What misconceptions would you like to clear up about your country/the country you live in?
Preceded by this post for all countries, this post for poor countries and this post for (overtly) authoritarian countries.
I'm Brazilian so I get to correct pretty silly stuff:
Brazil is a big place and the climate isn't homogeneous.
People like soccer here and many love it (some are reactionary and fight over games, as always) but it's not as all consuming as some people seem to think.
No, we aren't all extroverts, party animals, social butterflies, whatever, although I do feel the "Overton window" here on social things is more extraverted than in the US/West (and Japan and South Korea) in general.
We don't all listen to samba. While people here most often listen to pagode, sertanejo and Funk (moderately controversial music genre, though not really for substantive reasons) which are generally (keyword, obviously many songs in these genres are serious) lighthearted/for entertainment, we listen to serious or relaxed music too, mainly in rap, because we are normal.
I honestly can't really think of any misconceptions that aren't half-beaten to death about here.
Not all (US) Americans are fat, uneducated, sex-crazed, loud-mouthed jerks. We are also not any more conservative than people in most other countries, our media just tends to amplify controversy because it sells ads and our political system has some issues that make moderate fluctuations in the electorate have less effect than many of us would like.
"Sex crazed" is waaaaay far from the list of prejudices people here have about people from the US. "Insanely Puritan" sure but not "sex crazed"?
Perhaps I should have said "sex-obsessed" instead. I've gotten the impression from both reading things online as well as talking to friends from other countries that they think our media are mainly about characters trying to have sex or being concerned with who is having sex with whom and with what type of sex they're having.
In particular, when Bill Clinton was in office, French media kept saying things that amounted to, "Look at how obsessed American news sources are with who their President is having sex with. Over here we don't care. Our Prime Minister has a mistress and nobody bats an eye!"
Oh, and I should add that we're mostly not puritans either. Most Americans don't really care about what other people are doing in the bedroom. Again, it's a small sliver of the populace who is upset over such things, but they're a very vocal minority.
EDIT 2000, tldr: Ok this whole thing took me on a brain journey so first off thank you. Its also a massive wall of text and if you don't read - don't stress it. All love.
(Just-woke-up-ramblyness-below sry)
Oh ok sorry if it came across as I thought you where all puritan :)
While I do think there is a US cultural streak for a radical-lutheran puritanism ideal of guilt and sin of others - that's not unique to the US and I think me baking it in to some connection to the early English colonists is simply a too neat package to be anywhere near the truth (it just sounds good, you know?).
Yeah I kind of agree in a way - I remember the Clinton thing, most here thought it was kind of odd to obsess about him having sex with someone else since it was an issue between him and his wife (if he promised her fidelity and monogamy then he broke his promise to her). This was before everything else about that spilled out with all the little abuses of power etc etc
I think its important to talk about cultural differences though - sort of divorced from humanity. While I grew up thinking all people from the US where fat, lazy, brutal, racist, religious, imperialists - that all sort of ended with the advent of the internet for me when I could actually talk to you. You're the same as me, the same as everyone else on the planet.
That being said cultural differences exist. Like... the sign in La Guardia airport saying "God Bless our Troops" which to me and my husband ears sounds just demented. Or the thing with saying "thank you for your service" to military people.
That doesn't equate to you being "Militarized and seeing a divine right and duty to god and the nation to do X" - it just means its a cultural ideal which can or cannot be part of a human. Or more probably a way to phrase a wish, thought, or concept, in a agreed upon way that may or may not exist outside. Without the previous information, that saying "God Bless Our Troops" sounds insane - simply because the flavour, the packaging of that communicated wish is so strange without it.
For us here being seen as cold, distant and aloof is both true and untrue. Because certain things that we have in our culture is from the outside a tad insane. It doesn't make us all cold distant and aloof. Just that there's a general flavour in our communication and movement.
I mean I'm not distant cold or aloof - I hope...
