I spent the last 7 days at the Association of Black Sociologists and American Sociological Association conferences, so that is why you missed me(well I’m sure at least a few folks didn’t miss me LOL!). This trip was my first visit to Montreal, and it actually inspired me to write a post, which I hope to put up within the next couple days. This is an annual trip for me, so every year for a week in the first half of August I’ll be gone. These academic conferences always serve multiple purposes, so I am really busy. Besides getting another line on the resume (which we call curriculum vitae in academia–I don’t know why), networking with other sociologists, and checking out the latest books, it really is a good chance to catch up on old friends that I haven’t seen in a year. This year I also spent a great deal of time helping my school search for job candidates, which was an all day marathon. Even though I was busy, I had fun, and I have several posts in my mind that the trip inspired.
The other kind of interesting part of the conference for my is exploring the local culture. Local culture refers to norms, customs, beliefs, and the nonmaterial culture of a particular place. Nonmaterial culture could include the architecture, the roads, the cars, clothing, and any other sorts of tangible elements of the people in a particular area. Many people use the conference as an opportunity to explore the tourist locations, museums, and historical landmarks, but I like to people watch. I was initially worried that the French language of the Quebecois would be difficult to navigate, but that was not a problem because almost all of the people I needed to talk to spoke English. Plus, I was also reminded of how much of language is nonverbal anyways. Several cultural norms stood out to me, now keep in mind I’m not generalizing to everybody here, but I noticed somethings that I don’t see so much of in the cities I have lived in.
One of the first things I observed about Montreal was the incredible number of outdoor cafes. These cafes were full, too. It was almost like a requirement that you ate outdoors. That could be the French/European influence on the city. I’m not really sure. I also noticed how slow the pace seemed when I was at a cafe. People stayed for a really long period of time, and it took an eternity to get a bill unless you specifically requested it. In fact, I only saw one fast food place–Tim Horton’s. The eating culture there was really different, from the types of food, to the portions, to the price, and the fact that I could not get a free refill in on an iced tea.
The walking pace was also much slower. I found myself passing people routinely. I realized that the east coast of the US, especially the NYC area is really fast paced. I know people talk about “New York minutes” all the time, but I didn’t realize how much that sort of mentality had crept into me. I guess because I usually feel slow in New York.
I made several other observations–people wear really dark clothes, the city was more racially diverse than I expected, etc, but what stood out for me the most was the pace and the eating culture. So this long ramble leads me to my serious question of the week. If I came to your town or city, what aspects of the local culture would stand out? This is kind of a difficult question for people to answer, especially if they have not lived outside of their local area, primarily because almost all people tend to be at least somewhat ethnocentric. We tend to see our own cultural norms as normal, natural, and superior. So I’ll also extend this question. What are some of the local cultural norms that have stood out in the cities that you have visited?
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Total strangers will make friendly small talk with you here in OKC without any expectations other than passing the time, and it doesn’t matter what gender, race, culture or sex (or mix thereof).
Another thing is the profusion of restaurant chains and fast food places, and the dearth of sidewalks.
Total strangers will make friendly small talk with you here in OKC without any expectations other than passing the time, and it doesn’t matter what gender, race, culture or sex (or mix thereof).
Another thing is the profusion of restaurant chains and fast food places, and the dearth of sidewalks.
My town–Lynchburg Virginia. My guess as to what would stand out, based on what stood out to me (I’m not Virginian).
People say hello to strangers. When I jog, people I pass often say, “Evening” or “What’s Up.”
Class matters–a lot.
The hippies who never got the memo that the 60’s are over. Someone gave me the peace sign yesterday when I was walking.
Race relations are weird; blacks and whites preach at one another’s churches–even conservative rural churches, but don’t go to the same bars.
Churches are a huge part of social life; almost everyone goes to church.
Colorado Springs. Similar to SamChevre, blacks and white go to church together but I don’t see much interracial socializing.
Went out to get a cup of coffee, and remembered one of the big noticeable differences (which I hardly notice anymore).
Smoking. Smoking is more common here than in bigger cities (although not as common as in the middle-of-nowhere town where my parents are)–probably 40% of adults smoke. The social norm to offer cigarettes still exists (if you are preparing to smoke, you make sure to offer a cigarette to the people you are talking to.)
The smoking example is a good one. New York and Connecticut have basically banned smoking in doors, but I remember being annoyed in Las Vegas because there seemed to be people smoking everywhere.
In southern Ohio where I grew up, smoking was/is much more common.
Madison, WI.
The beer. It’s everywhere. The cheese and brats would come in a close second…
I grew up in Detroit but moved away (to a town 45 miles away so not exactly out of the area) when I was still a teenager. Last year, a friend of mine and I thought it would be fun to take photos of all the buildings in downtown Detroit. So we looked a little like tourists. A lot of people stopped us to tell us that we should be careful with our cameras because someone might steal them. Everyone we encountered was very friendly but concerned. A lot of people asked why we were there and why we were taking pictures. It was weird.
When I first moved to Portland, I was surprised that strangers greeted me in elevators (“good morning!”). In New York, you don’t talk to people you don’t know in elevators.
If I came to your town or city, what aspects of the local culture would stand out?
In and around Edenton NC, while driving, once you turn off the main hyways folks wave at you while you pass them driving and they expect you to wave back.
If you live next to older people, when one gets to being poorly or sick, or a woman becomes a widow, then when you mow your own lawn you mow theirs too.
If you have a garden, you take things like tomatoes and cucumbers to the Doctors office when you go for an appointment. One bag for the doctor and one for the folks that work in the office.
If you go to the DMV, you don’t have to wait. And they smile at you and sometimes know your name.
1. We really do have lots of very good coffee. Even in diners.
2. Middle-class people do not smoke. Period.
3, It really does drizzle continuously in the winter. Summers are very dry. We talk about it a lot.
4. Many very successful businessmen, even bankers, never wear a suit…rarely even a tie. (Male lawyers wear suits.)
5. We have lots of sprawl.
I live in Cardiff, South Wales. When I first moved here, after having lived in Barcelona for 7 years, I was completely freaked out because no one here ever makes eye contact with you when you pass on the street, whereas in BCN, everyone does. Welsh people I’ve mentioned this to have said that making eye contact with people you don’t know could be perceived as aggressive.
However, people you don’t know will strike up conversations with you at places like bus stops and shops.
Also, it’s perfectly normal here to acknowledge, smile, talk to and play with small children and babies you come into contact with in public. From what I hear about the US, that would definitely freak a lot of people out.
