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I'm a dual citizen and canadian antipathy towards the US is so silly as to be infuriating. It is indeed pretty much the same culture. Those iconic ontario accents posted are like... well a part of a clear continuum of dialects in North America. California sounds odd to you? I bet, you know who else it sounds odd to? Frikkin Minnesotans or Mainers. Welcome to the collective.
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Apr 6, 2017 09:53
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Scudworth posted:In Alberta... It's disgusting. fixed
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Apr 7, 2017 12:56
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chitoryu12 posted:Orlando words My cousin lives in Fort Lauderdale and this makes me nostalgic for visiting him. Florida has this weird dichotomy of being full of awful poo poo but also being a really great and relatively cheap place to live. And by god Disney has amazing restaurants. I got drunk, went on my ancient okcupid, and messaged my top "anywhere" match last night, and so suddenly I've been chatting with a girl from London. One thing that's already stood out about the US is how politically polarized we are. For the most part, your friend group is either very right-wing or very left-wing. Obviously you're forced to interact with your political counterparts thanks to family ties and work obligations, but in terms of who you chill with, chances are your group is either left or right. That even applies to your interests, your bars, your food, your activities, your clothes... I'm a leftist and voted Bernie, as you'd probably expect for a goon, but I'd like to say I want to connect more with conservative people. I'm aware of this phenomenon and still it ends up that 95% of people I click with have the same political views as me, cuz anyone who disagrees with me is in a totally different school or restaurant or bar, or wears clothes that look ugly as hell to me, or has a different accent than me. (and I mean more drawl vs. generic newscaster, not immigrant vs native-born.) It's crazy. At least here in Texas it's insanely easy to guess someone's political beliefs on sight. Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Apr 23, 2017 |
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Apr 23, 2017 19:29
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chitoryu12 posted:Democrats are centrist compared to a typical "left-wing" party elsewhere, but they're still the leftmost of the two political parties that actually have any power in America and overall don't go as far to the right as Republicans. Also, people on the ground who vote democrat usually lean more left than the party politicians. UltraRed posted:The political divide among the places you go and the friends you make really struck home to me. It's definitely true. It wasn't true when I was in college back in the early 2000s. The Bush, Obama, and Trump years have really solidified divides. I think there are some folks who almost end up idealizing Europe (and Canada/Australia.) I lived in Canada and while I prefer it there in MOST ways, it's unsurprisingly not this racism-free, ultraliberal paradise where everyone is taken care of. It's got all the same poo poo the US has, and the same types of rear end in a top hat. Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 15:47 on Apr 24, 2017 |
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Apr 24, 2017 15:40
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Corrode posted:We were talking about "urban" which is "built-on land." Vast swathes of most countries are of course developed for agriculture, but that doesn't make them urban. In fact it's pretty much the definition of rural. As the North Dakotan above or any american from the intermountain west can tell you, there is a vast, vast difference between agricultural areas and the great wide nothingness that the US, Canada, Australia, and many other countries still have in swathes compared to the UK. There are places where you can drive for drat near a full day and not see anything but two-lane highways and the occasional small town with a gas station. Signs reading "NEXT FOOD: 160 miles" and so on are not uncommon. Drive from Utah or Idaho across the breadth of Oregon and you can quite literally traverse one UK's worth of distance without seeing much of anything beyond wilderness. Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 04:05 on May 6, 2017 |
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May 6, 2017 04:02
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chitoryu12 posted:People also tend to forget that America is also an extremely young country. Before European colonization, the modern United States and Canada had little in the way of large settlements and roads (they had a few, like the Cahokia Mounds, but they were relatively rare). The first European colonies were obviously on the side right across from the ocean, so the largest urban centers are mostly concentrated on the East Coast. The West Coast expanded thanks to natural resources and the ability to establish huge trading ports. But the United States has only been home heavy urbanization for about 300 years, and the most recent city to be founded was Anchorage in 1914. Compare this to London, which has been in constant expansion since the time of Ancient Rome and had a population around 60,000 by the 2nd century. Another side-effect of this is that huge parts of the US were developed with cars in mind, where Europe already was extensively developed before the invention of the automobile. You can often tell the older parts of the US from the street layout. I'm from the red county in west Texas (the panhandle) that's between the two clusters of other red counties, between Dallas and Albuqerque. Even out there there's a few areas of the city that are walkable and many small or abandoned towns have charming little downtown cores of a few blocks, but since the region boomed only when oil moved in, these areas are dwarfed by auto-focused roads. As much as the auto-focused transit sucks, as an american I've had the privilege of driving highways and interstates and backroads and byways around 41 of the 50 states and man, taking a road trip through americana is something special. Last year I experienced the road from NYC to Nebraska to SLC mostly on smaller highways and it is not an experience I'd want to lose. I think renting a car and seeing some of the country by road is worth it if you ever want to visit. Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 08:30 on May 8, 2017 |
