Europe Local Custom Tips by Mikebond

Sports

The most popular sport in Europe is certainly football. Some peoples, like Italians or Spaniards, are totally crazy about those 22 people who play with a ball. It is a fact that the best football teams in the world are European (well, South America has some, too): Milan, Juventus, Inter, Roma in Italy, Real Madrid and Barcelona in Spain, Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea in the UK, Bayern München in Germany, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux in France, and many more.
However, football is not equally important in all of Europe.
Rugby enjoys a high support in France, Ireland, England, Wales and Scotland. These five team play every year the "Six Nations" tournament. But there are five of them, you'd say! The sixth team is... Italy, the weakest one, which ends up last almost every year.
Hockey is very important in Sweden, Finland, Russia, Latvija, Czechia, Slovakia and Germany.
Other important sports are volleyball (Italy, Serbia and Russia have the strongest teams), basketball (national sport in Lithuania), cycling (the most important tours are the Giro d'Italia, the Tour de France and the Vuelta de España).
Well, we Europeans love sports, as you can see, but... we often just watch at them! That explains why Europeans are getting fatter and fatter!

Time format: 0-24 instead of 0-12

In most European countries, with the exception of the English-speaking ones, the official way of saying the time of the day goes from 0 to 24. For example:
7.15 is 7.15 am
12 is 'noon'
15.45 is 3.45 pm
20.30 is 8.30 pm
24 is 'midnight'.
However, in informal situations, Europeans also say the time from 0 to 12. So, if you are writing to a friend, 7.15 can be both 7.15 am and 7.15 pm (while the oral forms would be different). It can be useful to add "in the morning", "in the evening"...
This is true for all the European languages I know, but I (still) don't know all the European languages, so if this is not true for your language, please let me know.

I've felt the need to write this information because I always use the 0-24 format in my tips when I write about opening times of museums, for example, and not everyone may be familiar with this format.