Culture Shock

tourtiere is basically a French Canadian thing - which means it was likely a French thing before that. and wherever the French ended up, so too did their cuisine. seeing as the French were historically on the same side as the US (y'know, 'cause they both hated the Brits), doesn't surprise me at all that some French ended up heading further south than Upper Canada to get away from the English. XD

hereabouts, in Metis/Franco-Manitoban land, it's usually a mix of ground beef and pork with sweeter spices (cinnamon, nutmeg). doesn't usually have potato or onion, nor do we eat it with mustard. there's usually gravy of some sort, (mashed) potatoes on the side. one restaurant in Winnipeg does it with a maple cream sauce that's just fucking divine. when I was first introduced to tourtiere, in rural Quebec, it was chunks of beef in gravy in a pie crust, and it was some of the best damn food i've ever eaten. (they followed it up with local wild blueberry pie.)

 

My guess is, Upper Peninsula tourtiere became more specifically a pork pie because they also had pasty brought over by the Cornish miners and so they ended up with kind of a pork = tourtiere, beef = pasty thing, maybe. I mean it seems like a reasonable theory, at least.

 

@alchemicalheart i'm led to believe you put the bag in a pitcher.

@littlepinkbeast that's a really interesting theory! also interesting is that, iirc, my host family was very much of the opinion that tourtiere was Beef Chunks and No Other. regional cuisine and its history is so fascinating.

 

this seems appropriate for the culture shock thread: over in the problematic pairings make you evil thread we accidentally started talking about american schools vs everybody else's schools, so. i'm canadian, and i grew up in a smallish city (population 160k) and went to a high school with about 1k students.

we had no security officers, very very rarely had police visits, had full control of our medication (this one seemed obvious to me but apparently other places make you give your meds to someone else?? even advil??), no locker checks, no gates, certainly no metal detectors.

i am lead to believe that things are very different in many american schools. please, tell me about your high school experience wrt the above stuff, because i'm still half-convinced that i've only heard extreme examples!! also i am curious :3c

 

Back from a really nice day at the wat so I feel like sharing my one big moment of culture shock with it. Years ago I was very upset when going to a meditation class. I forget why now even. The point is I had been upset for days and I wanted to talk with the Achaans about this all. I spent some time walking around the room thinking about things and trying to gather the wherewithal to talk to someone. One of the women who volunteers and helps keep the temple's finances going came by and asked me what was up. I tried to explain and was told to go sit down. That was just it. Just go sit down.

She didn't sound mad at me or ashamed of me like, say, my family would be. But she also wasn't there to listen to me cry on her shoulder. She was there to tell me to go sit down and calm the hell down. Which I did because I didn't really feel like fighting. I didn't feel that great about it at first, and honestly I was kind of super pissed. I did sit down though and I did put a solid effort into meditating. Which fixed the mood problem pretty damn well. Then I had a calm talk with the Achaan about things afterwards when I wasn't falling apart.

 

it is unwieldy but it is also very easy to store!! you usually buy it 4L at a time, and since they're just bags you can stick 'em anywhere in the fridge. also cartons are more of a pain to throw out/recycle, whereas a plastic bag can get balled up very small. shrug!! it's mostly families that get bagged milk. most people don't need that much milk so we just buy 1 or 2 liter cartons.

 

From the UK, for reference.

My primary school was really weird about meds, actually - I took liquid paracetamol one time when I had to go to school while still sick and got in trouble which didn't help anything - but I don't think my high school cared much, though I'm sure they would have been Really Mad about #drugs. I also didn't see any police/security, though that doesn't preclude their existence, I guess. On the other hand, my high school was really obsessively annoying about Your Skirt Length Must Be Precisely This (did you know that not everyone can afford to get their school uniform tailored??) and about how You Must Not Have Your Phone On You In School (to the point where someone confiscated my friend's phone in the girls' bathroom while she was trying to fix an emergency).

 

In the middle of Buttfuck Nowhere, Pennsylvania-- pretty rural school district, with a weird split between "rich horse-owning people" and "people who are or should be on welfare of some sort." 400ish kids per grade, which put high school roundabouts 1200 students.