On the down side, being so drunk you’re puking all over the street is no big deal.
I’ve had a hard time with this one, but thank something for Seattle Male who has given me things to agree with and disagree with and report other people’s disagreements with.
1. Many folks from NY think that Seattle and NW coffee sucks. I don’t drink the nasty stuff myself, but those who do report NW coffee as being very, very weak and lacking any special coffeeish flavor.
2. I smoke. I’m solidly middle-class. I know an ever dwindling, but still significant, number of middle-class folks who smoke. Although this is an anecdotal teeny sampling, of course.
3. Yes, indeed we do.
4. The no suits thing is a NW thing. The same thing happens in Portland. When I found my first job in the NW, I went for the interview and they said, “We want you to work here, but if you come in wearing a suit we’re sending you home.” I was shocked after my years in NY and the uniform/suit wearing and the utterly useless fashion replacement for the cod-piece, the tie.
5. Everywhere that has a lot of people has a lot of sprawl. Not so much in the NE where towns had already used up most of the land, although they do it too.
6. Monorail!
7. Monorail mishaps causing monorail shutdowns (fire, collisions – yes, collisions. look it up).
8. Monorail politics. Should we extend the mass transit of the future of the 1950’s to the region or should we kill it?
9. More roll over accidents than anywhere I have ever lived. This includes lots of single car rollovers.
10. Music. Music. More music. An utterly fantastic local music scene.
11. KEXP. The best radio station there is. Listen to it streaming. Donate money to it.
This is a great question for a blog!
I’m from Minneapolis. We’re stand-offish. You really don’t talk to strangers here and generally don’t make small-talk in the elevator. In fact, there’s a whole code of elevator behavior–four people get on the elevator in the lobby and stand, essentially, in the corners of the elevator. People on left side get off on the fifth floor. One of the people in the right corner MUST move across the elevator, because it would be inappropriate to stand so close to a stranger for even a couple of floors when you didn’t have to.
It’s really segregated by race, far more so than most cities. Class mitigates this a bit–people will usually socialize across race lines before they will socialize across class lines.
It’s extremely local–that is, we have some city-type stuff but we have only one or two of each thing. Which is kind of delightful, because it’s easy to know most of the city really well, it’s easy to be a regular at a congenial place, and there’s a lot of shared culture. It’s also easy to bike from one end of the city to the other.
Everyone has opinions about our neighbor-city, St. Paul: Is it a paradise of cheap rents and old houses, or a hick, conservative town where no one opens their doors after dark? And St. Paul is so close, but it really is different.
I walk across a bridge over the Mississippi every weekday, which has a certain mythic resonance.
There’s a LOT of houses rather than apartments, so there’s a lot of greenspace and gardens, but there’s also a lot of culture built around private space and homeownership.
For a small provincial city, we have large populations of Somalis, Hmong, and recently Mexican-Americans. There’s also a large housing complex called Little Earth (mere yards from my house, says whitey Frowner) which is Section 8 housing that mostly Native (Ojibwe and Lakota, mainly).
Some people in Minneapolis strongly support the city’s efforts to support and house refugees from Laos and Somalia…or rather, most people support this some of the time, when it’s framed as food and cultural diversity. But there’s also a lot of tension from a lot of stuff, racism, misunderstanding, the fact that most of the Somali people are Muslim and many women wear at least a head-scarf and a lot of people born here don’t get that even when they’re not actively hostile, African-American people feeling that many white people think of Somali immigrants as “good”, “deserving” while being racist against black people who were born here (which is, I think, an accurate feeling). It can be a marvel and it can be a mess.
Chicago suburbs:
Despite the existence of sidewalks, no one walks anywhere. Even a kid on his or her way to a soccer game expects to be driven if the distance is more than 1/2 mile.
Despite living within 5 to 20 miles of a city with world-class cultural amenities (one of the world’s finest symphony orchestras, 5 major-league teams, renowned museums, famous schools, what amounts to an inland seacoast, etc., etc.), few people from the suburbs ever go to Chicago except for work and the occasional ball game. And they seem to be proud of it. The reason given is usually fear of city traffic. Suggestions to use public transport are usually treated like the questioner is from Mars. I suspect a major unvoiced reason is that a close eye on Chicago news reveals the presence of Negroes in Chicago, and many suburbanites don’t wish to risk encountering one.
While as a whole the Chicago suburbs have people with a variety of national, racial and cultural backgrounds, integration in the suburbs is like a bag of marbles, with each marble representing a particular neighborhood or suburb. Thus, you have your black suburb, your poor suburb, your Hispanic suburb, your Caucasian suburb, but there are few suburbs that have people of varying origins living next door to each other.
Despite the presence of numerous able-bodied high-school age children, most establishments with entry-level positions (fast-food franchises, etc.) are staffed by a majority of people not from the neighborhood and in many cases not from this country. However, all the kids are whizzes at video games.
Many government services are rendered not on the basis of town/village/city municipal boundaries, but by independent districts whose sole responsibility is that one service and whose boundaries are completely different from municipal boundaries. Thus, while the cops are based on the village/etc. government, the schools are run by school districts that have parts of many towns in them (and the high school and elementary/middle school districts are often different), the sewers and water are provided by sanitary districts that are different from either the municipality or the school district, etc. This includes fire protection, libraries, mosquito abatement, community c0lleges, etc., all of which are separate districts with taxing powers. The roads in front of your house could be maintained by the village, the township (don’t ask), the county, or the state. Sometimes within a few feet of each other. Your property tax bill breakdown is a page in itself. And you need to save it so that you have a fighting chance on figuring out who to call if you have a problem with any of these.
All of this means that government is even less directly accountable to the citzenry than usual, since it’s organization is impenetrable.
I don’t drink coffee, so I can’t answer for that. Chicago seems to have submitted to the will of Sauron (I mean, Starbucks). Can some caffeine addict explain to me how a cup of coffee is worth $5.00? I can get a joint for less than that.
The favorite local fast foods (and these are not dominated by national franchises) are hotdogs/polish sausage and pizza.
Chicago pizza is the best I have ever eaten, easily beating out anything served anywhere on the East coast certainly. Pizza always has tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese. Anything else is fine, but without those two ingredients it’s not pizza. Also, there are two varieties; thick crust and thin crust. Thin crust is what you non-Chicagoans are used to. Thick crust, about 1/2 inch thick, *if made correctly* includes some corn meal and crumbles a bit. Pizza made on crust that is simply thick bread is inferior. I recommend Lou Malnati’s (any of them), or Pizzeria Uno or Due in a pinch. Home Run Inn is a good thin-crust, even the frozen stuff you can buy at the grocery.
