Customs and Traditions Trivia
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48 free Customs and Traditions trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every country has a rule that visitors break within an hour of landing: the thing you must never touch, the gift that insults, the drink you are supposed to refuse three times before accepting. Customs are the unwritten manual of a place, and they are far stranger and more logical than the guidebooks let on. These 48 questions travel through more than thirty countries across six continents. They cover how people greet each other, what is expected at a birth, a coming of age, a wedding and a funeral, how to behave at the table and with a gift, what happens at midnight on New Year's Eve from the Andes to the Baltic, and the local festivals in which whole towns throw fruit, leap over fire or parade through the streets before dawn. Each answer comes with a short explanation of where the custom came from and why it survives. It suits a pub quiz round, a classroom geography lesson, a travel-club night or a warm-up before a long trip. Play it on your phone with instant answers, or print it for the table.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In Japan, what must a visitor do at a home's genkan, the sunken entryway just inside the front door?
Remove their shoes
Visitors remove their shoes at the genkan and avoid touching its lower tiled floor even in socks, so no outside dirt crosses into the house. Inside, they change into slippers kept for the purpose.
Q 02In Thailand, which part of the body is considered unclean, never to be pointed at a person or a thing?
The feet
The feet are symbolically unclean, the reverse of the head, which is sacred and never touched; sitting on a temple floor, visitors tuck their legs so that no sole points at a person or a Buddha image.
Q 03Which gesture, common across India, can mean yes, okay or 'I understand' depending on the context?
The head bobble
The head bobble, a side-to-side tilt, is so context-dependent that it can also signal 'maybe' or plain polite acknowledgement. It is found across South Asia but is most associated with India.
Q 04Which practice, routine in American restaurants, do staff in Japan often politely refuse?
Tipping
Tipping is not a custom in Japan; any service charge is fixed or built into the price, and restaurant staff have been known to chase customers down to hand back money left on the table.
Q 05On 1 April in France, what do pranksters try to attach to a victim's back without being noticed?
A paper fish
A paper fish is the French April Fool, the poisson d'avril, a phrase a poet wrote as early as 1508, long before English speakers wrote of April fools.
Q 06English Morris dancers traditionally wear which noisy accessory strapped to their shins?
Bells
Bells on pads strapped to the shins jingle with each step; the dance was dying out when Cecil Sharp watched the Headington Quarry men at Christmas 1899, took down their tunes and set off a revival.
Q 07Which aristocrat, Anna Russell, is credited with starting afternoon tea to fill the long gap before the evening meal?
Duchess of Bedford
The Duchess of Bedford, Anna Russell, is commonly cited as afternoon tea's originator: she is said to have had tea and cake sent to her room, then begun inviting friends, and the habit grew into a fashionable social event.
Q 08During Swan Upping, the annual ceremony on England's River Thames, what happens to the mute swans that are rounded up?
Ringed and released
Ringed and released is the swans' fate, because by prerogative right the Crown owns every unmarked mute swan in open water, and the annual round-up keeps track of them.
Q 09Which small case holding a parchment with Torah verses do Jewish families fix to the doorposts of their homes?
A mezuzah
A mezuzah takes its name from the Hebrew for 'doorpost', and the parchment inside carries the passages of Deuteronomy that command the practice itself.
Q 10A South Korean law of June 2023 scrapped which tradition?
Counting newborns as one
Counting newborns as one, then adding a year for everyone each 1 January, made a baby born on 31 December two the next day; when official use ended on 28 June 2023, South Koreans became a year or two younger.
Q 11German children starting school are handed a Schultüte, a large decorated cone traditionally filled with what?
Sweets
Sweets gave the cone its other name, Zuckertüte, 'sugar cone'; the gift is meant to sweeten an anxious first day of school, and toys and stationery now share the space.
Q 12Which song is Mexico's traditional birthday serenade?
Las Mañanitas
Las Mañanitas is traditionally sung early in the morning to wake the birthday person, and its verses say as much, urging the sleeper to wake up and see that dawn has already come.
Q 13Which country's calendar has thirteen months, the last of them only five or six days long?
Ethiopia
Ethiopia's calendar has twelve months of exactly thirty days plus a short thirteenth for the leftover days, and its year count runs seven to eight years behind because it dates the birth of Jesus differently.
Q 21Ukraine's pysanka, a national symbol, is an Easter egg decorated using which technique?
