Yeah, my address in Japan was:
[Room Number] [Dorm Name] [Street Address], [Ward]
[City], [Prefecture] [Mail Code]
No, they’ll do their best to get it to you no matter what information you include, and (City, State) and (ZIP Code) are pretty mutually reduntant. But the more info you have, the more likely it is to get where it’s intended to go in a reasonable amount of time.
Especially if you include the ZIP, you can fudge the city quite a bit. It’s not uncommon for two different people to right one address two different ways: one using the name of the suburb, and one using the name of the city the suburb is closest to. This is especially true when the “suburb” is really more of a neighborhood that’s still officialy part of the city in question.
You make me sad. Or maybe I’m more depressed about whatever it was you saw here that failed to make an impression on you. 
Next time, let me know when you’re coming, and I’ll tell you what you should go see.
A lot of people in the U.S. don’t even know exactly how D.C. works. One of the interesting things IMO about the fact that it’s not part of any state means that they don’t have any Senators or Representatives. Residents can even get a license plate that says “Taxation Without Representation.”
I used to think that “Newark” was just an odd way of saying “New York.” :smack: I might have figured out the difference as late as the early 2000s, when I was flying into the Newark airport on a visit to NYC.
And I’d call that an attitude that’s pretty prejudiced toward your own interests. I, personally, happen to be fairly crap at geography, but I’m far from a pop culture slob.
Yeah, when I say I’m from Milwaukee, WI, I usually specify that it’s a city about an hour and a half/80 miles north of Chicago, because that’s a landmark that people tend to know. I might also say that we make beer and motorcycles.
If I want to be more specific, I’ll usually use the back of my left hand as a reference for the shape of the state and point to where Milwaukee is, more or less.
The one thing I find that people who haven’t visited the U.S., or have visited it very briefly, tend not to comprehend is the sheer *size *of the place. Even individual states–and not the ones you’d expect like Texas or Alaska–can be comparable in size to entire countries.
I don’t believe any of those are remotely comparable to the Great Lakes (especially not when the Great Lakes are considered collectively), either in size or in influence. I’d say it would be more like someone not knowing about the Mediterranean Sea.