The stuff you buy that is represented as Polish Sausage in the supermarket is not Polish sausage. Polish sausage is bought cooked from some guy with a cart in the neighborhood or at a local establishment. Or, you can buy it raw or smoked at a sausage shop; the best is from a shop where half the signs are in Polish and I’m a foot taller than anyone else in there. You can tell it’s genuine if a) it’s in natural casing, b) the meat is pork that you can tell is of a coarse grind, c) you can see the mustard seed, caraway seed and coarse ground pepper grains in it, and d) it is not colored red. Oh, and the garlic smell will knock you down if you are unprepared. Boil it for about 30 minutes, toss it on the grill for browning (optional), and serve with horseradish. If you want some within a week of Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas or New Year’s, order a few days ahead, as many households in the Chicago area will be serving it at that time.
Hot dogs (and Polish Sausage) are served in poppy seed buns with mustard, relish (which may be colored a green not normally found in nature), chopped onions, chopped tomatoes, and celery salt. Chili is available on request. The salad may well completely hide the hot dog. If you do not wish to be instantly tabbed as a tourist, do not ask for ketchup. You may encounter hostility. In any case, they may not have any.
Signs intended to be read by maintenance people or people with similar jobs (such as those “This is trash, please take away” stickers you put on stuff at work) will be in English, Spanish and Polish.
My origin in the East Coast means I talk faster and walk faster than the locals. But the locals talk faster and walk faster than people Downstate (farm country).
Chicago is run by Mayor Daley. When Daley I died after 21 years in office, it took the news commentators on TV and radio weeks to stop saying “Mayor Daley” when they were talking about the Mayor. Now his son, Daley II (Richard M. Daley instead of Richard J. Daley) is in charge and will exceed his father’s tenure by the end of his term. And make no mistake, he’s in charge. A close reading of the city charter would lead you to believe that Chicago has a “weak mayor/strong legislature” government. This is at variance with reality. Almost all the aldermen and women owe their seat to Mayor Daley’s political organizations (slating, money, political workers, etc.). If he dropped his pants on the other side of the street and told all the aldermen to kiss his ass, one would only hope that the crosswalk sign said “Walk” or you’d have 50 people run down in the middle of the road.
Mayor Daley is a Democrat. All 50 aldermen are Democrats. All of the County officeholders are Democrats. Winning the Democratic primary is tantamount to election in Chicago or Cook County. A Republican in Chicago is like a black man at a KKK meeting.
The gas prices are officially the highest in the nation, about ~$3.30/gallon or more right now.
Law firms and people working at banks and financial houses do the suit-and-tie thing. Maybe some of the professional services folks downtown. Increasingly, no one else does. Which means that my Spiderman tie no longer sees the light of day, unfortunately.
Chicago. The blues. Everywhere and anywhere. Big corporate-style venues and little holes-in-the-walls. I’ve never heard of anyone of any race getting hassled in a blues club regardless of the neighborhood it’s in.
The rest of the music scene? Live music all over. Every tour by every major artist in any music style includes Chicago. Radio stations are mostly rock-n’-roll and talk. Some country, not much, surprisingly. Gospel, folk and the blues are there, too. Two classical stations, I think. You are likely not more than 15 minutes driving time from live music in the ‘burbs and 15 minutes walking time in the city.
The “Loop” is formally an actual oval of rapid transit tracks that is elevated above street level surrounding 3 or 4 square miles in downtown Chicago. All rapid transit trains except one go to the Loop. Occasionally, a train falls off, but no one’s been killed in such an accident for a few years. But to say that an office or location is “in the Loop” extends near the Loop as well as in it.
You are a Sox fan. Or, you are a Cubs fan. Representing yourself as a fan of both is heresy and will gain you contempt from all. Until last year, the Sox were regarded as the ugly stepchild, with a soulless corporate ball park in a run-down neighborhood, whereas the Cubs have a glorious old ball park in a yuppified neighborhood that everyone feels safe in. Cubs fans looked down at Sox fans. Now Sox fans look down on a World Championship banner, and the Chicago Cubs’ fans have gone the longest without winning a World Series of all the Major League franchises. Sox management wants to win. The Cubs are owned by a media conglomerate (the Chicago Tribune) that wants to keep profits up and use the Cubs to provide programming for the TV station they own. Since people fill Wrigley Field (where the Cubs play) for just about every game regardless of how badly the Cubs suck, it works for them. Wrigley really is a great place to watch a ball game, but most of the fans are there to watch each other; Wrigley Field is possibly the world’s biggest singles bar.
Sox fans live south of I-290 (which bisects the city in the middle from east to west). Cubs fans live north of it. Taking up the cause of the other team makes you a traitor. Both fans glory in discomfiture of the other team.
People will talk to strangers. Even in the city.
If you live in Chicago, you can often intelligibly communicate your home location by citing what Roman Catholic parish you live in. The local Roman Catholic bishop is either a Cardinal or is named one within a couple of months after assuming his seat. Anything that he gets involved in or that happens to him is treated by the media the same as if it involved or was happening to the Mayor or Governor. No other religious leader in the city or suburbs gets anything close to such treatment. Between the Irish and the Polish, there’s a lot of Catholics in Chicago.
Speaking of nationalities; if you are running for public office and you have any Irish blood in your family, you might change your name if it is not recognizably Irish to one that is. A woman who is Irish and has married outside that nationality will keep her maiden name as her middle name and list it on the ballot. A Polish name goes well on the ballot. If you live in Chicago long, you will learn how to pronounce “Wlodarczk” correctly, without hesitation or stumbling. If you are Irish or Polish, and don’t live in the old neighborhood, you or your parents probably moved out to specific suburbs with a lot of Polish or Irish in them. Should you go to visit your or your parents’ old house, someone with a name like “Sanchez” or “Garcia” lives there. However, if you go to the local police station or firehouse, you’ll find plenty of Wlodarczks and Dunnes there.
Since I am from Montreal, a few comments.
1) Yes, you can take all the time in the world to finish your coffee and talk here. No one will bother you.
2) We like the outdoor cafes. This has as much to do with pretedning we don’t live in an icy deathscape for most of the year as with any European influence.
3) What you may not have noticed is separate cheques. The default here is almost always that everyone pays their own bill. At the very least, most places will ask you if anyone wants to pay together, but usually the bills just come separate.