Wax-resist dyeing
Wax-resist dyeing, in which melted wax shields each colour before the next dye bath, gives the pysanka its name, from the Ukrainian verb 'to write': the patterns are written on in hot wax.
Q 22How is Iceland's telephone directory alphabetised, a consequence of most Icelanders having no family surname?
By first name
By first name is the only workable order because Icelanders carry patronymics such as Jónsdóttir rather than inherited surnames; to tell namesakes apart, the directory also lists professions.
Q 23Which 18-minute English-language comedy sketch, recorded in 1963, is watched in Germany every New Year's Eve?
Q 14Two-up, the coin-tossing gambling game, is traditionally played in Australian pubs on which day of the year?
Anzac Day
Anzac Day two-up recalls the soldiers who played it widely in the First World War; returned men played it after the day's march, and outside a few licensed venues it is still illegal for most of the year.
Q 15In a New Orleans jazz funeral, what name is given to the crowd that follows the brass band purely for the music?
The second line
The second line follows behind the family and band, twirling parasols and handkerchiefs once the sombre dirges give way to upbeat tunes after the body is entombed.
Q 16The Inuit kunik, often mislabelled an 'Eskimo kiss', presses the nose tip against which part of the other person?
The cheek
The cheek, not another nose, receives the kunik: the nose is pressed to the skin and the loved one's scent breathed in, a gesture of affection very often made to small children.
Q 17Which two staples greet honoured guests in Russia, giving the language its word for hospitality, khlebosolny?
Bread and salt
Bread and salt are offered to guests in a welcome ceremony across the Slavic world; in imperial Russia a high salt tax made the salt an expensive, prized thing to set before a visitor.
Q 18On Koningsdag, 27 April, what may the Dutch do in the street without the usual permit?
Sell used goods
The right to sell used goods on the street, free of permits and VAT for the day, creates the vrijmarkt, or 'free market', a flea market that runs nationwide.
Q 19Which chocolate-dipped biscuit stick gives South Korea a gift day on 11 November, a date that looks like four of them?
Pepero
Pepero is made by Lotte, which says it did not invent the day but took up a schoolgirl craze: in the usual telling, girls swapped the sticks in the hope of growing as slim as a Pepero.
Q 20Which Māori New Year festival, named for the Pleiades star cluster, became a New Zealand public holiday in 2022?
Matariki
Matariki marks the cluster's first pre-dawn rising in late June or early July; at the hautapu ceremony, dishes are cooked in an earth oven and uncovered so that the steam rises to feed the stars.
Dinner for One
Dinner for One, with Freddie Frinton and May Warden, was by 1995 the most frequently repeated television programme in Germany, yet it remains little known in Britain where the sketch began.
Q 24At a Korean doljanchi first-birthday party, what does the doljabi ritual invite the baby to do?
Pick an object from a tray
Pick an object from a tray and the choice is read as a forecast of the child's future, a brush hinting at scholarship, in a custom modelled on the Chinese zhuazhou.
Q 25Which dish do Koreans traditionally eat for breakfast on their birthday?
Seaweed soup
Seaweed soup, miyeok-guk, is what new mothers eat for weeks after childbirth, so a birthday bowl honours the mother who ate it when you were born.
Q 26In South Korea, how should a younger person drink beer poured by an elder, according to traditional table etiquette?
Facing away from them
Facing away from them while drinking shows deference, just as drinks and objects are passed and received with two hands rather than with a single hand.
Q 27Which carved wooden birds, symbols of fidelity, appear in pairs at a traditional Korean wedding?
Mandarin ducks
Mandarin ducks are carved in pairs as 'wedding ducks' to represent peace, fidelity and plentiful offspring; wedding geese likewise stand for a long and happy marriage.
Q 28Which Japanese festival on 15 November celebrates children aged three, five and seven?
Shichi-Go-San
Shichi-Go-San, 'seven-five-three', sees girls of three and seven and boys of three and five dressed up and taken to Shinto shrines to give thanks for their growth.
Q 29Japanese travellers are expected to bring back omiyage for colleagues: gifts that typically take what form?
Regional foods
Regional foods, boxed in small portions to hand round, are the usual omiyage, and bringing them back for co-workers is a social obligation, even a form of apology for the absence.
Q 30The furoshiki, Japan's traditional gift-wrapping cloth, takes its name from which everyday place?
The bathhouse
The bathhouse gave the cloth its name, literally 'bath spread': bathers are said to have bundled their clothes in crest-marked cloths, and the cloths caught on as Edo-period commoners took to public baths.