Your Local Culture and Traditions

[Lallapalalable]

Like the new board
Guess we should get the namesakes out of the way. Time for culture!

I realize many of the users here are either from the UK or the US, so there may not be the biggest variety in cultures, but even tiny regions have their own quirks. For instance:

I live in the US, was raised in a christian setting, and my parents are divorced. Just like most other people here.

My region was cheifly settled by German, Polish and Hungarian settlers, so a lot of carryover from those cultures (too much to list, just stereotype). ie We have a New Years tradition to eat Pork and Sour Kraut as the first meal of the new year, to bring luck somehow.

Our local economy was once held on the back of the now abandoned steel plant, so there are many little euphemisms and namesakes based in steel and iron (local minor league baseball team is called the "Iron Pigs").

One of the religious groups that were dominant in the early years were the Moravians, and the artwork is prevailant in most of our decorating and architecture. Sort of gothic, lots of arches. Oh, and this thing:

supposed to represent the star above bethlehem. Even our cities and towns are named after religious locations. There's Bethlehem (there is a giant one of those^ stars on top of the hill its under), Nazereth, Egypt, and many more.

I live on the outskirts of the cities, so I have easy acess to both city life and country life. Its awesome.

Thats all Im gonna push on you now. Your turn!

 

[DepricatedZero]

I wasn't terribly impressed when I visited Pennsylvania, but I was on the turnpike most of the time and stayed in a town -on- the turnpike. (Somerset?)

I'm from Cincinnati, where the culture is all sorts of fucked up

Like, it's absolutely normal to walk into a restaurant and ask for a 3-way. The waitress won't even bat an eye. Perhaps it's my fatness, but the foods of Cincinnati are...their own. This is a 3-way:

That's Spaghetti, Chili, and Cheese. The Chili is like a condiment here. We also put it on tiny little hotdogs we call Coneys.

Ron White actually had an amusing bit about Cincinnati Chili and the smug Cincinnatians who brag about it. It's not like normal chili, not even like normal hotdog chili. It's got cinnimon and chocolate in it. So good. I love it. If you ever come to town, look me up, cause I insist everyone get to try it.

We also celebrate our heritage with a lot of food festivals like "Chilifest" and "Taste of Cincinnati." They're fun. Our Oktoberfest is said to be the second largest in the world(only after Munich) and I believe is the largest Beer Festival in the US at around 500,000 patrons a year. It's a grand time.

So we're a German town, and a river port town. Some other cool things we have are Steamboats on the river, the "Purple People Bridge" which is just a bridge for walking across the Ohio River rather than driving. Goes from Downtown to the Levy in Newport, KY - which is a pretty cool place too. Some good bars, including this place called Hofbrauhaus which has some of the best beer I've ever had.

Oh we also have Jungle Jims, which is like, Mecca for Foodies. I have video, this place is ridiculous. They have...everything. Jungle Jim is also a loopy fuckin rich wacko. It's funny, even in the video he's wearing a pith helm and a BOA. Get it? It's cool though, lots of good food, and awesome liquor store. They have all sorts of imported beer and liquor. They're working on building a Monorail to tour the store...he's awesome though. It's a pretty cool store.


Hm, there's so much more about Cinci. We have awesome music, good night life. Lots of parks, lakes, rivers. Cool town, cool town.

 

[Prolescum]

Well the city I live in is not the one I was born in, but that's probably true of around 70 odd percent of the population.

It's a varied, eclectic little city with a population nearing 200,000, almost all of whom are weirdos or nutters.

As most things here are decided upon a whim, it makes sense that we have our own Taj Mahal clone.

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Built by a promiscuous prince regent, he also had the local henge smashed to bits and turned into a fountain.

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Each year there are too many festivals to count, but they include a main, month-long summer festival, a fringe festival that compliments the summer one, a comedy festival, beer fests, pride parades and open house art fairs. Basically ten months of partying, two months to get back into shape.

The side of the city facing France looks like this

and quite a lot of the rest of it looks like

We do, however, have some of the biggest grains of sand in the multiverse

People come from all over the world, often to go to the well respected universities, and being 50 miles or so from London means a large influx of cockneys at the weekends. There are more than enough vegan restaurants, hundreds of pubs, a few serving exclusively local brews, beach football, dozens upon dozens of nightclubs, and activities I'm probably not even aware of... There's nary a dull moment down here.

