I don’t know if this is regional or not, but around here (South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska) if your grandma is making you a sandwich with cold cuts the condiment is butter, not mayo.
Ahhhh, when I was lived a way from the Midwest, I knew I was back with my peeps when I got a ham and Kraft slice sandwich on Wonder Bread with butter.
Eh, not really, unless you’re counting tourists. It’d be correct to say most people in Hawaii are Asian-- they’re about 60 percent of the population. I don’t know how much of that “Asian” was Japanese, but a breakdown of 40 percent Japanese/40 percent Chinese/20 percent Korean seems about right to me.
Agreed 110%. I don’t know what the other stuff is. But it ain’t clam chowder.
The flavored carbonated water that you drink is POP. Throw ice cream in it, and it becomes a SODA.
In Cleveland, there’s the legendary East Side/West Side divide. It’s been said that real Clevelanders never cross the Cuyahoga River, and I’m finding that, after three and a half years of living here, it’s more-or-less true.
I found that the best way to describe the East Side/West Side cultural divide is:
East Side: Harvey Pekar
West Side: Drew Carey
East Side: African-American
West Side: Hispanic
East Side: Jewish
West Side: Arab/Muslim
East Side: ethnically diverse
West Side: Irish and proud. Did I say Irish?
East Side: old money
West Side: new money
East Side: hippies and intellectuals
West Side: GBLTs
East Side: Cuy-uh-HO-guh
West Side: Cuy-uh-HAWG-uh
It’s clam chowder for those who actually like clams. Babies who prefer the bland taste of milk can’t handle it.
Native Montanan here. If you asked me how far the drive is, you’d be more likely to get it in miles, but your question seems to imply time rather than distance. I’m not sure that Minnesota is any different in that respect, now that I think about it.
When I went back to Montana this summer, I had licorice ice cream for the first time in at least 17 years. I tell people about it here, and they look at me as if I had swallowed manure. Perhaps that is a cultural oddity, because I have never seen it anywhere else. Actually, shops that sell hard ice cream of any flavor are much less common in Minnesota than Montana–every small town here has a Dairy Queen instead!
Along the front range in Colorado (the east side of the Rocky Mountains, roughly Pueblo to Ft. Collins), people give directions using the cardinal points (North, south,east, west) rather than saying left or right. It’s “go south on I25 and turn west on Colfax and you’ll run into the Capitol.”
The mountains are to the west and it makes it easy to navigate. It’s hard to explain, but even when it’s cloudy and you can’t see them, you still know where the mountains are.
Did you ever go up into Saskatchewan when you lived in Montana? I’ve always been curious to know how similar the two places are. I’ve never actually gone that way, we’ve always gone from BC into Washington state.
That should be East on Colfax. We really need a nine hour edit window here.
Good point! I totally hate clams, but if I pretend that NECC is cream of potato soup, I can stomach it.
[QUOTE]
Orlando, Florida is the starting point (generally) where people start differentiating between sweet and unsweetened iced tea. South Florida primarily serves unsweetened tea, and somewhere above Ocala, Florida, the sweetened tea tastes a bit more like sugar water than actual brewed tea.
…and Columbus, IN is the northern end of the sweet tea / unsweet tea choice. Any further north, you might just as well order a diet coke. 
What the hell is wrong with you people on that coast? Do you just not know how to drive or are you expecting NYC traffic across the entire damn continent? If I can drive to Vancouver from San Jose and back and still have plenty of time to enjoy my four day weekend, you can most definitely go see the Rocky Mountains from Ontario in freaking two weeks and have an awesome holiday.
Some time ago when I was still in High School, I went on a road trip with my family. The route was San Francisco Bay Area -> Reno -> Salt Lake City -> through Wyoming (Can’t for the life of me think of a single town there) -> Denver (two full days in Denver) -> Colorado Springs -> Santa Fe -> Albuquerque -> Flagstaff (one full day here, Grand Canyon and all) -> Las Vegas -> Los Angeles -> Bakersfield -> San Francisco Bay Area. This took about 8 days and included plenty of sight-seeing including getting lost in Salt Lake City, visiting some giant hole in the ground in New Mexico, a flyover of the Grand Canyon, the Hoover Dam, avoiding the strip in Vegas, visiting the museum of natural history in LA, and a lot of really really boring driving.
Right on the money! I moved out of NYC but my folks still live in the Bronx - shortly after I moved, I tried to explain where the movie theater was in relation to my house. I said “It’s 10 miles away.” “So far?” I later rephrased it: “It’s 10 minutes away.” “Oh, that’s not bad!”
Michiganders will describe the location of something in the state by pointing to a spot on their right palm. It could be worse, we could be Floridians.
How is it that from just two words (one boldfaced), I feel I’ve known your folks half my life?
You’d have gotten nothing, as we wouldn’t have had a clue what it was! 
You’d have gotten nothing, as we wouldn’t have had a clue what it was!
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! 
(Well, I do love steamed clams. It’s not the clams I dislike, honestly - it’s the tomatoes. I am not a big fan of tomatoes.)
Similarly in Hawaii, in Honolulu. One uses Diamond Head and Ewa(Beach) as directions for east and west. What do we do if we are east of Diamond Head or west of Ewa? If east of DH we usually use another landmark or area such as Koko Head. If west of Ewa, we use Makakilo or Waianae.
For north and south, we tend to use Mauka(toward the mountains) or Makai(toward the sea).