You haven’t been to nearly as much of the US as you think you have if you believe this to be true. Having lived in the US my entire life, I can tell you that you are very mistaken.
I sort of have to say huh? I live in a suburb of Milwaukee, hardly known for being cosmopolitan . In terms of restaurants, within a half hour drive (as in from here into anywhere in the city) I can find reasonably good authentic Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Korean, Mongolian, Indian, Persian, Greek, Italian (Lots really good ones including delis), French, German (again some really really good ones),Serbian, Irish, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Peruvian, and Mexican Food. There are also a couple of rib joints, and at least one Cajun place, a couple of good seafood places, and other restaurants that specialise in “American Cuisine”. None of these are chains, although we have our share of those too. There are an assortment of grocery stores in the area that specialise in produce, some are better than others. I love the fruit at Brennans. Most of the Sendek’s do a really good job at produce, there are also various immigrant markets with yet another whole array of “what is that and what do I do with it?” stuff. We do have a new Whole Paych… erm Foods, but mostly I do better pricewise at other local stores. This is just Milwaukee, there is alot more variety 90 miles to the south in Chicago.
I supose that if you never leave the airport or the strip mall the US does look the same, and with the chain stores it is becoming more homogenized, but if you are paying attention at all, there is lots of variety.
I lived in Wellington for three years. In that time I visited practically every part of the country.
Seriously. I’ve lived in or near several MAJOR metro areas in the USA. - New York, San Francisco, and Atlanta - and the differences are remarkable. True, in this age, we have access to the same information and “stuff,” but the attitudes of the PEOPLE are shockingly different in all 3 cities - and those are just three of perhaps two dozen HUGELY important metropolitan areas.
To Europeans specifically, the US is HUMONGOUS in size relative to what you may be used to…
Joe
Well, then, don’t move to Wichita, Kansas! I’ve found that the ones who view the US as intolerant, radically conservative, etc, are ones who have not spent much time there. It’s a big place, and you CAN find areas like that, but plenty not like that, too.
Of course, I’ve left the US myself, but not out of any dissatisfaction with it, but rather because of wanting to be out in the big wide world. And I’m always laughing at the preconceived notions about Americans that are held by many of the Europeans living here in Thailand. They’re even funnier than the ones I often see here on this board. Talk about being taught by the media what to believe!
[QUOTE=furlibusea]
I sort of have to say huh? I live in a suburb of Milwaukee, hardly known for being cosmopolitan . In terms of restaurants, within a half hour drive (as in from here into anywhere in the city) I can find reasonably good authentic Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Korean, Mongolian, Indian, Persian, Greek, Italian (Lots really good ones including delis), French, German (again some really really good ones),Serbian, Irish, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Peruvian, and Mexican Food. There are also a couple of rib joints, and at least one Cajun place, a couple of good seafood places, and other restaurants that specialise in “American Cuisine”. None of these are chains, although we have our share of those too. There are an assortment of grocery stores in the area that specialise in produce, some are better than others. I love the fruit at Brennans. Most of the Sendek’s do a really good job at produce, there are also various immigrant markets with yet another whole array of “what is that and what do I do with it?” stuff. We do have a new Whole Paych… erm Foods, but mostly I do better pricewise at other local stores. This is just Milwaukee, there is alot more variety 90 miles to the south in Chicago.
QUOTE]
Yes, and as an example of what you are saying, one of the best Thai restaurants I have ever found was in Lubbock, Texas, of all places. A little place near the university there that had been converted from an old hamburger stand. It was the best among several good Thai restaurants in that city, all of them owned by one or another member of the same extended Thai family who had moved there. And they were tickled pink to be living in Lubbock, a place that I found to be very conservative indeed myself, too much so! But they fit in just fine. The owner of that particular restaurant was the patriarch, and the rest of the family followed him in time. He was a retired boxer from here in Bangkok, and quite a successful one, too, I understand. My Thai wife gives a big thumbs up to his place and agrees its better than the ones we ate in while living in Honolulu, and THAT is a big recommendation, believe me.
The OP might consider Hawaii. That’s the US, has much diversity, and the weather can’t be beat. Quite an expensive place, though, about on a par with New York.
I lived in Christchurch and the Canterbury region for 18 years, and found that it wasn’t so much physically 20 years out of date as much as it was a frame of mind in many of the populace.
Sure, the country is technologically advanced, lovely scenery etc, but there’s a degree of naieveity about The Larger World in some cases.
For example, we often have friends and family from NZ coming to visit us here, and they’re always leaving obvious stuff- bags, cameras, and so on- sitting in plain view on the back seat of the car at shopping centres and so on.
“You really shouldn’t do that” we say.
“Why?” they ask.
“Because someone might steal it. It’s school holidays and there’s a lot of bored kids around at the moment. Take your camera with you.”
“Why would someone want to break into the car to steal my camera?”
“So they can sell it on eBay for money.”
“But that’s illegal!”
:smack:
Wellington and Auckland are a lot more cosmopolitan, but Christchurch and Dunedin are a little to “Pleasantville” for my liking.
It’s hard to explain in any quantifiable sense, but when I came back from the UK in 1998, I had this feeling that I’d fallen through a wormhole in the time-space continuum and that Rod Serling was about to step out from behind a tree somewhere and reveal that the title of tonight’s episode was The Chronological Traveller or something.
I never really shook the feeling that as a country New Zealand was basically wrapped in cotton-wool, perpetually wearing a set of headphones with calming new age music coming through them, and that “Overseas” was where pretty much anything useful was made or came from. Probably explains why I moved two years later, but I’ve always been a traveller at heart, so it’s hard to definitively say.
I didn’t say there were no cultural differences. It’s just that what relatively slight ones there are, get magnified, just as a little rise in an otherwise flat plain looks like a hill. Remember the original claim was
which is simply insupportable.
Note that the same thing is even more true of Australia, the differences between the states here are almost invisible to the outsider but magnified to the resident.
I’m from Spain. I speak Spanish, English and Catalan. I can wing my way through Italian and somewhat through French. I took 2 pretty-useless years of German but it was 15 years ago and I haven’t used it since. When I spent two months in Germany in '95, I did all my buying by saying “hundert gram” and pointing.
I’m currently living in the German part of Switzerland, going to work to Germany several times a week. Most of the team’s German; all the programmers are from India except the lone Spaniard (not me, there’s two of us, yay!). Official documents, because they have to be used in over 50 countries, are all in English. I’ve been here for two months; I can understand what the guys at the border say because, seeing my Spanish plates, they stop me. Every. Single. Time. My other conversations begin with me saying in German “sorry, I don’t speak German. French, English, Italian?” Everybody speaks one or another, so we make do.
My previous job was in Spain. Some coworkers were Chinese or American; we spoke English with them.
Previous job, Costa Rica. One of the managers for the client was American and didn’t speak a word of Spanish, he just refused to learn it. We had to write anything he needed to read in both languages.
What was the question?
Good to hear that you have a UK passport - but what passport does your lass have ?
I thought the discussion of the U.S.'s cultural uniformity, or lack of it, was interesting in its own right. So I made a thread about it.
Regarding the concern about international news. My broadcast service has three 24-hour channels dedicated to international news, where mention of the US is hardly ever made except in the context of someone else’s news. And we live relatively in the sticks.
You really must be joking. Have you ever been to either of those places? This isn’t at all about the locals noticing more contrasts. My parents, European immigrants, have no trouble appreciating the major differences in lifestyles and attitudes in those two places alone.
Anyone that thinks Arizona and Maine are similiar has never been to either place.
But is the difference comparable to that between the UK and South Africa, which was the original point?