 

[Lallapalalable]

I guess some more pics are in order for me:

did I mention there are a shit-ton of cement factories/plants scattered around? 'Cause there are, and some as old as cement itself.

Oldest movie theater on our side of the state (still hoppin)

Bethlehem Steel. If you saw the intro to Transformers 2, this is where they filmed it (dont worry, I didnt see it either)
and for excitement, we usually go for a two hour drive to...

OMFG AMISH COUNTRY!!!

But seriously, one of my favorite places to go is Bake Oven Knob:

Love the outdoors around here. Summer time is hiking time!

whats that steel frame thinger in the background? I saw it in another picture. I also like that James Brown building. Dont know why.

 

[Lallapalalable]

I wasn't terribly impressed when I visited Pennsylvania...

Where did you go? Im guessing Western PA, and besides Pittsburgh its just countryside. I love it, though, but I guess your cityboy nature didnt let you fully appreciate it

Oh we also have Jungle Jims, which is like, Mecca for Foodies.

Dude, I think I have to go there. Like some sort of fat person pilgrimage, I have to go there before I die (which will probably be about an hour afterwards )

 

[ImprobableJoe]

Ummm...

 

[Lallapalalable]

wha?

 

[Prolescum]

@Lallapalalable

It's the West Pier.

Once upon a time it looked like this:

And due to being a hub of graphic designers, someone made a virtual snapshot of its prime

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It fell into disuse sometime back in the last century, then when a conglomerate of business bastards were offered the chance to rehabilitate it, they were told it was a listed building (grade III I think) and the structure had to remain and someone did this:

Twice.

No one was caught. There has been a decade of moaning, bitching and complaining all the while the restoration work has stalled due to lack of funds. It's a crying shame, it was a glorious piece of Victorian pier design.

It was visible in the relatively recent Neil Gaiman film Mirrormask, but seen in many others, including Quadrophenia, that crappy Who film from the seventies.

I'm impressed by your baked mountain thing.

 

[australopithecus]

Well, we have Lady Godiva aka Naked Horse Woman.

We used to make a shit tonne of cars but now the factories all look like this:

At some point in the 1940's Germany decided it didn't like us and this happened:

There's a load of medieval architecture around:

 

[simonecuttlefish]

Now all this may not "define" a culture, but check it out, imagine what you could do with it, and bingo - there IS the local culture.

I live in a country town on the beach in Australia called "Coffs Harbour". Population including surrounding areas is about 50,000.

We have a giant banana called ....... "The Big Banana"

and giant cuttlefish - "The Big Simone"?

At "The Pet Porpoise Pool" you can just walk up and play with them, if they are inclined,

and a marina,

and a jetty you can jump off. We saw two dolphins catching fish under it the other day. They also launch fireworks off it every New Years Eve, and you sit on the beach to watch 'em.

There is a little island that "mutton birds" dig underground holes to nest in, because sheep live in burrows and can fly .... apparently.

We have some gorgeous beaches,

and it's whale watching season again at the moment.

There is a whopping collection of award winning restaurants, including an almost solid city block length strip of them.

For about 4 weeks a carnival sets up overlapping Christmas and New Year, free entry, just buy ride tokens. They open for a few hours each night after sundown till about midnight. It's right on the beach, next to the jetty. Magnificent.

Offshore there are the "Solitary Islands", and reefs around them where the cold southern current and the warm northern current collide, to make a truly weirdo and wonderful diving experience. People come to check out the diverse mix of marine wildlife, including the local grey nurse sharks.

Nice huh? Come visit

 

[Yuecake]

I am from Greater Manchester in the United Kingdom. Travel around a bit and you'll see influences from the industrial revolution and times gone by:

myth-inspiring countryside:

Awe inspiring structures..

(Joddrell bank, at night the silhoette of this giant satellite looms at you, makes me feel so uneasy)

A taste of some of part of English quaintness and heritage

 

[ImprobableJoe]

Also this:

 

[Sparky]

In Invercargill, New Zealand where I grew up there was only one thing of influence:

Tim Shadbolt!

