Culture exchange thread

kid charlemagne

kid charlemagne

Well-known member
london- chill but i feel like i was mostly around tourist type people than regular folk.
paris- either dickheads telling me this was a resturant not a washroom or a people speaking to me in diff languages or street gamblers trying to take me to an atm. cool city at night tho
dublin- either nicest people in the world or guy trying to fight me and my friend
 
kid charlemagne

kid charlemagne

Well-known member
also another big thing i noticed was the architecture and housing. uk feels a lot older, not it a bad way tho, even the buildings you can tell are newer or refurnished, they still have a nice victorian look to it. the states only seem to get more and more modern. regular towns and cities too tho, uk just seems to have a more old and authentic look
 
Ian Scuffling

Ian Scuffling

Well-known member
Studying at St. Andrews where there is very little to do and the sun is not out much, so I can't help but think of that one song about Harlan County all the time which is why my initial answer to this question is always "wet, dark and cold." I like Dundee well enough but haven't done much there other than their nice arthouse theater, but Edinburgh I loved the few times I went. Calton Hill and the surrounding area are gorgeous. The suburbs look much more like they were made for people to live in, like KC was saying, which I find kind of soothing.

People are generally nice but again I'm kind of hamstrung by the St. Andrews bubble where there's lots of Americans and angloids, so my culture exchange has been more with academia writ large than the rest of the UK (unfortunately). I've made two close British friends with whom, by nature of knowing they frequent similar online spaces, I don't find there to be a significant cultural barrier. Something about the British that I can't quite put my finger on makes them seem less sociable and open to me than the Irish though. I suspect the rest of you have much to say on that subject.

Listening to Meat is Murder for the first time did give me an "I finally understand these people" moment the other day.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
One thing I did notice in the US is that lots of people are uniquely obsessed with status in a way that Brits aren’t. It seemed like Americans spend much more money on positional goods, and there were waaaay more luxury cars and SUVs than I’m used to seeing in London. I couldn’t help thinking that a lot of the extra income that Americans have is basically going to waste.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
A lovely young entrepreneur I met in NYC was confused by the fact that I didn’t have a clear view of what the highest status jobs are in the UK, ‘Are you seriously telling me you’re not sure if a successful start-up founder is more respected than a successful investment banker in London?!’. I think he thought I was BSing him to give the impression that the UK doesn’t have any weird status games (which it definitely does have). I genuinely didn’t know!
 
sus

sus

Moderator
When I was in New Orleans, the friend we were staying with kindly invited us to a house party. It was technically a ‘crawfish boil’, although the focus wasn’t really on the food, it was on the alcohol. Once you finished a drink, you had to throw the glass as hard as you could at the garden wall, and everyone cheered if it smashed on the first attempt (rather than bouncing off the bricks). It’s actually slightly trickier to smash a glass bottle on a wall than it sounds - about ⅓ of throws failed to smash for one reason or another.

There were beer funnels, lots of guns (some mounted on the wall, some carried by the partygoers), and a few unusual games that I hadn’t played before. One game, Hammerschlagen, involved throwing a hammer into the air in such a way that makes it spin around repeatedly, catching the hammer as it fell, and attempting to quickly smash down a nail in a tree trunk below immediately after catching the hammer. I decided not to play, because I’m such a klutz and didn’t think the combination of alcohol and airborne hammers was likely to result in anything good. But still, it looked fun.
 
dilbert1

dilbert1

Well-known member
linebaugh said:

Does europe have this type of person?
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Yeah this is all over Europe via skateboarding, every Free Skate Mag, Pocket, Grey etc. “homie” upload, especially from the UK actually. The Carhartt WIP team is kind of a slighly evolved version of this. Its funny how they really think the exterior fools everyone, I could smell the shitty Spotify playlists and recently rebranded IG feed from a mile away
 
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dilbert1

dilbert1

Well-known member
You guys have a lot of this cringe polite do-gooder vibe over there, really rubs me the wrong way. Its like this guy lost all his brain cells except for the few required to reassure him that he’s “doing the best he can”

 
dilbert1

dilbert1

Well-known member
I know this “type” of person is in the UK but what about the mannerisms and patterns of speech? I find it soothing, personally

 
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mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

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dilbert1 said:
You guys have a lot of this cringe polite do-gooder vibe over there, really rubs me the wrong way. Its like this guy lost all his brain cells except for the few required to reassure him that he’s “doing the best he can”

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No, the yanks on this forum are far more like that than us Brits. You guys are so square you're almost cubes.
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

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dilbert1 said:
“So square you’re almost cubes” yeah that’s vicious. See, even your attempts at insult evince a secret neurotic compulsion toward courtesy
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No, I'm merely aping the dissensus US style for the purposes of satire.

Furthermore it can't be denied that the do-goodingest of all was Padrage, who I believe is under your care.
 
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