RonF has pretty accurately characterized Chicago and it’s suburbs. Since I’m a bit more familiar with the suburbs, I will recount a couple of true stories that have happened to me out in the super yuppie-white county of Dupage. These will easily give you a good picture of what it is like to live here.
I used to live in a condo complex in a town called Naperville. You may have heard of it, it’s won alot of awards for being the best place to live. Of course, they don’t mention that this is only true if you are upper middle class, married, white, christian – preferrably catholic or it’s close variant lutheran, and have at least one kid. When taking a cab from the train to my home while my car was in the shop, I had to tell the cabbie where I lived. I was promptly informed that I lived in the ghetto and that a “nice girl like me ought to find a better place to live.” I inquired as to why where I lived was the ghetto, since my neighbors were all very nice, clean people and the neighborhood was quiet and safe. Apparently, I lived in the ghetto because the cabbie had once seen a black person there, and also there were spanish names on the mailboxes.
While I resided in the same place, I lived about 1 mile from a grocery store, with the world’s most useless sidewalk in between. It dead-ended across the major street with a 50 mph limit, and forced you to walk on the road until you got to the street entrance to the parking lot, or go through a really big ditch. I’m an adventurous sort, so when I only needed 1 or 2 items, I’d grab a backpack and walk over. I actually got questioned by the police as to what I was doing walking to the grocery store! As though I obviously didn’t belong there since I thought a mile was a stupid waste of gas for a gallon of milk and some eggs.
I now live slightly further east, residing in a more yuppie neighborhood with my in-laws. Apparently, I stand out as odd because my four-year old is only in 2 organized activities a week (swim lessons and aikido.) Also, since the park is across the street and I can see it from the kitchen, he is sometimes allowed to go to the park by himself, for instance, if I am washing dishes. This is tantamount to abandonment according to the neighbors, whose kids can’t even be in the fenced in backyard without an adult hovering over them. I often wonder if their 8 year olds can put on their own underwear, for crying out loud.
I just moved from Seattle to San Francisco’s Chinatown and have been thinking of this a lot. For one thing, I think I have finally worked out that in Chinatown the polite way to ask for passing-room in a crowd is a tiny physical bump; speech of any kind is asking for more interaction than is actually needed, and is therefore a bit rude. Even when I am trying to remember that this is the protocol, it’s hard to do so.
I am from a small town in South Carolina, but I’ve spent the last three years living in Brighton, England.
In my hometown I graduated with a class of 90 people in 2003. I had about 5-6 close girlfriends during highschool. ALL of them have at least one baby. About 50% of them have two. A couple of those are married and/or still in contact with the father, or at least know who the father is. 3 of those girls now have pregnant younger sisters.
When you drive past people you wave.
Smoking is extremely prevalent.
Most people go to church at least Sunday morning, if not Wednesday evening as well.
There are hardly any restaurants or stores left that aren’t big chains.
Only roads in the very center of town (by the courthouse, police station, etc) have sidewalks.
There is next to no foot traffic even in the poorest sections of town.
Piercings and tattoos have become more accepted. SC has just passed a law allowing tattoo parlours.
Unnaturally colored hair is practically unheard of.
There’s very few places you can smoke in public. Compared to other cities, I’ve noticed there’s no dog shit anywhere. We have to poop and scoop or else! People don’t greet on another verbally, but might nod and smile (compared to Belize where people constantly say good morning/evening). People mix racially everywhere. Most neighbourhoods are pretty mixed, but I might be getting a scewed idea because I live near the downtown core (which may be very different than the suburbs). The default religion is none or unitarian, so strongly religious people really stand out. People have conversations with the homeless men who mutter on the streets, and many people know them by name. A few shop owners have them wear advertising for a bit of regular cash. (They don’t seem to want off the streets, though.) We also have rotating buildings where the homeless can eat and sleep. There’s one tiny main street with an adult sex toy shop right next to a kids’ toy shop. It makes sense to me, but some people don’t like it.
And if you like Montreal, you’ll love Quebec City!!
One thing I noticed when two years ago in Vancouver is that credit cards really seem to compete. I often saw stores that took Visa OR Mastercard but rarely both.
I like Montreal much more than QC (I don’t live in either). QC is like a little fairytale city, Montreal is more vibrant. And if you like modern culture — it’s the place for you. I saw a modern version of the ballet Cinderella and it was mostly wonderful. It was certainly creative.
But where I really live — D.C. Metro — you will be struck by (1) some godawful traffic, and even more so, the “f-you” attitude of a significant proportion of drivers and the various indications that a large proportion of drivers have only a limited idea where they are going because the city is so transient many people don’t live here long enough to really figure it out; (2) a clean and gorgeous underground Metro that out-of-towners wonder how the heck we managed to get so much federal funding for; (3) lots and lots of museums, most of which are free; (4) no skyscrapers (even where the buildings are tall, nowhere in D.C., they are not nearly as tall as you find in nearly any other major metropolitan area); (5) a beautiful waterfront park space along the Potomac River; (6) a lot of biking and bike trails; (7) the colonial feel of parts of Georgetown and Old Town Alexandria; and (8) the degree of security in every building downtown, but especially federal buildings.
Squid, I’m afraid that I’m going to have to ask you, or at least your “reporters,” to step outside.
Hey! Don’t shoot the messenger. As I said, I don’t drink the stuff.
Let the coffee wars begin. I had no idea there was an east coast west coast coffee battle. Sounds like the rap scene in the mid1990s. LOL!!
Bean, 1) 4) and 5) are probably related.
Frowner said,
“I’m from Minneapolis. We’re stand-offish. You really don’t talk to strangers here and generally don’t make small-talk in the elevator.”
My sense is that the southeast, Appalachia, and the west coast (in that order) tend to have greater acceptance of talking to strangers. The northeast is the worst(you see my southern Ohio bias here), but I have heard the upper Midwest is similar.
Bean’s point about housing is interesting. I was taken aback by the number of huge subdivided houses here in the northeast. We had very few of those in the southern Ohio. I also think the architecture differences in general are fascinating. When I went to Florida, I was taken aback by the one story homes, but given the heat it makes sense.
I remember hearing the DC does have skyscrapers because their is an ordinance that forbids building higher than the Washington monument? Has anyone else heard that?
Ron,
You love you some Chicago. :) I know about the driving in the midwest. That is one good thing about the New York. People are more inclined to walk.
I also love some Chiacgo pizza. Ironically the best Chicago pizza I have ever eaten was at Pizza Papolis in Detroit. But those paper thin NYC pizzas don’t cut it for me. LOL!!!