Its a tricky subject - because it strips us of our humanity and individuality. But ignoring these flavours removes our collective existence within a certain way to frame thoughts and communicating them.
As a subject it can easily turn in to guilt and morality - but ignoring it can mean stripping us of our past and our humanity... Its tricky is what I'm saying :)
EDIT 2000:
What I think I'm trying to say is that its NOT a gene forcing a behavior on all equally. BUT its like a family, or childhood friends. You're not them - you are your own person with your own existence and agenda and thoughts and removing the "you" from the conversation is a brutality on the human.
At the same time you will always keep parts of them with you, a turn of phrase, a concept, an ideal. You will need to react to it - to take a stance on it. To accept, ignore or rebel against that flavour, something others may not, meaning you will have something of them in you no matter what.
And to strip you of that is to strip you, the individual of your past, and your humanity.
For example. My dad was an alcoholic and died due to it in a pretty gruesome and horrid way. That means I have a certain attitude and behavior around alcohol - not to mention certain things I had to do to deal with his death. So alcohol exists as a theme with me, if I drink I am reacting to that past, if I don't I am reacting to that past. It doesn't make me an alcoholic but it means that unlike others around me the flavour of it exists in me. I have to take a stance, a choice or ignore that choice. His death is very much a part of me whether I chose to or not as a sort of scar.
From the outside this can be summarized brutally as "Alcohol-obsessive, scarred, son of an alcoholic" equating me the human with my past. At the same time ignoring it is also brutal, pretending it isn't there or never was there means stripping my right to my fears, my past, my flavour.
I want to (to bring it back to the topic) be able to hear a US friend say "Thank you for your service" to some soldier and remember the human who says it. The person with both agency and action, but who has a past. To not equate them with the whole of the phrase, and still not summarize the phrase as the whole of their person.
Oh yeah, I can definitely understand that. That's spot on. There's definitely a contingent of people here who believe it's their job to espouse their beliefs to anyone who will listen. For example, I live and work in Los Angeles which is very liberal. We're a non-majority city (meaning there's no race or ethnicity that makes up over 50% of the population). When I started working here, there was 1 really conservative guy at work who would regularly send out emails telling us how he was going to vote in upcoming elections. Nobody else sent any emails related to the election. He would set his status message on chat to a link to some offensive immigrant-bashing website. Most people posted either "in the office"/"away" or maybe they used a plug-in that showed the song they were listening to at that time. Nobody else posted anything remotely political for their message.
And that's kind of what life is like for me in America. Certain groups of people (and it's not just conservatives - there are places where the liberals do this, too), just feel a need to vocally express their views and to try to convert anyone who will listen to their side.
(reread the post I did you're replying to and... oooof that was one rambly post of mine, sry. Or "thank you for your service" is probably in order ;) )
Well this thought cropped up recently as I started listening to The Dollop, a podcast I generally enjoy, but that has this undercurrent of Puritan communication. There is a flaw, it is not systematic, it is due to evil (secular ideal of evil in this case) and evil manifest in people and it is the task of the virtuous to point that out publicly in a sort of flagellation like way.
Just to have that said, I don't think this is "all people from the US" or "typical US people" its just an undercurrent a flavour... Like people from Germany who tend to get really enthusiastic about stuff that others would see as "an interest", or Norwegians who can't stop eating Kviklunch chocolate while wildly trying to be gangsta about it, or French people who can't riot well but really enjoy to do so. Or people from where I am from who are coldly distant to anyone they haven't known for a decade, and pretty smug about it too as if its a good quality.
My impression of the US is based on the American girls that visit my city. They are all very polite, fit, pretty, and want nothing to do with me. So that’s how I imagine America is like. An awesome place that just keep ignoring me hahahaha
Depends on where you live I guess, in my coastal city it seems like most people are pretty hot.
I think this is one of the reasons why Americans tend to have a somewhat more favorable stereotype of Brits than the French or the Spanish do. When it comes to Brits on holiday in the Med, we're not sending our best...
