Things about Massachusets culture those in large parts of the US would find weird*
“Staties”
Clam bakes and boils
“Down the Cape”
Redsox fever, even for non-baseball fans
Linked to above, irrational hatred for New York (though they do clog up our roads in the summa’)
P-town (Provencetown) = Gay Mecca; I think the closest equivalent to it would be San Francisco, but correct me if I’m wrong.
Western MA may as well be a whole 'nother state…
Boston accent - we’re fast talkers, too, so keep up!
Toilet paper. And if you think about it, it makes sense. Why waste good paper to smear your feces around on your butt when you could be washing it until it’s squeaky clean?
The “sit” toilet vs. the “squat” toilet. If you use a squat toilet, you don’t have to touch the seat and you’re much more likely to hit your target while hovering if you squat vs. try to hover in a seated position.
Hand washing. We usually use utensils to eat our food, so we probably don’t wash our hands as frequently as a culture who eats with their hands.
An aside: My wife got a job here as a bank teller, and in chatting with one of her customers, she told him she’d just moved here from Kansas City. “Oh, Missouri, my in-laws are from there,” he said. “Man, they’re weird. We were visiting them last December, and when I told them I was gonna go ice-fishing on the lake, they looked at me like I was crazy!”
Oh god, I apologize, I thought that big brouhaha of a thread several years back was famous enough that everyone would get the callback…carry on (And I dont want to search for it for fear someone will continue before my five minutes are up :))
One I got from my old anthropology head: chairs. Sitting in a chair seems like the most natural thing in the world to us, but watch someone who has never even seen a chair before try to get comfortable in one.
Actually, much of American beer is so bad that it has to be ice cold. There are a few exceptions. Getting beer ice cold masks the bad flavor or lack of taste. We’ve been programmed by Miller, Anheuser Busch, et al.
Fortunately there are now a lot of better alternatives available to the bad mass produced crap.
Not mentioned above, about the U.S.:
(Primarily from the perspective of Europeans)
–Huge portions served at fast-food places
–(related) Wide-spread obesity
–(except beer and wine) Drinks always served with ice
–Illegal to drink on the sidewalk (in front of a restaurant or club)
–U.S. currency: All bills the same size and color, with monotonous designs; coins have no numbers on them to show their value
–Store-front Evangelical churches
–Laws changing from state to state
–Musical theater
–High rate of homelessness (particularly in urban areas)
–“Excessively” courteous driving
–Jaywalking laws (heavily enforced in many cities)
–Students addressing professors by first name (grad school)
and so on…
–(From the perspective of Japanese and Koreans) Driver’s license cheap and easy to get, to the point where many high schools provide driving classes for free.
I was born and raised in California and lots of things we do here are considered weird.
Menudo, breakfast of champions, hangover cure and all around home remedy, is made of hominy, beef tripe and pig’s feet. Menudo is served in restaurants, at church gatherings and at someone’s grandma’s house.
Sunglasses. 24/7 365
Highlighted hair on young children all the way up through the grandma making menudo
Use of the word “like” as in “Like, OMG, I need some menudo; my head is, like killing me!”
Making a family of friends and animals–most of the world seems to see family as people they share bloodlines with.
and so on…
The ‘flag-waving’ stereotype makes me go :dubious: I keep seeing it all over this board, but when I was in Turkey and Greece I saw Turkish and Greek flags EVERYWHERE. Shops sold shirts with their flags on it. People hung flags on their houses. I saw at least as many flags in Athens and Istanbul as I would see in the US. Not so many on their bumper stickers, but that’s about it. Is it just Northern and Western Europeans who don’t fly their own flags? Or is it just American flags that shouldn’t be flown?
And once again, as far as homelessness goes, I saw plenty of beggars and cripples (Istanbul) and drug addicts (Athens) and hookers (both). And as far as prudery on TV, I don’t know how hot and heavy the Greeks got (didn’t watch Greek TV) but the Turks don’t even have kissing on their soap operas, and certainly no nekkid people. Our TV is apparently pretty violent though – my friends were all convinced from watching Law & Order that you would be raped and murdered if you ever went to New York City.