I also can relate to your point about the Polish names, not so much from living in Chi-town, but from living in Detroit, which has some similar white ethnic groups. You have to look hard to find a Paczki, but in Detroit everybody eats them on fat Tuesday.
PS-Chicago is a very segregated city. Chicago and Detroit go back and forth as the most segregated major cities in the US. Unfortunately, the midwestern and northeastern cities are by far the worst when it comes to that.
LC said, “2) We like the outdoor cafes. This has as much to do with pretedning we don’t live in an icy deathscape for most of the year as with any European influence.”
LOL!! My friends we all making jokes saying that.
LC said, “3) What you may not have noticed is separate cheques. The default here is almost always that everyone pays their own bill. At the very least, most places will ask you if anyone wants to pay together, but usually the bills just come separate.”
Yeah, I did notice that, but I thought the people could just tell that we were tourists conferencing.
Rachel:
I can’t really comment on it, despite my customary making fun of Squid. Trouble is, I left the NY-Metro area in 1988 to live in Portland. My arrival coincided, more or less, with fancy coffee becoming readily available all over the average large city– not just in Italian-style cafe’s.
I love the local coffee shops, and I loved the local coffee joints in downtown NYC, too. I’m afraid to look up those old favorites, though, because chain madness also began to take hold in a big way in the late 1980s and early ’90s. I’d probably find out that my former favorite hangouts are all St*rb*cks now, and I couldn’t take it… :(
Re Polish names and people from somewhere else: I grew up in Pittsburgh, and prided myself on having rudimentary pronunciation skills for half a dozen eastern European languages by the time I was 12, which was necessary to pronounce people’s names correctly. And Washington is a lot like Portland in that very few people of my generation are “from here.” And very many people are, like me, rustbelt refugees. D.C. is the rustbelt refugee capital of America. When you go into a bar during football season you are as likely to be surrounded by Steelers and Browns’ fans as Washington fans (can’t bring myself to use the team’s name). It’s bigger than football, and bigger than the rust belt — there are also bars that “specialize” in Vikings and Cowboy fans. Also, during the World Cup there were many venues that stayed open 24 hours so that fans of various countries would never miss a game featuring their team.
I’ll add to the coffee wars by saying that the most perfect coffee experience I’ve had is north of Montreal, where I went to a bakery that served perfectly sized cafe au lait that was perfectly strong, especially when balanced with the pain au raisin. For me, it’s not the coffee per se that’s lacking at gourmet coffee shops, it’s the failure to effectively replicate the experience of being able to savor a reasonably sized cup of coffee with a perfect roll, in a leisurely manner.
My daughter lives in the Boston area, and she says people are much more standoffish there than in the Chicago area. I actually hadn’t noticed, but then I am gregarious by nature.
Outdoor dining in the Chicago area is not the usual thing. Some cafes set up for it when weather permits, but it’s not unusual in such cases to see the indoor tables full while the outdoor tables are empty.
You will see very few adults under the age of 45 smoking.
Everyone’s from around here. East Coast transplants such as myself are rare. The same for West Coast transplants. This is in contrast to when I lived in Boston, where I could, on average, throw a rock into a random gathering and have 50/50 odds of hitting someone born on a different continent.
This leads to somewhat insular viewpoints. Overall, people around here seem to think that the social, religious, etc. customs of the Chicago area are duplicated across the rest of the country. When they encounter someone who isn’t with the program, they act like there’s something wrong with you. Example: this led to a scene when we were raising the kids and had a birthday party. I didn’t know what a “loot bag” was. Turns out that around here, the family hosting the party is actually expected to give some goodies to the guests. I was shocked. Then everyone else was shocked that I was shocked.
Magikmama gives some valuable insights to the ‘burbs. DuPage County (which I live a mile east of in Cook County) is one of the wealthiest in the country, overall. I had to laugh when I read the cabbie describe a section of Naperville as “the ghetto”. It’s kind of indicative of the casual racism you hear a lot of around here. It’s also laughable to describe any part of Naperville that way, as if there was any large area of real poverty like the West Side of Chicago in Naperville.
It’s quite standard around here for people to put their kids in a bunch of extra-curricular activities (usually sports) to make sure the kids have no free time “to get into trouble”. This turns the adults in the family (usually Mom, but Dad takes his turn) into cab drivers, getting the kids from one activity to the next. They are usually way too scattered for the kids to walk to and from them. I have to admit that I did my share of this. “Soccer Moms” are a real phenomena around here.
Magickmama, think about how your neighbors/acquaintances reacted to letting your kid actually walk to the park and play there without you hovering 20 feet away. Now consider what the reaction is when they join the Boy Scouts and someone like me has the kid lighting fires, using knives and axes and bow saws and sleeping in tents and not panicing and throwing all the kids into vans and driving to a motel should there be a thunderstorm. Or tying them to a rope and having them rappel down a 70 foot cliff.
For that matter, think of the reaction of the kids when they actually have to carry a pack a 1/4 mile, or have to take a 5 mile hike, and I won’t stop the whole expedition if they forget something and jump in the car and drive off to get it for them and I won’t allow MP3 players/cell phones/hand-held video games/iPods. The mothers (again, never the fathers) often have a big problem with “What!? My son and I won’t be in constant contact should he get tired or hungry or want to talk to me?” Christ, no. Cut the cord, will you? He’s 11 or 12.
And finally, after a week with the kids in Summer Camp: “What do you mean, he didn’t earn 5 merit badges?” No, but he had a grand time playing in the mud catching a frog, he got across the high ropes course at COPE that’s 40 feet off the ground and whizzed down a 200 foot zip line with an 80 foot drop and has the T-shirt to prove it, he paddled 2 miles around the lake with me and explored an abandoned log cabin in the woods, he helped us strip the bark off a dead tree, mix some concrete, and put up a flag pole, and he actually spent some unstructured time farting around with his buddies in the woods and seeing if he could get a knife to stick into the tent platform (well, actually, I don’t tell Mom about that bit about the knife). He saw the stars for the first time, all 6000 of them instead of the 30 he can see in the sky where we live. He stuck one of the wood carving knives a 1/2 inch into his hand, but it’s healing and he’ll live and now he knows what to do if he sticks a knife a 1/2 inch into his hand. “But how’s that going to help him get Eagle!?” Ah, damn. He’ll get Eagle if he wants to, but I’m not going to force it down his throat. Let the kid have some actual fun and come up with something on his own that he wants to do.
Oh, and there was a black Troop next door, but nobody got attacked. Probably the first time he’s walked/swum/eaten next to some black kids for a week his entire life. You should have seen the skit they put on.