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May 8, 2017 01:42
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chitoryu12 posted:I've spent a lot of time in New York City over the past decade, and I typically drive up and down the coast instead of flying. I've also taken extended road trips where I've gone to NYC, Boston, Niagara Falls, Sandusky, and Detroit all in a single trip before driving back down to Florida via West Virginia. In case it wasn't clear I was using a generic "you" when I quoted you, I figured you lived in the US  chitoryu12's trip reminds me about another bit of car culture here. Once you're a young adult and get to drive yourself around, alone, you get a pretty amazing feeling of freedom that I have always related to "the road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began..." from The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings books. You start driving and soon you realize that you and this vehicle could really go anywhere you want. For example the main route between Florida and LA, that I expect chitoryu12 will take, is Interstate 10. It just so happens to run a short drive south of where I'm from, intersecting a smaller highway. As a teenager it felt badass to drive around blowing off steam and suddenly find a route that, if I wanted to take it, would whisk me to El Paso or New Orleans or LA in a heartbeat, no questions asked, no ticket, no talking to anyone but maybe a gas station clerk. I imagine similar feelings and nostalgia for them are what encourage a lot of americans to keep supporting lovely transit infrastructure. The freedom of the open road is amazing as a young person, and still kinda cool today. Mass transit is way better for obligations but when you're traveling for pleasure, there's a lot of pleasure from taking your own vehicle over vast distances. Another cool side note, a road trip that brought us through Louisiana is the only place I've ever encountered someone who spoke a dialect of english so strange and archaic I couldn't understand they guy. Turned out he was trying to show us a baby gator they were raising in a watery ravine outside the service station but you could understand maybe one out every twenty words he spoke. That experience is probably more common overseas than in the US. Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 17:45 on May 8, 2017 |
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May 8, 2017 17:41
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chitoryu12 posted:I think Louisiana is the only place where you're guaranteed to encounter people speaking a dialect that's completely incomprehensible in most of the country. That area (New Orleans especially) was heavily settled by the French or colonists descended from French-speaking colonies, which has a resulted in a number of people speaking in a downright foreign dialect. Some areas of Appalachia will have thick accents and mealy-mouthed speakers that are difficult to understand, but Louisiana Creole is a mixture of several languages. My dad was a french immigrant so I do speak modern french, which makes the Louisiana speech doubly weird to me. You think Québeckers talk weird? Hooooo boy
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May 8, 2017 19:58
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Larry Parrish posted:Accents are really regional, like my town has a sort of rural drawl going but lots of folks speak at least a little Spanish so you get kind of a pidgin going sometimes. But thanks to everyone knowing the Hollywood accent, its possible to not sound like a deranged redneck all the time. I just want to chime in that hearing someone say "los federales" outside of a Breaking Bad discussion really, really reminds me of home.
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May 10, 2017 21:42
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 01:27 |
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Contrary to popular belief, there are other places in Texas that are good, and not Austin. In fact Austin is, while liberal, kind of a sweltering shithole. Hope you like traffic and californians, and remember, "keep Austin weird" means "keep Austin gentrified." You'll get more poo poo for treating small town people like toothless hillbillies than you will for being an evolutionary biologist. There will be racism though, especially in the rural east and southeast which is an extension of Louisiana and Arkansas. In any city other than my proud hometown of Lubbock and nearby west texan hellholes it isn't wildly different from any other city in any other state, racism-wise. However there is no reason to ever go to Lubbock, Amarillo, Odessa, Midland, or El Paso. Just don't do it, unless you're a petroleum engineer maybe. Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 22:14 on May 21, 2017 |
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May 21, 2017 22:07
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