When I graduated there were 3 security officers. Police visits were out of the ordinary but not unheard of (we had at least three kids in my grade arrested for dealing drugs, so uh ._.). Area apparently has a heroin problem?? I live under a rock and only heard about the big stuff though, the only reason I know that is cos one of my friends is a gossipmonger who likes knowing All The Things.

We weren't supposed to carry medicines with us (even OTC stuff like advil), but. See also: drug problem. (Also no one cared anyway, as long as certain teachers or the administration didn't see you you didn't get in trouble.)

Locker and bag checks were theoretically with "reasonable suspicion" but like. Whatever suspicion system they were using sucked ass, drugs of various sorts, alcohol, and weapons all got in with 0 problems.

Unsure what you mean by "gates," like. The middle school's doors were almost always locked from the inside and you had to be buzzed in? (Except during bus unloading, obvs.) But that wasn't a thing at the high school. Idk. (I have heard that the high school started doing this after I graduated, but I haven't been there so I can't say for sure.)

Metal detectors, no?? But then again, rural area, not like this is Chicago or some shit.

edit: Both middle and high schools were hella fussy about "skirt most be at least This Long" and "shoulder straps must be at least This Wide," but then we didn't wear uniforms and theoretically should have been able to find "appropriate" clothes to wear.

 

ahh someone in the other thread mentioned that their school had a fence and gate, so i thought i'd mention that mine really didn't. also the main doors were almost never locked. we wandered in and out as we pleased, and most of the doors that did lock were propped open in the warmer months. i think my elementary school doors locked automatically, though.

our dress code was pretty relaxed, and very few teachers would ever make any attempt to enforce it. our skirts and shorts were supposed to reach the tips of our fingers. mostly, we just avoided the teachers we knew would say something unambiguous, rather than something like "your skirt's looking a little short today, [name]."

 

My Colorado high school: didn't have metal detectors or a gate, no locker searches that I knew of, open campus, but there were lockdown drills occasionally, and security desks at the entrances. Looking back on it, though, bit surprised we didn't have more security due to the Columbine shooting.

 

Ontario elementary school in the 90s-2000s: when I was taking ritalin, my dose was split up between breakfast-lunch-dinner. I had to leave my lunch dose with the office at school, presumably because it's a controlled substance and I was in, like, grade 3 so I couldn't be trusted to not do something stupid with it. But yeah we had no security checks or anything but I heard that school's gotten stricter with visitors/parents signing in at the front office. In high school, we never had locker checks or metal detectors or anything. Idk about bigger cities like Toronto, though.

Tourtiere experience: it's basically ground beef (or pork? I forget) in a savoury pie crust, you can put gravy on it but I don't bc I haaaaate gravy. It's A Quebec Thing, although my dad's only sort of from quebec, so it's not a big ole deal. We have it at thanksgiving or christmas or whenever the stores make a big deal about having it.

Milk in bags anecdote: apparently it keeps longer than in a carton? I dunno. it's a little inconvenient because you have to cut the corners off properly or else the stream comes out weird and you overshoot your coffee/cereal. Or you cut too much off and end up pouring out too much. I gotta say, cartons and plastic jugs are kind of more convenient in that sense?

And not exactly full-on culture shock, exactly, but as a white person from south-eastern ontario, i'm still not sure what to do when an elder from the local first nation goes around smudging the room at certain events? I was usually at those events for work, which meant I didn't have to applaud or whatever*, just stand there doing job-related things. But yeah I moved to "northern" ontario (ie lake superior, which is still relatively southern but we're "the northwest") and smudging and/or drumming is sort of common here due to the larger first nation population. the first time I even remember first nations being acknowledged at an event in southern ontario was my college graduation near Trenton, where they opened by acknowledging the nation whose traditional land the college is on. and then again at my brother's graduation in a nearby city, but yeah little bit of a "uh so what's the rules?" type of culture confusion. nothing even close to what I've heard students from first nations go through when they have to come to big cities for school, though, yeesh.