I'm American. Growing up, the only kinds of British people I encountered living in the US were the Oxbridge kind: intelligent, well-mannered, generally attractive.
Now I live in Amsterdam, which happens to be a much-loved destination for "lads on tour". I think that my impressions of the British are now — to phrase it politely — much more balanced.
Lol. I live here and that's how I felt growing up!
I think Americans who travel to Brazil will be somewhat unusual, and also, the places where cruise ships stop get an entirely different impression.
I have a pet theory that a lot of the problems in the US are a function of the country just being so damned big, and I believe the fat stereotype fits in with this. There's so much space, the people expand to take it up (nature abhors a vacuum). It also explains why Texans are often huge.
This is entirely scientific.
Neat. One of the things I hear a lot about the US is that hundreds of thousands are homeless, or bankrupted by healthcare (yearly?) And millions are indebted by healthcare and student loans, sometimes for a decade or 2, and the US has 25% of the world's prison population (5 times the average and higher than places like China and Russia) among other issues, implying it's a pretty bad place to live in and worse than most developed countries. How does that compare to your daily reality?
Yeah, those facts are very likely true. I'll expand a little on what @tindall said in their response.
I think here in Los Angeles alone, there are something like 65,000 homeless people. What's interesting, though, is that the homeless population doesn't all fit the stereotype of smelly, mentally ill person walking around screaming. (Though we do have our share of those as well.) Instead many of them are people with jobs that just pay too little to live in a normal place. So they live in their cars or shelters. A lot of times you wouldn't know that they were homeless. You may be interacting with them on a daily basis at the various businesses you go to.
It also varies by where you live. Because Los Angeles is relatively warm most of the year, it's a safer place to be homeless than a lot of other cities. You're unlikely to freeze to death here, unlike someplace like New York City, or Boston, for example. And unfortunately, we've had a problem with neighboring states dumping their homeless people here.
I grew up in Michigan, which is fairly rural and in the middle of the country. I lived in the suburbs of a medium-sized city that was starting to shrink. I rarely saw a homeless person. They tended to be in the city, which I didn't go to very frequently, and they tended to be in parts of the city that I wouldn't go to even when I was there. It was pretty shocking to me when I first spent a significant amount of time in a large city and started seeing them everywhere.
As for prison, we definitely have too many people in our prisons. I don't just mean that we have more people than fit (which we do), but I mean that morally, we've put too many people away for too many minor infractions. It's really a bunch of institutional racism and classism. White people get brought in far less for the same crimes, and when they do, they have more favorable outcomes. Our legal system favors wealthy people who can afford good lawyers to defend themselves. And on top of it, we make zero effort to rehabilitate people who are in the system ensuring that as soon as they're out, they will re-offend and be brought back in. However, it does seem to me that it is very slowly improving. In the last few years, the federal government closed all federal for-profit prisons. Some states are starting to follow suit. But it will take decades for efforts like those to have any effect.
I wasn't asked. I'm not particularly well-travelled, but I've got some notes about my area (Southern California) and the three major cities in Oregon from when I visited my dad in Salem.
The homeless aren't everywhere. When you say "hundreds of thousands," that is over 3.797 million mi² (the surface area of the US). My city has some concentrations at major bus stops (major transit center, and major resort exchange), but they've also been trying to at least get shelters up (the NIMBYs keep yelling about that as if it's worse than homeless people camping on the street and pooping in the bushes). My city has 1202 homeless, for a population around 500,000 people. There were camps along the Santa Ana River, and at various parks (now the park camp spots are dog parks, go figure), and there seem to be concentrations, rather than 1,000 people just spread out around the city..
