nick said: "Well hell, you're our SISTER!" I was about 12. I swear the windows rattled from the seismic release of emotions over what was finally acknowledged.

My dad's old hairstyle in the 80s. We have an agreement to never bring up the perm again.

My biological maternal grandfather smothered my newborn uncle in retaliation for my grandmother sticking up for herself during his abusive tirades. He’d been abusive in every sense of the word towards my grandmother and their children, and for the most part my grandmother just took it out of fear. One day she got a bold streak and argued back at him. He stopped arguing and my grandmother thought maybe he just decided to leave it alone. Later that day he smothered their newborn son in his cradle, and told her if she ever talked back to him again, she’d be next. He lead the authorities to believe it was crib death, and so it was ruled to be such.

Thankfully my grandmother escaped him some time later. I didn’t hear this story until I was an adult. I never met my maternal grandfather and I’m quite content with that. If I cared enough to know where he was buried, I’d go p**s on it.

When I was 5 my dad one day took me with him to visit a guy about buying a wagon. While they were talking I went into the backyard to play with the guys grandson. My Dad forgot I was with him and just left. He came back 25 minutes later and that was the very last time my Mom let my Dad take me anywhere until I was old enough to call home. The biggest plot twist is I'm now married to the grandson. But yeah my Dad hates if anyone brings up I got left so we don't.

Let’s say you got invited to a Mongolian herder’s family. You arrive and meet the hosts and see a sheep outside. You play with it, take pictures and go inside the ger. While inside, the hosts prepare milk tea and some dry curds. After a while you go outside and see this: The cute sheep that was tied to outside the ger was your lunch. It was killed in your honor and you are about to eat it…. I have seen many times the shocked expression on the faces of the foreigners when they see that….

The Netherlands here.

When we greet someone, we give each other three kisses on the cheek.

Normally, we have a calender with people's birthdays in our bathroom.

We actually celebrate second Easter day and second Christmas day, and we're working on the third.

On work and school days we bring our own lunch with us from home. Usually a slice of bread with cheese, or Nutella, or peanutbutter or chocolate sprinkles. A slice of bread with peanutbutter AND chocolate sprinkles is also an acceptable lunch.

We cycle everywhere.

When it's about 15 degrees Celsius outside, we'll wear shorts.

When we celebrate our birthday with the family, we sit in a circle.

We eat dinner at 6 o'clock.

In the summer we flee to foreign countries to escape our shitty weather. The locals go out, the tourists come in.

We’re mad about iceskating. We try to skate on, for example, the canals and the lakes every winter, even if the ice is still too thin and there’s a real chance we’ll fall through and die.

Flevoland is a province of the Netherlands we made ourselves. It used to be sea.

The Netherlands is so flat the Gods can use it as a pool table.

When someone has their birthday, we don’t only congratulate them, but also all their friends and family.

…Don’t get me started on Sinterklaas, the absolute weirdest thing we Dutchies do.

Apart from partying on the canals in orange on the king’s birthday.

We’re very tall, and we even have the tallest average height of the world! Dutch guys are 183 centimeters on average, and Dutch women 169. I am 1.80m myself (5′11″ I believe). I don’t notice this much back home, but in other countries I’m a literal giant.

We're bicycle crazy. We have about 22.5 million bicycles for 17 million people. My family is especially bicycle mad. We have 10 bicycles for 4 people. My dad has a station bike, a short distance bike, a mountainbike and a race bike; my mum has a bike you can fold, a short distance bike and a long distance bike; my sister has a bike in Amsterdam and a bike at home, and I just have my one bike. We put kids on bikes when they're about 3 years old.

The nieuwjaarsduik (the new year's dive): In the morning of the first day of January, the Dutch join each other on the beach and run into the sea to greet the new year. I have to be honest, I've never even been on the beach on January first, let alone in the sea. It's just too cold. Thousands of people do this though and a lot of people I know do too.

Our houses usually have very big windows, but we rarely close the curtains. It is rude to stare or peek in though, however tempting it may be.

Normally we think of poverty as correlated to hunger and being skinny. In America, because unhealthy food is so cheap, poverty is actually strongly correlated to obesity. Obesity isn't uncommon in other classes either. The obesity epidemic is seen as a scourge of prosperity. It’s really, really, easy to get fat here if you aren't disciplined.