One more Seattleism: TALKING about coffee and coffee shops is a big deal here.
Starbucks is a very big business everywhere, no less so in Seattle, of course. And when I am out-of-town/on-the-road I look on Starbucks as a beacon of civilization.
But in Seattle I rarely (once a year?) go to a Starbucks except as convenient place to meet a blind date (since we can easily find a convenient one by checking the Starbucks home spage for “locations.”)
It’s not that I dislike Starbucks at all. It’s just Seattle is filled with so many hundreds of one-offs and small chains that Starbucks is simply not necessary. People talk about how Starbucks drives out indies — not so at all. Indies thrive in the “coffee shadow” of Starbucks.
Ron – LOL on the “OMG I can’t call my kid 24/7 what will he/she do if I’m not there to solve everything!?!” My son starts kindergarten in a few weeks and I just know I’m going to be the black sheep mom. I don’t know, I’m in my early twenties, and when I was 5, I had a watch, a time I had to be home for dinner, and the streets I wasn’t allowed to cross. That’s how it was for every kid in my neighborhood after school. It seems to me that these parents both expect very little from their kids and yet very much. They want them to be all super-geniusy, but give them no room to learn from their mistakes (or even make them in the first place.)
My parenting philosophy is that my kid is probably quite average, possibly less or more than, but I want him to figure out his strengths and weaknesses for himself – not tell him what they are, and the only way I can do that is to give him room to do so. He’s four, so obviously I’m not all “just go do your thing,” but I do expect him to do what he can by himself, and what he can’t I expect him to try. He can put his shoes on, he can’t yet tie them. But I make him try to tie each shoe before I do it for him, and one day, just like with getting them on his feet, he’s going to do it. And he’s going to be very proud that he learned how, and learn that trying to do things that are hard over and over is how we learn to do them. He’s also learning that my husband and I will NOT do everything for him, that some things in life are his responsibility, and that as he grows older, he’ll be more and more responsible for himself.
I’m trying to think about what makes Toronto different from other cities, and seeing as I just got back from a month abroad, this should be coming more easily than it is.
1. Torontonians are also really into patios. Like our Quebecois neighbors, we also like to pretend that we don’t live in a winter deathscape for half the year.
2. There are very distinct neighbourhoods/areas of the city, some of which are ethnically/culturally demaracted (there are about 5 Chinatowns, and 2 or 3 Little Indias). There’s also Harborfront, Kensington Market, Queen West, the Beach, etc.
3. We love our summer street festivals. Caribana, Pride, SalsaFest, Taste of the Danforth, and many more. I think this is also about forgetting about the hellish winter.
4. We also love our film festivals.
Victoria BC — people say “thank you” to the bus driver when they stop at the bus stop and open the door. And usually the bus driver says “you’re welcome”.
I live in a “vacation” spot, one of the mosr expensive ones in the world. RonF–$3.30/gallon for gas, and you think that’s EXPENSIVE? Sigh….
Much to my dismay, even with all these millinaires around there’s no locally-roasted coffee. Nor is there a really good espresso shop; one of my criteria is being able to get it in a non-paper cup and there’s nowhere I’ve found so far which will do that. So I buy mine online from new harvest coffee roasters. (for those of you who are coffeegeeks with a conscience, NH sells organic, fair trade, locally-roasted, good, and affordable coffee. Yes, it exists.)
Magikmama, one of the tenets of Scouting is that kids learn from their mistakes, so our job is to let them plan and execute activities and let them fail (safely; e.g., we don’t let them plan to do rock climbing without the use of helmets and belay ropes).
The theoretical reaction to a failure is:
“Gee, that failed! Why? I’m going to figure out what went wrong and do better next time!”
The actual reaction from the boy often is:
“Gee, that failed. That sucks! Why didn’t Mr. F keep us from failing? That’s what happens in everything else we do. And now we have to deal with this situation? This is hard. Scouting sucks! I want to go home.” O.K., maybe that’s an exaggeration. Sometimes. Sometimes not. But being allowed to fail without adults jumping in to prevent it is definitely a unique situation for about 80% of the kids.
and from many Moms (but again, never Dad):
“How could you stand there and watch my son fail? We never let him fail! It’ll hurt his self-esteem [a term I have come to despise]. He’ll get discouraged. He’ll doubt himself. Why didn’t you supervise him properly!”
My general philosophy is “No arterial blood, no broken bones, no problem.” Now, we do back them up some. After they burn dinner and render it inedible, we’ll let them go hungry for a bit. Then, magically, after a couple of hours, a box of cake mix and a can or two of pie filling appear, and 45 minutes after that we have a cobbler/dump cake that gets food in their bellies before they go to bed. Popcorn cooks up quickly in a Dutch oven as well. Not a balanced meal, true, but I believe we left the dietician back home.
Oh, and we definitely warn the parents, “If your son comes home dry and clean, he hasn’t had fun and we haven’t done our job. Don’t send him to a campout with clothes that can’t get torn or filthy.”
And finally; respect and self-esteem are earned, not granted. Every human is due some basic respect, of course. Name calling, bullying, “initiations”, etc. are not allowed. But past that, it’s earned by facing real situations and actually doing something. It’s not something that’s given whether you actually have done or learned something or not.
So, if you don’t load your kid up with activities guaranteed to develop his body and mind fully, cost you a damn fortune, get him or her a college scholarship (why is it that athletic activity earns a scholarship?) (BTW, nobody ever brags about their kid earning a scholarship using scholarship, just a scholarship using athletics), make him the best of his or her peers in something, spiff up his or her college application, have you and them running around like a madman all the time and leave them with no time on their own hands to do with as they please, be prepared to be treated as if you just don’t understand how to be a good parent.
Famous exchange when my kids were 7 and 11. A fine summer day.
“Dad, we’re bored.”
“Go dig a foxhole.”
3 minutes later, the kids troop by the window with shovels and other implements of destruction in hand. An hour and a half later, a hole 4′ across by 3′ deep has indelibly scarred the landscape. No other kid in the neighborhood had anything like this to play in, so they came in our yard. It was enhanced by the remains of the wooden crate our riding lawnmower came in because I was too lazy to throw it out; it made a fine fort-like superstructure. 14 years later, that hole is still out there. In fact, part of that crate is still out there. I use the hole for a (illegal) burning pit. No one else has this in their yard because they paid way too much for landscaping to let the kids do this. Me, the yard is for kids to tear up, not for me to look at.
“If I came to your town or city, what aspects of the local culture would stand out?”