It varies region to region, as well. I went to Portland (14,000 homless/600,000 population) Eugene (2,165 homeless/ 171,000 population) and the city my Dad lives in, Salem (1,118 homeless/173,000 population), and it was a totally different vibe. People camp out near/on my street (I live in a relatively poor/dense neighborhood on a cul-de-sac full of apartment buildings), but I've never seen the sort of camping like I saw in Portland and Salem. They were all also really chill, except for an altercation in the Starbucks I was under when I did the Shanghai Tunnel Tour in Portland (old under-city tunnels that run under the buildings, allegedly used for opium dens/sneaking people out of the city onto ships in the 19th century).
@joplin mentioned homeless dumping, which happens to the city two over (most populous/Hispanic city in the county, probably some sort of horrible systemic connection) from the more affluent southern county, which is more affluent, planned-development Stepfordized suburbia. There's also a tendency to ship drug addicts into Sunny Southern California™ because our laws are janky, and many rehabs play it fast and loose, and tend to kick people out when they can't pay. It doesn't seem to affect my city that much, but I'm on the other end of town from it.
Canada
Most Canadians don't live in particularly cold regions. Vancover for instance, typically doesn't dip below 3C (~37F), and toronto doesn't get much colder than -10 (14F). Both cities get into the high 20-30s (60-80F) during summer. together those two cities alone account for 20% of the canadian population. There are parts that get cold (ottawa and quebec for instance) and the north gets exceedingly cold, but very few people live that far north. 90% of the population lives within 100mi of the border.
Bagged milk is only a thing in the eastern half of canada (Quebec, Ontario and the maritimes). going west you'll get boxed milk like the states.
We do actually say sorry a lot. From what I understand the meaning of sorry is subtly different in Canada, it is not seen as an admission of wrong doing. If a car hit me, and it was entirely their fault, I would still apologize to them, because their day (or more) is ruined, but that doesn't mean I think it's my fault.
Not everyone speaks french. Quebec is majority french, Ontario is supposedly somewhat bilingual, but the rest of Canada speaks English. Roughly 20% of Canada is a native francaphone. Many consider french speakers as a minority (outside of Quebec).
I can't really think of any other misconceptions. any suggestions?
I mean, having lived in Chicago and parts of Michigan, it doesn't sound that different to me.
I mean... Chicago's pretty freaking cold.
Nobody really says "eh?". It might have been slightly present in vernacular over 20 years ago, but nowadays, it's more or less gone.
The stereotype that we pronounce the word about as "a boot" is wrong, but it's not entirely unfounded. In modern Canadian English, certain diphthongs (such as the ou of about) did not get the lowering found in American English. I've heard that this (non-lowering) is heard in Scottish English. So, whereas in American English, house the noun and house the verb have the same diphthong pronunciation (lowered /aʊ/), in Canadian English, the noun does not have the lowered /a/, instead having /ʌʊ/. Same thing contrasting the words ice and eyes. Same diphthong used for both words in American English, but different diphthongs in Canadian English.
I've been in a number of Ontario cities and towns, including Ottawa. As far as I can tell, bilingualism is what the government hopes the country is, but, in actuality, only Ottawa and perhaps regions bordering Quebec could be considered bilingual. Certainly, southern Ontario (near the US) is primarily monolingual (English), with most people having weak to non-existent French fluency.
That said, I believe French-English bilingualism is a requirement for most (all?) government jobs, especially the higher political positions (provincial premiere and up).
There are a few pockets of Ontario's interior that are francophonic primarily, like Sudbury.
French bilingualism is necessary for federal employment and political office, but not provincial in Ontario.
Somehow I have had to explain, multiple times, Toronto is not the capital of Canada and we speak mostly English in British Columbia...
What did they think you speak in BC? French? Mandarin?
1 Person complimented my English, and 5-10 others have either asked if I spoke Spanish or tried to speak Spanish to me. I've done a lot of traveling :)
I apologize to inanimate objects frequently, like when I knock over a broom.
Ok, so now I have a new Canadian stereotype I guess? Bagged or boxed milk!
