We do too have pretzels, and I asked my parents - who were around in the 70s - and they said pretzels were familiar back then.
That attitude may have been common back then, I suppose. Although, again asking my parents, they were eating copious amounts of pizza out of boxes with their hands. Of course, they were pinko liberal student types at the time.
This one, I grant you. Although, as MrDibble has pointed out, the roads did actually have numbers back then - I too have maps to prove it - they’d only just been numbered and probably most people weren’t familar with them. I still have this problem with older people when giving directions - they’d much rather use a street name or “the road from X to Y”.
It was only the very conservative religious types who gave a damn about the Sabbath. In fact, in general, it sounds like you were probably dealing with older, conservative, religious Afrikaners.
Where in South Africa was this? I’ve lived in three different houses in Cape Town, two built in the 50s and one in the 70s, and they all had shin-level outlets. I have never, to my recollection, seen a house with most of its outlets at waist level.
Now, some things about South Africa that others find weird:
[ul]
[li]That we call traffic lights “robots”. (No, seriously.)[/li][li]That you can’t pay for petrol or diesel by credit card (though that may soon change).[/li][li]Our weird university degree system, in which you graduate with a BA or BSc after three years, and then go back for another year to get a BA(Hons) or BSc(Hons).[/li][/ul]
Not so surprising to me; a South African acquaintance of mine who now lives in Canada still calls them “robots” from time to time.
This isn’t so odd either–this was the way things were in the province of Ontario when I went through university there. Because Ontario had 13 grades in school (all other Canadian provinces and all US states had only 12), Ontario universities allowed students who had gone through 13 grades of Ontario schooling to graduate with a general bachelor’s degree after three years of university study. Those who took four years of university study got an honours bachelor’s degree. I think things have changed now that Ontario has done away with Grade 13, but that’s the way it was when I did my undergraduate work (early 80s).
Your explanation makes it sound like the objection is to the harmfulness of UV-rays but isn`t there actually a cultural prediliction for fair skin as beautiful?
In the U.S. it used to be that fair skin meant you didn`t need to work outside and therefore was good, until eventually it switched completely. I’ve always wondered if the Asian fair skin = attractive idea was rooted in the same concept or something unrelated.
I once spent a very obnoxious a 3 and a half hour car ride with a Chinese woman who spent the whole trip trying to hide from the sun. It was bad enough that I couldn`t put the top down on a gorgeous summer day, but then she spent the whole trip squirming around like a vampire anyway. This is America, baby, we like our women tanned.
In the U.S. it used to be that fair skin meant you didn`t need to work outside and therefore was good, until eventually it switched completely. I’ve always wondered if the Asian fair skin = attractive idea was rooted in the same concept or something unrelated.
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I think that’s the origin in most cultures: for centuries, the only people with a tan would be the peasants who worked in the fields day in, day out, while the nobility, esp. the women, could afford to hide inside.
In the 50s, when airplane travel became affordable, and 90% of the working population slaved away inside offices instead of outdoor fields, being tanned meant you could afford the luxury of taking long vacations in southern locales instead of working each day at the cube farm and vacationing in Southhampton. (Which is why tanning salons became so popular).
In the past was also when thick was beautiful, because it meant you could afford to eat enough. At the turn of the century (19th to 20th), a capitalist showed off his wealth by having his pocket-watch sit snugly in the pocket of his stretched-to-the-limit suit; in the 50s that changed, because now healthy food costs more than cheap fatty sugary food, so the capitalist of today shows off his wealth by having his rolex dangling around his wrist while wearing a track suit.