Surprises are big and small when you live abroad.
I am not sure how obvious this is to most people, but something that intrigued me about Japan is how everyone I encountered seemed to be able to read the Latin Alphabet. Japanese people appear to read Latin characters, or in Japanese, “Romaji” (when he visited, my brother most eloquently asked “when you say Roman characters, you mean English, right?”) nearly on pace with native English speakers.