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.

  • Guster@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Kinda reverse, but when I moved to Singapore I was amazed by how few people knew how to cook their own food. But then again you can get a meal outside for 3-5 bucks so not really an issue

    • sunbeam60@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      Same when I moved from Scandinavia to the U.K. to study. Not a lot of my fellow students had any confidence in cooking and even the ones that said “I know how to cook” were spooked at the slightest level of complexity in a recipe or just didn’t understand the basics (how do things get crisp, what treatment makes meat tender, etc etc).