I've never been outside Europe, so I can't really say. I figure where I live must not be too different from a similar-sized town in, say, California (similar climate often translates to a similar way of life).

One important difference would be, as you say, the languages. I use Catalan, English and Spanish every day. There's rarely a day I don't hear German, Norwegian, Dutch, French, Russian... On any random street you may overhear a conversation in Arabic, Berber, Romanian, Italian, Bulgarian... Here one must learn to both try to understand and make oneself understood with few words and lots of body language - we often say that if two people really want to understand eachother, they will.

Not everywhere in Europe is like this, though. Mine is a very touristic area and close to North Africa, so we're a melting pot.