In my town of 70,000 in north Texas you would notice the megachurch about a mile from my house that covers a city block. People pour into the place all days of the week. The churchgoers are nearly all white. There is also a large evangelical movement in this town, including among many members of the megachurch.
You would notice that Republicans win all of the local elections, Democrats might as well not even bother running. In the last presidential election, in my neighborhood, the pro-Bush signs in yards outnumbered the pro-Kerry signs about 4 to 1.
But then it starts to get a little more complex among the white people. There is a very large Mormon population in this town. There is a very large Mormon church too. The conflicts between evangelicals and Mormon are surprising minimal. But you do hear the Mormons referred to in private as a cult sometimes.
There are two colleges here too which has brought in a larger gay element. About a mile from my house, behind a 7-11, is a rather hidden gay bar. It has almost no outside lights. But everyone knows what it is, and it is less than a half mile from the evangelical megachurch. You would expect some fireworks here, but … nothing much.
The colleges, of course, have many liberal faculty members and students. So we have a strong liberal presence around town too.
So among the white folks there is a lot of diversity.
We have much racial diversity too. We have a predominately black side of town. Another side of town is Hispanic. The two local high schools, however, do not segregate along racial lines. The white, blacks, and Hispanics are spread between them rather evenly. The high schools are probably 40% black and Hispanic. But unlike in the big cities, most whites don’t move their kids to private schools (both of my daughters went to the public high schools).
Race relations are good. One high school has won the state championship several times recently, and the teams each year are of course very multi-racial. The team has had games broadcast live on ESPN twice in the last two years. The spirit of good will toward the team among the citizens spills over into race relations (IMHO).
In a city of 77,000 the intractable problems of the inner cities within America’s largest cities are somehow avoided to a large extent. I can’t help but think that there are lessons here for America at large. One lesson, it would seem, is that large scale urbanization has benefits, as well as significant social costs.
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“You would notice that Republicans win all of the local elections, Democrats might as well not even bother running.”
That raises a question. If you define “local election” as something at the municipal level (town/village/city/school district/etc.), how many of your local elections are Democrat vs. Republican, and how many of them are not? Here in the Chicago suburbs County elections and elections in the City of Chicago are Democrat vs. Republican. But the elections at the municipal level tend to be the Village Independent Party vs. the Progress Party or something such, with no identification with or involvement of the Democrat or Republican parties at all.
Magikmama, perhaps we’ve driven this particular issue to death, but I have to pass along what happened last night.
I’m at a Cub Scout Pack Committee meeting; this is where the Den Leaders, the Cubmaster, the Treasurer, the Committee Chair and all the other leaders and officers get together to discuss what the upcoming month’s Pack program is going to be for the kids and who’s going to do what to make it happen. The Assistant Cubmaster talked about how tough it is to fit in Scouting because his kid is on an athletic team. This is quite common; Scouting loses a lot of kids to athletics. I asked what the specifics were.
His kid is on a football team. He just found out that the team will be practicing 4 times a week, Monday through Thursday, for 2 1/2 hours a night. Now, his kid is a Bear Cub. He’s seven years old. And then he tells me that the coach has pretty much ordered him to become an assistant coach. “My kid loves football”, he says. I asked “When is your kid going to study?” He says, “Oh, it’ll be tough”. I wanted to jump at him and say, “Why didn’t you tell the coach that he’s fucking crazy, that your kid is going to practice for an hour, or maybe an hour and a half, or he won’t be on the team, and that in any case you’ll have no part of it?!”
What, does this coach think he’s running the Chicago Bears? Has he lost all perspective? The real pisser is that I suspect that if the team doesn’t practice this much, they’ll probably lose all their games because the other teams have the same schedule and none of the other parents have the wit to stand up and get control of the situation. Whereas I have a Troop meeting for 1 to 1.5 hours a week and I worry about how much of the kids’ time I’m taking.
I’m not even sure kids should be playing football at 7 years old. If they are playing any sport, the number one objective should be to have fun. Second, to learn the rules and fundamental skills. But now the objective is to win as many games as possible and to become highly skilled so that you can make your high school varsity team (or the best club team at that age if you are in tennis or gymnastics), and have a shot at a college scholarship. That’s the pinnacle.
I interview kids for admission to MIT. I see a lot of Asian kids. What I don’t see is Asian kids on athletic teams (not counting golf or tennis). This is because no Asian parent is going to approve of his or her kid spending 2 or 3 or more hours a day practicing a sport when they could be studying. And that’s why, IMNSHO, kids of Asian heritage are a minority at MIT, but they are very specifically not an “underrepresented minority”; the MIT student body has more Asian kids on a percentage basis than the population as a whole. Not due to favoritism or some kind of racism, but because their parents don’t say, “Gee, the kid really loves football, I guess we’ll have to sacrifice so he can spend 15 hours a week at it after school and on weekends.” They say, “Are you crazy? Go study! I don’t care if you love it or not, you’re going to do what’s best for you.”
Christianity is no longer the predominant religion in suburbia. Youth athletics is. Don’t believe me? Drive around suburbia and count cars in the parking lots of athletic fields and churches on Sunday morning. There was a time when no one scheduled games on Sunday morning because everyone expected to be in church. Those days are gone. I can’t imagine what a coach would say if a kid told him or her, “I can’t play Sunday morning, I’ve got church.”
Parent: “My kid’s going to do ‘x’ because he loves it and that’s what he wants to do.” Me: “But is that the best thing for him to be doing? What do you want him to do?” Parent: ” …?” Overriding a kid’s desires and making the decision on what the best way for him to be spending his time is a null concept to these parents.
Ahhhhhh…..
[ /rant ]
Fresno, CA is a quirky city that’s a little lost navigating change– it has added a lot of population quickly. (I think the population of both city and county has doubled since 1980.)
Apartment dwellers don’t get to know their neighbors. One or two conversations with your next door neighbor in a year is unusually talkative. Turn over is high in many complexes; much like Portland, short leases aren’t unusual. (We also collect not-very refundable “cleaning” deposits and charge fees to check your credit history.)
Home dwellers may talk to their neighbors, but it’s usually just a hello when you’re both doing yard work. (Exceptions do develop over time, but it takes years to get beyond this.)
Because of Fresno’s leapfrog development, older neighborhoods mix with newer. In “good” areas of town, there are still neighborhoods to be avoided (usually due to the presence of minorites– there must be crime/gangs).
While driving is very common, especially in the newer suburbs in the north, the “Tower District” has more consistant crowds and walking traffic.
Whatever chain restaurant last opened will have immense lines for months.