*by this i don't mean applaud the smudging, I've gathered that's Not A Thing One Does. I mean, when it's appropriate to applaud, it was appropriate for us to not, because we were there working and not actually part of the audience.

 

i had to google smudging and it's really interesting! TIL i guess.

as for the milk in a bag thing, i'd hope it keeps longer, i wouldn't want to use it as much as an easily poured carton or jug. my mom and i were wondering, doesn't it get punctured easily? and if it doesn't because of heavy duty plastic, why not just use the jugs? if you cut a corner, how does it seal properly? also, it apparently saves space but if you fill a pitcher don't you have to make room for two things in your fridge instead of one? milk in a bag will forever mystify me.

 

most of the benefit is how much of it you can buy at once! the bags rarely get punctured and no, once you cut a corner it does not seal. this does not really cause problems unless you are clumsy with it. the space saving part is that if you got the same amount of milk in cartons as you would in bags, you would have more difficulty finding space for the extra cartons than you would the extra bags.

there's honestly not a whole lot of benefit to milk bags, but in a family of six with four kids who eat an absurd amount of cereal, being able to buy 8L of milk in one go is ideal.

 

Well, you don't make room for two things, when you open a bag you put the bag in the pitcher so it is standing and not spilling milk, if that makes sense?
And it doesn't seal properly, once its open it usually lasts two days though, at least in my experience. They really are easy to store though, and while cartons are pretty handy the squishy bags just get into those random spaces. Like a carton won't fit rounded edges in the fridge space, while the bags just kind of squish and settle. And it generally doesn't get punctured because... it usually isn't next to puncturing things? I dunno, it works, I've used all sorts of methods for milk by now.

 

see, i grew up in a family of six and we did use a lot of milk, but we bought gallon jugs (a little less than half of 8L) that lasted us about a week and a half. which is about how long it took to go bad, so there you go. literally every fridge i've seen in my life (even mini fridges?) has had a milk shelf, and about two thirds as many an egg shelf. you don't have to search for a place for the milk, it goes on the milk shelf in the door. idk.

 

@Deresto i will point out that one bag of milk is less likely to be catastrophically spilled by a clumsy little kid in the act of cereal-pouring than a gallon jug is! but i also don't have much else to say in the defense of milk bags. i don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about why they are good. they simply Exist. think of it like... idk, kool aid jammers and capri suns vs. regular juice boxes, i guess.

 

Honestly it kind of confuses me too. It doesnt seal but the only time ive ever had bagged milk go bad on me is when I was living with roommates in college, we all went home for the holidays, I came back and oops the milk had become lumpy. But my parents manage to get through a whole 4L (so abt a gallon?) before it goes off. Meanwhile I'm on my own and just buy 2L cartons because I don't have the space (tiny bar fridge) or appetite for more than that.

(Edit: also as to the appeal of buying 4L of milk in bags as opposed to one 4L jug, I guess it's like, if you want that much milk it can be more convenient to use 4 separate litres instead of one container that holds 4L. you only have to lift one litre of milk at a time, which is nice. and as to the bags not getting punctured, the plastic is actually pretty tough! My family has a bit of a milk bag hoarding problem, we'll cut one end the rest of the way open once it's empty, wash it, and then my dad will use it to hold leftover cooked chicken thighs or something. aside from the fact that you have to use a bread tie or twist-tie to hold them shut, they're kind of better than sandwich bags for re-using. end of edit lol)

Also when I moved here, a lot of the houses in my neighbourhood looked really tiny to me, but when i mentioned it to coworkers they were like "....not really?" and i only recently realized I was thrown off because a lot of the houses don't seem to have a second floor or an attached garage. My landlady's house has a basement and a main floor and a garage beside the house, that's it. Although i have been to a couple parties at "normal" houses, so they do exist here. Maybe they just cost more, or this area is older and has smaller lots idk

 

@Mercury I'm really interested in your bay area vs Oregon experiences. I grew up in the bay, but my mom's family is from Oregon so I've spent a lot of time there too. There are definitely some cultural differences I've noticed, but it seems like you noticed a lot more.