In the states our milk comes in plastic jugs - thicker plastic than a water bottle, but in gallon quantity. I am guessing the boxed milk is similar to how our half and half comes, but we call it a carton, not a box. Cool stuff.
Everywhere I've lived in the states (Midwest, South, West Coast) half-gallons have come in both boxes and jugs, for what it's worth.
I guess I just assumed that bilingual education is taken more seriously in Canadian schools than in the US.
Oh, it totally is. In Ontario, for example, it's mandatory for every kid to have French in the cirriculum from about Grade 2 through to Grade 9. Further French classes are available at higher grades of high school, but they're optional. Despite this, French fluency is very rarely attained by anglophones by adulthood. Lack of interest, lack of incentive (signage, books, TV, Internet -- everything's in English), lack of practice (no French speakers to practice with in daily life -- not in the family, not at school (peers, teachers), not in public places).
It really, really depends on the province. British Columbia has a reputation for bad French because it's not used there at all, to the point that the concept of "BC French" exists where someone educated in French in BC comes out with noticeably worse quality French than they would have if they studied French in eastern Canada.
New Zealand:
That being said, we are still better off than a lot of countries, and our COVID response is indeed as good as it appears.
This is a big one for me. Our tourism industry constantly drives the "100% pure" or "Clean, green, New Zealand" narrative to both us and to overseas countries. The truth is, we're just as filthy as most other western countries, we don't correctly prosecute environmental violations to the extent they should be dealt with, and we don't act in any meaningfully green ways on a day to day basis that is significantly better than say any of the Scandinavian countries—which as far as I can tell are probably the gold standard of environmentally-conscious westernised society.
New Zealand is in fact well behind the United States in several key environmental areas, especially when it comes to transport electrification and the phasing out of fossil fuels.
The reason we're considered "clean and green" is that we're relatively not-so-over-populated, and humans haven't been living in this country long enough to fuck everything up completely. Throw in a little ignorance-of-the-environment garnish, and you arrive at the national delusion New Zealanders are somehow better than other country's citizens at being environmentally conscious.
Yep, and to be fair to them, if everyone believes that nonsense, it's true! All we can do is worry about our own country and make improvements to our own economies. If everyone did that, we might just get somewhere.
Forgot to reply to this. Your experiences do reflect our country, except for the religion part. We've a pretty atheistic nation, though that is indeed less true for older folks, and we do have pockets of quite fundamentalistic Christians.
Are sheep officially part of the census? How about hobbits? :P
I've actually heard about some very good work being done regarding homelesssness down there, specifically in Auckland.
How different is Kiwi identity different from Aussie? Is it comparable to the Canadian/American dynamic?
How seriously do non-Maori people really take all the 'respect for the indigenous inhabitants' stuff?
Haven't heard of that myself, but I don't doubt that such things exist. Of course, they've only a bandage over the underlying problem though.
I'd say that's an appropriate metaphor. Just like the Canadians, we've generally pretty similar to our neighbours across the pond, but perhaps slightly chiller and more sensible.
It's not perfect, but much better than most white-majority colonial countries.
Māori culture is a lot more integrated here than in most places (excluding a segment of cranky old white guys). It's not like the US/Australia where indigenous culture is a barely-noticeable entity. At school, I had to do the haka, and a lot of people use Te Reo Māori in their vocabulary (eg. I use the term puku for my belly). Recently, we had a Māori guy as the head of a major party, and his race wasn't an issue. Most people see NZ as a bicultural nation, though that is slowly changing to multicultural with recent immigration.
However, this status has been hard-won by activists and leaders in the 50s-90s, and it's still far from equal. Māori people are still disproportionately imprisoned and subject to racial biased in the workplace and justice system.
When is 'very recently', exactly?
Also, given a large chunk of US/Reddit progressivism is essentially praising places like NZ for being as left as we want our governments to be, this seems very unfortunate. Is this true for economics too, and if so, why do you think it is that way?