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But yeah besides him we have some pretty awesome geographical features near by. For example, the Fiords:

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We get penguins on the Caitlins occasionally and we've got tuataras too:

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We had the guy who is famous for making the world's fastest Indian:

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And we have a water tower with a dirty old transformer right next to it

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[nasher168]

I live in East Yorkshire in England, about 10 miles away from Hull. Hull is home to a few things of note. Amongst them is The Deep, a massive aquarium which looks like this:

Hull also has a large shopping centre:

Hull doesn't really have a rich cultural history. It's only ever been an industrial place, though that's now dwindling. We do, however, have a town nearby called Beverley. It's a market town and is home to one of the two Minsters in England (EDIT: according to wikipedia, it's not one of two but one of twenty-two Minsters. Whoever told me that was wrong, then):

 

[derkvanl]

Dutch here, living (and born) in the southwest of the Netherlands in a province called Zeeland.

I live in a small village called Wissenkerke, which is on one the smaller "islands" (all are now connected by dams) It's in the middle of the National park Oosterschelde (nature all over). We have a very strong culture of "fighting the water", there are dams and dikes here everywhere. We also have a lot of tradition in fishing, seafaring, agriculture and religion (this is still a part of the dutch bible belt). The areas are not densly populated, it's all flat and there's a lot of land below sea level.

In the provence are still areas where most of the people in a village goto church 3 times on a sunday, where girls have to where a dress, they don't have TV, filtered internet, no conception, no vaccination, and there are a lot of christian-based schools around here. They also bring a lot of tradition.

Some pics of the area I live in, there's also a lot of tourism here (abt 1Million every summer on 300k inhabs)

We now produce oysters, mussels, lobster, seafish, potatoes, onions, weats, fruits, beers, whines. It's still quiet here except for the touristic spots. It's good for biking and any kind of watersports. There's still a lot of local products being produced (also for the tourists) in the traditional ways and a lot of people are concerned in keeping those traditions up. Which I think is beautifull, we are really rich when it comes to history and culture. There allways (centuries, if not longer) have been a lot of migration here due to seafaring. Due to the churches' influences a lot of our history is recorded and we know quite well how it looked like and how people lived and what they did a few hundred years ago

I have some videos up on my youtube channel, iceskating is tradition in the Netherlands, if there's nature-ice, everyone skates. The second video is one of our traditional sports, they ride unsaddled horse (local / north-belgium breed for agriculture in the old days, real strong animals) and try to stick a spear through a ring (the ring gets smaller every time).



The next are more from the area. A lot the islands got flooded in 1953, so we secured it now all with dams, the biggest dam is one that's designed to keep the tides going and preserve the fishing and seafoodindustry behind it. It can close when necessary, but is open most of the time.



too many tradition and culture to list it all.

 

[Lallapalalable]

I also used to live in Iceland, and as Im guessing not too many frequent posters are from there, I shall act as cultural ambassador.

I lived on the Navy base in Keflavik, so homelife was pretty americanized. We had a movie theater, bowling alley, and even a strip mall. But, drive off the base and you see all sorts of outlandishness (for what I was used to, at least).

For one, the hot dogs were all made of lamb. SO good though. The skin was tough but once you got through it the juice just poured into your mouth and it was just delicious. The ice cream was amazing as well, as they used sheep milk to make it. Basically, all the food was sheep, sheep-cream based, seafood and starches.

There was the capitol, Reykjavik, about 15 miles or so from the base. We would go there all the time for local shopping and sight seeing. The architecture was mostly modern, and the cathedral was the most impressive piece.

All of the towns were small to medium, but the tourist industry was booming so there was always stuff to do.

A lot of my time was spent touring the countryside, and Ill save spork some bandwidth and just do this
countryside pictures
Those pictures hardly do justice to the landscape. The mid-atlantic ridge cut through the country, creating a wide range of landscapes from mountains to small canyons to wide, flat lava flows. The main vegetation was grasses and moss. The moss was so thick in some places you could jump off of rocks and land without getting hurt (most of the time). I only ever remember seeing one small patch of trees, and Im pretty sure they were transplanted. There were also hot springs out the wazoo, as well as geysers. Waterfalls were so commonplace that we only made time for the big ones (or the little ones that froze mid-stream in the winter), the weird ones (one was so high up that by the time it reach the bottom it was just a light mist), or the densely pack ones (Devil Falls is a series of maybe 50 waterfalls on a single cliff). There were about a dozen large glaciers as well, including the largest in Europe, Vatnajokull. While living there, a volcano erupted beneath this glacier causing mass flooding and destruction. Luckily, it was largely uninhabited in that area.

