Did you go traveling somewhere and find something that left you reeling? Chatting with a friend and learned a thing you find extraordinary? Wonder if anyone can confirm whether a custom actually exists yonder? This is your thread. I'm going to start: what the hell is up with the USA and having dinner at 5 or 6pm? I've lived several years in the US and I still don't get over it. That's closer to tea-time! What happens when you get hungry at 9 or 10?!
If you get hungry at 9 or 10, you have a snack. I don't think I would be very happy with the wait between a noon meal and a laaaate supper like that D:
my family often ate dinner at 7-7:30 and now I live with people who eat at 5 on the dot. that's so early. eat a proper lunch!! why the heckie do people on the east coast slice bagels in half and put a spread on each half and eat the halves instead of eating them like a sandwich?! edit: ftr I moved from California to Massachusetts. also, WHY ARE THESE STATES SO SMALL. I TAKE A WRONG TURN AND IM IN RHODE ISLAND
Tea time is for snack time! I mean in La Paz it was actual tea with pastries usually but in the rest of the Latino countries you grab a snack at 4-6, then dinner at 7-9. Sometimes I have dinner at ten because things happen and that is ok. So weird.
Because sandwich bagel is way too much breadstuff. Eating a half is the optimal bread to topping ratio
Lunch is usually pretty small for a meal, so if I had to wait until 7 all the time for dinner, I'd constantly get dizzy with hunger, never mind any later than that. Plus we don't have snacks very often. 5-6pm just works better.
I suppose that makes sense if you have a small lunch and no snacks. Both my parents worked, though, usually until 5 PM, and by the time everyone was home and settles it was 5:30 or 6, and then there was food prep time... @Raire Not if you just use the same amount of topping you would use on the two halves? Maybe there's more weight in the toppings here and people use larger amounts of topping that aren't suitable to bagelwiches.
I went to a large temple up in Hacienda Heights here for an anthro assignment. Basically doing an ethnography on Mahayana Buddhism. My first day there I was fine. Excited and looking around at all the things that were so different from my thing. Familiar faces up on the walls and in statues but looking very different. The next trip though I got dizzy and started to cry. I had to go hide in the bathroom while I cried out a panic attack. It was just too different from Thai Buddhism, but also similar enough for me to not be entirely detached from it. I apparently just couldn't handle it.
i know someone who's girlfriend is finnish and apparently they do this easter witches thing in finland where its like a second halloween or something?? i dont remember all the specifics but he was like "no, seriously, this is real, i totally thought she was bullshitting me when she first told me but its all true"
also @Avery if you eat half a bagel at a time it prolongs the whole bagel experience and makes u feel like ur getting more bagel for ur buck ;0
In happier news let's talk food. If a Mexican offers you food you take it. You do not refuse it. You can try to refuse it but you will not be allowed. We will literally forcefeed you if we must. YOU WILL EAT YOUR GOD DAMN FOOD. This also applies to Arabs and Thais and Cubans and most good peoples. This does not apply to random white people in California. Random white people in California are horrible hosts by and large in my experience. Do not trust them to feed you. This also applies to religious places I've noticed. Mosques and small temples have meals. Churches do not. Fear the churches. Fear them greatly. Meals as in meal meals. Not have this bagel. I mean "No you need more curry and do you want dessert of course you want dessert GET THIS CHILD MORE COFFEE" meals.
If you're working poor and have a day shift, you have to be up by 5 or 6 am so 9 or 10 is probably your bedtime anyway. You have to eat earlier, and maybe have a bedtime snack. Can confirm! It's a much bigger deal than Halloween is, but the dressing up thing is pretty much child-only. (They also dress up as cats!) Halloween as Americans know it is a new import over here. The cultural background behind it is a meld of Orthodox Christianity and old old Finnish traditions, so it's a very uniquely Finnish thing.
OH YEAH on the topic of culture shock I've personally experienced - I've had it in a big way twice. Moving to Finland from the US was obviously a big deal, but surprisingly, moving to the SF Bay Area from Oregon was in some ways worse. I was expecting things to be different in Finland, but I wasn't expecting them to be as different as they were between Oregon and middle California. Some of the differences were big - a lot of the common stores were different, traffic was fuckawful, the climate was totally different - but there were a zillion tiny differences, too, like little differences in slang and social rules, that exhausted me. My mom moved to Maryland a few years ago, clear across the country, and when I visited her it was culture shock all over again - the US has become strange to me in general, but the east coast is a lot different than the west coast on top of that, so I really felt like I was in a foreign country that just happened to share a language with my native one. The thing that always gives me the most culture shock: grocery store layouts.
God. I hadn't even thought about that. If I can't handle Buddhism then how will I handle grocery stores. I will cry in a grocery store in Japan. The clerks will ask what is wrong in their vague way. People will look at me with confusion and walk away quickly. I cannot find the poptarts. Why.
My grocery store culture shock story: at thirteen years old, lil' Raire moves from London, to the capital of Honduras. On the first trip to the grocery store, she sees a BIG sign at the entrance: "PLEASE LEAVE YOUR FIREARMS WITH THE FRONT GUARD". This is when we learned that Hondurans are legally allowed to carry three firearms on their person. Like, really serious firearms. And some restaurants had similar signs. This should tell you a bit about life in Honduras.
I have trouble gauging how rich people are in the US because everyone has a bathtub and the sink spinny blade dealio. These are both rich people stuff here. I don't know anyone with a sink garbage disposal. The only people I know with bathtubs at home are either seriously fucking loaded or my godfather, who lived in the us for a while and upon returning built a house that's a replica of the one he owned in the US. Bathtubs are a luxury I only experience when traveling. ): I wish it wasn't because God I would love to have a fuckton of hot baths with salts and bombs and all that. Sounds so nice. The running out of hot water thing is also baffling. I though it was some sort of idiom I didnt get until a couple months ago a tumblr friend explained that no, you guys have an actual limited supply of hot water, that's a thing that happens.
Oh yeah, it is. I don't know about anywhere else but houses in the US have water heaters, which hold a certain amount of hot water that can come through the faucet, but when it runs out it takes some time for it to reheat some more. And on the subject of luxuries... I learned from a friend who lived in Finland that people having saunas in their homes is pretty common there... It blew my mind, because in the US you only see those in like, spas and fancy hotels and stuff.
You can get water heaters that heat on demand, is that what's used over there? How do you not run out of hot water? My family is half finnish, and my grandma had a sauna in her house. she sold it and i miss it :(. I'm trying to think of an odd Minnesotan thing that we do, but its difficult, maybe i'll figure out something to add after work tomorrow, its late.
Holy shit really? Like I knew it was a thing over there but I didn't know it was common. Saunas are tip top fancy fancy shit here. Also Californian thing is that we unironically use surfer slang. Or did at any rate. Some of it still sticks around or is making some sort of comeback.
I am currently Really Not At All Rich but went to a private school that had a lot of very rich people and a former friend from there just posted a picture of the indoor pool in her new house and I am just so ??????? (pools are Very Rare here in the UK) also wife is from America and every time she comes here she gets excited about how there is Actual Public Transport here that actually takes you places. (it's adorable. often when she sees a bus she is like 'bus!' in a very excited voice.)