This year. In practice, it was commonly done beforehand, under the premises of mental health. However, this required medical approval, so if you happened to have a doctor which was devoutly fundamentalist Christian, then you'd have to hunt around for another.
New Zealand is one of the countries that bought into the neoliberal economic dogma that became popular in the 80s/90s the hardest. This has had devastating effects on our poverty rates, financial mobility, and the general welfare of our less privileged. So I would say that no, it isn't very progressive in that regard; even Ardern's much-vaunted government has failed to do anything about this.
Brazil again
Funny enough, my thoughts were more along these lines until I found out a few years ago that Brazil's considerably more white than I realized. Wiki points to something close to 50% classifying themselves as European Brazilians and ~45% as mixed, and I'd thought it was much more of the latter and a bit less of the former. Racial categorization there has its own dynamics though, from what I gather.
I've heard that the food broadly isn't that great, sadly.
In Brazil’s census race is determined by the person asked, so it’s natural that more people identify themselves with the dominant ethnicity. We also have a different definition of white. For example, for us most Latinos are white.
We have a whole vocabulary to describe the more subtle distinctions in pigmentation, each with its own social status. It’s pretty gross if you ask me. Just finding more specialized ways to be racist.
My knowledge of the Dutch is primarily informed by football, and the idea that everyone collectively thinks their English is much better than it actually is sounds very appropriate, lol.
A few about Latin America:
And a very large chunk of us do not speak Spanish...
🇦🇺 Perhaps I am not a "true blue" Australian, but...
I have tried to get my husband to agree to move to Australia for years but his reply is "They are the Norwegians of the English speaking world" (He's from west Sweden so dislikes Norwegians) - basically your accent is the English equivalent of what Norwegian sounds to us and the prejudices about Norwegians are applied for you too
(Ok just to make that clear to he doesn't "hate" Norwegians, or Australians - but certain bits are stuck in there like his refusal to move to the island of Hisingen here in Gothenburg, its a thing but not a true thing)
Haha, sounds like your in for a tough time convincing him ;)
One day... one day... :D
Bwhaha, I must admit I quite susceptible to throwing the "c-bomb" out there.
Philippines
(along with one other tildes user according to the 2020 census. Hello kababayan)
I'm not entirely sure what modern misconceptions there are about my country but I'd be happy to answer any questions to the best of my ability if anyone is curious about something.
Within the last couple years I learned a ton from my Filipino roommates and their family.
Stuff I didn't know (and I could still be wrong about! please give your input):
Edit: to add on to the last point, it seems like there is a LOT of talent in the Philippines when it comes to entertainment, but I'm not sure how much they appreciate it. It seems like you can pick up a great singer or dancer from practically any street corner, but they sometimes look abroad and celebrate stars who maybe aren't actually as good.
Oh for the most part this is actually pretty accurate! If you feel like learning more I can expound on them below.
1/2/3 - It's debatable but the Philippines has no main land mass. It's a bunch of islands put together. So although we are an island country like Indonesia or Japan, they would be a chocolate bar and we would be more like a bag of assorted minis. All the same brand but in different flavors. And there's no way to "roadtrip" from one end of the country to the other - unless you have a ship. So most of the cultural stuff got self-contained to their areas. A Filipino from Luzon (Northern region) may not even speak the same language at home as someone from Visayas (Central region) or Mindanao (Southern region), but everyone is taught Filipino English and de facto Tagalog.
4 - Yes, I think in general our people and government tend towards the conservative morally. Due to the aforementioned self-containment of the islands, our news is widely subjective. Often the international media get correctly the pulse of the capital but not so much the rest of the country. Due to this, information campaigns are skewed. Duterte is famously the first president from the South, with the cultural background of the South. Historically we've only had 16 presidents each with different styles (mostly from the North), so when loyalties come into play, it becomes a very hot topic indeed. I'm trying to be as kind as I can, being someone who does not support Duterte haha.