The weather was tolerable, to say the least. In the summer, it rarely got above 60, and I remember having to wear a sweatshirt and a jacket on the warmer days. The winter...well, lets just say it would snow so much you could jump out of a third floor balcony and land safely in the snowdrifts. Some days, it would be damn near illegal for you to be out of your house at all, because you would die. For the most part, though, it didnt get dangerously cold for about 8 months of the year, so it was bearable. Epic sledding and snow fort building, btw., especially in the snow plow piles. One was so big we built a slide into it.

The language was really cool, it felt like your tounge was dancing. The word for hello sounded like you were telling someone to kill themselves in English. Luckily, the second language was English, so we were able to get around pretty easily. I think the origin of Icelandic was Norwegian, but it has not evolved over the thousand or so years since. For example, there are no words for helicopter or cell phone.

Their mythology was cool. I really only remember the christmas traditions of the kids leaving their shoes in the windowsill for the 12 trolls of christmas to leave gifts for the good kids. Bad kids got rotten potatoes. Each troll had a different personality, like one would stare at you through the windows, others would break in to steal specific foodstuffs or beg for candles. Personally, I was terrified of them, having been 8 when I lived there. The mother troll was named something along the lines of Grendall which I guess is cool enough in itself. Thor was a big part of their mythology, and even a few families had similar names (my art teacher in school was flat out Mr. Thor). Aside from christmas, the trolls had other parts of the mythology, such as explaining weird rock formations that had human qualities.

Ah, so much more. I seriously suggest anyone to spend at least a week there. Its relatively cheap to travel, only being a few thousand dollars for a month-long stay. I suggest summer time, as you get about 22 hours of daylight and, you know, the temperature stays above 0.

 

[Lallapalalable]

derkvanl, Im really impressed with Dutch engineering, specifically with waterways. I was especially taken aback when I first heard that they made the peninsula into an island with that canal. If any coastal country survives global warming, its you guys.

 

[derkvanl]

derkvanl, Im really impressed with Dutch engineering, specifically with waterways. I was especially taken aback when I first heard that they made the peninsula into an island with that canal. If any coastal country survives global warming, its you guys.

It still amazes me too, you might find those interesting:



The 1953 flood was enormous, 150.000 hectares flooded and allmost 2000 deaths. that's why we build the whole deltaworks. It's not only that one storm barrier, but a whole infrastructure of dams to control the water.

http://www.deltawerken.com/Deltaworks/23.html

 

[Moky]

I live in a concrete jungle and if you live in the US, you basically know where I live.

(^^^Aeriel view, just to show how large the city is)

The city I live in has a huge history behind it, my college even offers classes on the history of my city. It was founded in 1833, burned down to the ground, then rapidly rebuilt. It was basically just several years straight of construction, so the city could get back on it's feet. Many of the houses, schools and apartments are from the 1800s or early 1900s, and there's many examples of modern skyscrapers and homes next to the old buildings. My high school is over 100 years old and was rebuilt, where as my university is 140 years old.

Case and point ^^^ The city is a huge mix of many immigrants, there are neighborhoods for Italians, Polish, Hungarian, Mexican, Indian, just a huge mix of people. It's kind of impossible to not be at least a little familiar with other cultures. I come from a Polish background, so that's the culture I'm most familiar with. The city has a huge amount of Polish-Americans. The city celebrates Casimir Pulaski Day by basically giving everyone a day off. Along with this day, there's PÄ…czki Day celebrated here, but not with days off. All you do is stuff yourself with pÄ…czki, which is deep fired dough with fruit or jam filling.

Best. Thing. Ever.

The people have also influenced architecture to a degree by making a new category of churches called the Polish Cathedral Style. (What an original name) You'll see the same style of churches in Pennsylvania and basically anywhere where there's a large Polish population. There's a LOT of churches in this style in my city.

I know most of the forum, along with myself, are atheists, but you have to appreciate how awesome these churches look.

My city has a large amount of museums and theaters. Music was greatly influenced here with many musicians from my area and has amazing food. Basically it's a good place to be a hedonist. The only thing I can really pin point on is my own Polish influenced background. I would feel as if I'm pulling things out of my ass if I spoke of anything else at great length.

 

[Lallapalalable]

I know most of the forum, along with myself, are atheists, but you have to appreciate how awesome these churches look.

Yeah, if there's one thing religion has brought a positive impact to, its architecture. The Mosques in southern Spain are among my favorite temple structures in the world. There is a university (Lehigh) near where I live that is based on Moravian cathedrals, and every time I walk through the campus I end up craning my neck looking at all the buildings.