I lived in Spain, and what people found weird about America/Americans, was not exactly what I expected.
At the top of the list of things I was quizzed about was our strange holidays and holiday traditions, such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, and especially Halloween. “Do kids really dress up and go around asking for candy?” Spaniards asked. “REALLY?” It was so bizarre to them as to be unbelievable.
My eating habits were strange to them as well. Why did I not consume a loaf of bread per day? Why did I eat so many desserts such as yogurt and fruit? Why on earth was I eating raw vegetables? Didn’t I know that that was dangerous?
Also, peanut butter. My roommates could not understand how I could eat something that looked like “baby shit.” Baby shit combined with rabbit food (raw celery and carrots) was just pushing it too far. After many months, I convinced one roommate to have a taste of peanut butter. “It tastes…like peanuts,” she said, incredulously. “Yes, of course it does!” I said. She explained that to her, peanuts were a food you munched on at a bar, not something found on a sandwich.
I know this one for a fact: our wastefulness with water. Long showers, specifically. The French at least in the area I visited had a tendency to follow a pattern of wet, lather, rinse. The lather portion of showering involving no water and the wetting and rinsing portions being very short (also very cold).
I suppose I’ll do Ireland since no one else has. The weirdest thing I find here is the education system. Here is a scenario taken from real life (I am not making this up):
You are a parent. Your children are of an age to start primary school. However, all the public schools in your area are run by the Catholic Church, and your family is not Catholic. Furthermore, because of bad planning these schools are all over-subscribed and therefore the schools are exercising their statutory right to only admit Catholic children. Your options are:
[ol]
[li]have your children baptised, into a religion you don’t believe in, so the local **public **school will take them[/li][li]find enough like-minded parents to start your own school and apply for recognition from the Department of Education (the first time I heard someone say “why don’t these parents start their own school” I thought they were taking the piss but no, that is really what parents are expected to do in this situation)[/li]or
[li]move.[/ol][/li]
And this is accepted as normal. It completely boggles my mind.
German students tap their desks with their knuckles to indicate approval for the lecture.
I still find the concept of arranged marriages odd, especially when otherwise 100% secular English friends follow their parents’ wishes and pop back to India / Pakistan to meet a potential spouse.
Ehm, you seem to confuse “heritage” with some other concept; neither Spain nor France would be what they are without their Basque, same as they wouldn’t be what they are without people of other ancestries. Some of us have this strange notion that you can be Basque, Navarrese, a Spaniard and European without exploding or anything. And I don’t just mean us half-breeds.
The “live mostly in both France and Spain,” true. I know Basque of Spanish, French, American, Colombian and Costa Rican nationalities.
Menudo or menudillo, as a dish, means guts. As in, the thin intestine. Menudo also happens to mean “small one,” which is where the music group got its name.
Allow me to rephrase, for those people with comprehension problems.
Catalan, Galego and Spanish (that is, “the language commonly known as Spanish by those who speak the other language known as English”) are similar enough to be mutually quite understandable by those who speak them at native-like levels, but different enough to confuse those whose kowledge of any of them isn’t so high. Often, foreigners with low-to-medium knowledge of the language commonly known as Spanish by those who speak the other language known as English hear someone speaking either Galego or Catalan and are confused because they do not understand the speaker but believe that they should, mistakenly thinking that he is speaking the language commonly known as Spanish by those who speak the other language known as English.
The language commonly known as Basque by those who speak that aforementioned language known as English, on the other hand, is different enough to be evidently a different language from that one commonly known as Spanish by those who speak the other language known as English, therefore the simultaneous existence of the language commonly known as Spanish by those who speak the other language known as English and of this other language which those who are speaking English refer to as Basque does not lead people with some knowledge of one of the language commonly known as Spanish by those who speak the other language known as English by those who speak it to mistakenly believe that they are hearing this language called Spanish in the other language called English and not understanding it: they realize it is a different language.
Was that clear, if convoluted, enough for you? Now give me a tree analysis