5/6 - The Philippines was grouped together by outside powers. Before then, we were a collection of different island kingdoms that traded with each other. Then in the 1540s Spain decided to simplify their maps and said "All that will just be the Philippines". Also they colonized it. Then Japan did, for like a year. Then USA did for a while. The next time we would be independent was 1946. That's 404 years as a colony. In comparison, we've only been free 74 years. So the hierarchies colonialism left behind stuck and stuck hard. One of which is that the rich and in power white foreigners (and their mixed blood offspring) were considered, well, rich and powerful. So yeah. Although I'm hopeful that with each passing year it gets less prevalent, there is a subconscious connotation that white = beautiful. Imagine my surprise seeing Europeans on our beaches wanting a tan! :) This colonialism also means we're such a young country, not even a teenager yet. So some Filipinos do like the allure of going to somewhere more developed and comparatively more stable. I can neither commend nor judge them, as growing pains of a country can take generations - and everyone only has one lifetime to live, and they want to live it fast.
7 - Yes, haha media such as television and the internet are huge in our country since with a lack of decent inter-region transportation (barring ships and planes) and such a mishmash of cultures (our majority religions are Christianity and Islam, which is quite the combo), media is one of the few things relatable from the tip of the north to the depths of the south.
Regarding the shows, this may be a misconception. I don't think those shows in particular are very loved here, but I live in the Philippines. It occurs to me that Filipinos living abroad who meet other Filipinos likely bond over the one thing they're sure to have in common - which is variety shows.
As for your edit, we are a country that isn't really too well known. You can see from this thread that there aren't many misconceptions since there aren't any conceptions at all. And culturally we're so varied that the only thing we can really agree on is that yes, we are all Filipinos. So what I've noticed is Filipinos tend to fixate on countries abroad as a metric for success. And it's a shame, since there is a lot of talent to work with, even if by virtue of population alone.
In the tildes textbox it didn't seem like a lot, but when I previewed - I wrote too much! It's practically an article! I hope it was even half as interesting for you as it was for me to read your comment and find out how we're seen from the other side. Thanks for letting me share so much about my country.
Thanks for your detailed reply, it's not too much at all! I'm into learning as much as I can about other cultures, and I find the Philippines very interesting. Unfortunately I didn't get to sample much of the food while we lived together, but I'll rectify that one day :)
Oh, I guess I did have one misconception of sorts, for some time. My introduction to the Philippines was primarily through the Miss Universe pageants, and after a couple editions, a young culturedleftfoot began to look out for Miss Philippines every year. You never disappointed.
I probably should have figured out sooner that everyone wouldn't look like that, but I still think the majority of the women I've seen are gorgeous, and I think it's a crying shame the beauty ideal is so narrow.
I hate to break it to you but we do not all look that good. If only!
I will say though culturally we had a matriarchial society pre-colonialism, and though less apparent now, women have held positions of power (2 female past presidents). So there is a confidence and comfort there and confidence can be beautiful 😂 (- Miss Universe 2015)
More seriously, our genes are also a mix between east and west so maybe if it doesn't conform with the beauty standard of the west, there's still a 50% chance it'll conform with the east and somewhere the mix worked?
I honestly have no conception whatsoever other than some joke Amy Wong probably made at your expense. Something about rich Asian countries vs poor Asian countries.
Yes. Amy Wong is from Futurama lol
I did try to find the Ali Wong joke you mentioned but aside from some stabs at her Japanese-Filipino husband, I couldn't find the one you meant. It is not a misconception that we're firmly in 3rd World/Developing Country mode right now so perhaps there was some truth to the joke - but there was probably a grain of salt as well.
I wasn't familiar with Ali Wong until you dropped this comment, so thanks for that as well hehe
Bavaria is a state of Germany, that has a very different and distinct culture that most of germany.
(The biggest former kingdom is by far prussia and the difference in culture between former prussian and bavarian areas are quite noticeable).