Everyone drives. SUVs and pickups are popular. Taking the bus doesn’t cross most people’s minds.
A local restaurant opened last year, advertising as black tie dining. It opened in summer, and everyone predicted relaxation of dress rules and its death. Both happened in less than 6 months.
Most dress is relatively casual; bankers and lawyers are the only suit wearing people.
Parking is free everywhere but downtown. (Grousing about paying for downtown parking is mandatory.) The most successful malls have all build new buildings over their already inadequate parking, so Christmas shopping will be interesting this year. [I’m betting a park & ride type system will spring up.]
* Armenians are sterotyped positively (as wealthy, organized, influential.)
* Hmong are present in huge numbers, but are sterotyped as strange and left alone. (The first Hmong candidate for City Council did survive the primary– we’ll see if he can win in November.)
* Latin American heritage is near omnipresent; intermarriage with both blacks and whites is relatively common and (outside of family) not unusual enough to comment on.
* A significant Black or Hmong presence is “a bad neighborhood.”
RonF,
I agree completely with your rant. We ask our kids to grow up fast enough, and then we schedule them to death with soccer, little league, pee-wee football, and other after school activities that I have to wonder what ever happened to a kid being a kid and playing just for the sake of playing.
My local community is focused not on our college athletics, but rather with one particular high school’s football program. It says alot about an area when they would rather invest 200 thousand dollars on a turf field for a high school team rather than mentoring programs or even better lab equipment for the school. High school athletics generates tons of money in my area, and I suspect that most of this is motivated not out of a concern for the kids, but rather by plain old-fashioned greed.
Concerning cheques, RachelS writes:
“Yeah, I did notice that, but I thought the people could just tell that we were tourists conferencing. ”
Nope. It’s prevelant everywhere. Mind you, Quebec also makes it illegal to change your name when you get married, so maybe we are just weird that way. :)
dorktastic writes:
“3. We love our summer street festivals. Caribana, Pride, SalsaFest, Taste of the Danforth, and many more. I think this is also about forgetting about the hellish winter.
4. We also love our film festivals. ”
This is duplicated in Montreal (we have a festival pretty much every week from May to Sept). I suspect it is a Canadian “fight against the winter” thing.
QrazyQat writes:
“Victoria BC — people say “thank you” to the bus driver when they stop at the bus stop and open the door. And usually the bus driver says “you’re welcome”. ”
That happens in Montreal as well. (Although in French.)
Something I’ve been thinking about is that I’ve often heard Americans express surpise at the racial and ethnic diversity of major Canadian cities like Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. I’m not trying to hijack this thread or anything, but I just find it generally confusing in terms of what I’ve been told many Americans think about Canadian racial or ethnic diversity – i.e., admiration of our multiculturalism policies, etc.
LC, it’s illegal to change your name when you get married in Quebec? Is it illegal to change your name under any other circumstances? All women in Quebec use their maiden names their whole lives?
RonF, pretty much. It’s a pain to change your name (legally — you can use whatever name you like socially), and you need a good reason. Marriage is not considered one. This is probably in part because most govt IDs are first 3 letters of your last name, first letter of your first, some number based on your DOB. Which makes it irritating if you have to visit your 80 year old relatives in hospital and do not recall their maiden names.
The name changing stuff is sort of restrictive (though lots of people don’t marry anyhow), but it does cut off that particular discussion a lot, because it’s assumed you won’t change your name legally, so changing it socially is less clear a choice.
Other things I noticed in Montreal in comparison to many other places: lining up for buses. Usually you remember who was there before or after you and try to go in order; it’s never a free-for-all. (Metros, more.)
The expected language weirdnesses, mostly the “I’ll talk in your language so you understand me”, which ends up having an anglo speak French and a franco speak English to each other.
The stupid steep outdoor staircases in the stupid winter.
The heavy use of electricity (without worrying about the cost), and very minor use of gas for cooking.
Jaywalking, against red lights, in the middle of the block, stopping between lanes until cars stop going by, etc. It’s such fun being downtown at the beginning of a new school year and watching the new students wait at intersections.
dorktastic said, “I’m not trying to hijack this thread or anything, but I just find it generally confusing in terms of what I’ve been told many Americans think about Canadian racial or ethnic diversity – i.e., admiration of our multiculturalism policies, etc.”
When most American think of Canada, we do tend to assume that the people are pretty much all white. I learned that wasn’t true when I went Windsor while in college. Of course, Windsor may easily be the most Americanized city in Canada, but it was more diverse than I expected. Canada has changed more because of immigration policies rather than the multiculturalism policy. I saw a presentation where a well know sociologist was noting that Canada was one of the most pro-immigration countries in the “developed” world.
To be truthful, Montreal was considerably less racially diverse than any major American city I have been to. I saw more Asians and Middle Easterners than you would in many US cities, but the number of Blacks and Latinos was tiny. We had an Afr0-Canadian woman speak at one of the conferences, and she was saying that there is no real Afro-Canadian commuity in Montreal, so I guess she thought people were sort of spread out without strong connections.
Rachel,
I’m just wondering where this perception of Canada as an all or mostly white country comes from. The statistics on self-identified “visible minorities” (quotations because I hate that term) are available here.
I am aware of the fact that immigration policy has been the primary engine of change in terms of making Canada a racially and ethnically diverse place to live, and I’m certainly no fan of our multiculturalism policy (check out Himani Bannerji’s essay On the Dark Side of the Nation. From personal experience with Canadian immigration and refugee law and policy, I find the fact that Canada is one of the most pro-immigration countries in the “developed” world really sad.
My city prides itself on the tradition of growing citrus fruits, but is killing off the agricultural areas with millionaire-style housing development projects that violate controlled density and growth laws in the books. It’s also killed off two annual traditions in the space of two months.
Maybe we just need to vote the bums out of office.
Maybe we just need to vote the bums out of office.
Now there’s a tradition sorely lacking in the Chicago area. Outside of George Ryan (who was implicated in a bribery scandal that led to 6 kids being burned to death in a wrecked van), I can’t think of any politician who lost office due to misconduct in office (not counting politicians who lost their office because a conviction made them ineligible to serve).
Dorktastic; many Americans are like me, where their only contact with Canadians comes at non-urban vacation spots where, just as in America (especially in the northern part), the population tends to be overwhelmingly Caucasian. My personal experience has been in Atikokan, Ontario, where the canoeing outfitter I use for Quetico Provincial Park is based. Also, on American TV, I can’t for the life of me recall one Canadian character or personality that wasn’t/isn’t white.