Things like Weißbier, Weißwurst, Oktoberfest, Lederhosen, etc. are all bavarian, not german and you'll have a hard time finding them in other parts of the country.
I think both Bavarians and Germans would be happy if people wouldn't confuse that.
This is interesting to me. My sister did a foreign exchange program in Regensburg and it was one of the first things she learned. I'll have to do more reading up on Germany and Bavaria. Before then I wrongly assumed it was one and the same. What are some cultural things that you would consider more fully German?
Aside from the sausages and the beer, the first thing that comes to my mind is the speed-limitless autoban. Maybe the Lamy Fountain Pens?
//There are jokes about bavaria being its own country
(the political party CDU [the one Merkel is a part of] has a branch called CSU in bavaria, which is much more conservative than their already conservative sister party CDU; they get called CDU/CSU in media and act politically as one party.)
• kids learn to write with fountain pens in school (as you said)
• beer in general is a part of german culture, only the weißbier is bavarian. While you usually drink beer in public locations and partys, wine is more common in private meetings (at least as I experienced it).
• Federweißer is a really young and sweet wine (so young that you can hardly call it a wine), which is only available during a short period in autumn . It is usually served with Zwiebelkuchen (onion tarte).
• Birkenstocks, open sandals for wearing at home and sometimes outside
•taking your shoes of indoors (thats where Birkenstocks come in)
•Kartoffeln (potato)
•bread, Brotpause (bread break; you take a few slices of bread to school or work to eat between breakfast and lunch) and Abendbrot (evening bread; you often eat bread as dinner)
•Brotboxen (bread boxes, like Tupperware are very widespread)
•Grünkohl mit Pinkel (in the north), green cabbage with a grainy sausage
• several carnivals with different names depending on your location, like Karneval, Fastnacht or Fasching
•castles, lots and lots of castles all over germany
Thanks for such an extensive list! These all sound pretty great. Castles just don't seem real to me, as someone who's never seen a real one. I know they're all over the place and they're historical and everything but they seem so mythical and out of a story.
Also adds "Eat Federweißer and Zwiebelkuchen" to bucket list.
Neat, didn't know that.
I was using reddit and someone said that Merkel, being from the CDU, is a cultural and to an extent economic conservative and she should be treated as such, although the nature of democratic politics makes it likely this is relative. Is that accurate?
Sorry for replying so late,
in the US, Merkel would probably be between A bit to the right of the New Democrats, although she certainly belongs to the more moderate, "progressive" wing of her party.
A brief summary of important political decisions that she made/spearheaded, because it's not as easy as left/right/center:
So it's a mixed bag. From a european perspective, yes, she'd be a moderate conservative. But also many left-wing people came to like her (or at least be ok with her personally) for her extraordinary crisis-management skills and pretty much drama free leadership. So as I said, a bit to the right of the average new democrat, her whole party maybe like a Mixture of Blue Dogs and New Democrats.
Definitely not conservative in the sense of Republican or evangelical conservative, they are mostly a far right party now.
The impression I heard from people close to me (mostly left) and partly my own:
-still influenced by lobbies (coal, vw)
All in all she is viewed as a respectable politician and while she has still a lot of flaws, she is definetly the best candidate the CDU has to offer and a good choice to represent germany.
I'm getting into Brazillian music a bit, mostly older stuff that I might want to play on accordion if I can figure it out, after stumbling across a few songs I like. I'm a bit surprised by how many different musical genres there seem to be, many of which I hadn't even heard the names of before. (I mean, I just looked up pagode and sertanejo in Wikipedia.) Without any background, sometimes I am wondering what genre a particular song is, so I can find others like it.
So, if anyone wants to talk about songs they like then I'd be glad to give them a listen.
Brazil is huge and relatively old. It also inherited from a bunch of awesome cultures. It’s kinda crazy how little people know about the largest country in Latin America.
It is actually very unlikely that you will die in a mass shooting (guess the country).