| Archive for langcafe2.myfreeforum.org Come in and have your daily cup of languages! |
| Uriel |
Explain Your Country's Little Foibles and CuriositiesAmerica, Schmerica. Apparently you've learned everything you ever need to know about us by sitting in front of the boob tube. So let's turn the tables on the rest of you.I'll start with Walker, my mild-mannered Viking-in-a-lab-coat. Nyckelharpa, huh? 
Looks like a cross between a fretted dulcimer and a hammer dulcimer. [img]http://samrizzetta.com/wp-content/sam2.jpg [/img] Both. My dad made a regular (fretted) dulcimer from a kit when I was little. He liked that kind of stuff. The description says the nyckelharpa has an unmistakable "haunting" sound (not unlike a dulcimer). That's off of "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Herring", by the way. 
|
||||||||
| Porthos |
Haha, funny. I sort of think of him like that too. |
||||||||
| Walker |
Sorry for my late reply, but I've been enjoying summer (it's been a rainy one for the most part).
I'll just take that as a compliment. Nyckelharpa, yes, it's a typical instrument in Swedish folk music. That's folk music, which means that you hardly ever hear it. However, I listen to a Swedish group called Väsen that plays traditional Swedish music as well as their own compositions. One of them plays the nyckelharpa. I couldn't find any of my favorites, but here are four songs. 30-års jiggen Björkbergspolskan Hasse A's Flippen They're welcome to come and play on my wedding reception. |
||||||||
| Bashar |
In the USA this sort of thing varies from region to region. Here's some curiosities of the places I've lived (which is quite a lot considering how old I'm not)
In New Jersey you can't pump your own gas (or "petrol" as some of you might call it). All stations are full serve, in which an employee (usually a Middle Eastern or Indian immigrant) fills up your tank while you stay in the car. It seemed a bit strange while we (me & my parents) lived there, but it didn't really hit us how different this practice was until we went to Hungary this year and brought our extended family from Jersey with us. At a gas station in Hungary, my dad actually had to pump their gas for them because THEY DIDN'T KNOW HOW! Omaha, Nebraska seems like anywhere else in the Heartland of America, except for these small bars and lounges which have signs reading "KENO" outside them. Everywhere you look there's a place with a "Lounge" and "Keno." This is actually legalized gambling. Keno is a casino card game, and these little establishments have one-player video Keno machines in them. Sales tax. In European countries, if you buy anything, the price on the price tag is the price you pay. In the States, you pay that price plus a tax. To Europeans this is an unfamiliar concept. It is equally unfamiliar to people in the state of New Hampshire because New Hampshire apparently has no sales taxes! There...now if you're an American, you're probably thinking you had no idea someplace in your own country could seem so foreign. |
||||||||
| Uriel |
It's because we enjoy doing math. There's nothing more fun than staring at a price tag that says $28.93 and wondering exactly what 7.125% of that might be! New Mexico has no sales tax on food or prescription items. And once a year, right before school starts, we have a weekend where various school-related items like pens and notebooks and children's clothes are also tax free. It just happened. God, I was lucky I talked myself out of going to the mall! I'm sure it was wall-to-wall shoppers. Texas has no state income tax. Lucky bastards! I once ordered a cheeseburger and fries, and my German stepbrother did the same. My silverware never came out of the napkin. He ate his entire meal with a knife and fork! During a discussion with his sister on the subject of finger foods, she intimated that in some parts of Germany, the older folks even eat bread and butter with a knife and fork! |
||||||||
| Deborah |
Sick and wrong!
Did you see the Seinfeld episode with people eating candy bars with a knife and fork? |
||||||||
| Uriel |
Missed it! Why on earth....? 
|
||||||||
| Deborah |
I assume you're asking why on earth they were eating with a knife and fork. No explanation is given, except for one person who says it's because she saw someone else doing it and she liked it. Here's a transcript of that episode, which was one of my favorites: http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/ThePledgeDrive.html I think it's worth a read. |
||||||||
| Walker |
I think it makes sense to use a knife and fork. That way you don't have to cope with pieces of onion and tomato hanging between the hamburger and your mouth, and you don't have to cover your fingers in dressing. It gets less messy and more hygienic. You betcha!  I realize you're supposed to eat it with your hands (or fingers?) (that's what I do) but usually when I eat hamburger and fries, I finish the meal with fingers less clean than when I started eating. By the way, after that fork discussion I've been paying more attention to how people at work hold their forks, and they do hold it upside-down. Women do, that is.
I've seen it twice, and yes, it's a funny episode! |
||||||||
| Julian |
Now when have you ever seen something priced at $28.93? US ticket prices must end on a '9' -- it's the (unwritten) law! $19.99, $59.99, $999.99. 
California has no sales tax on food, unless it's served hot or can be consumed on the premises, prescription drugs, plants, fertilizer, utilities, alternative energy devices and supplies, and veteran pins! The statewide sales tax is 7.25% but cities and counties can assess supplementary sales taxes, which explains why sales tax in LA is at 8.25% while in neighboring Orange and Ventura Counties it's 7.75% and 7.25% respectively. I believe San Francisco is 8.5%. Makes a big difference on those high-ticket items.
NYC is at 8.375% while Oneida County in upstate New York is a whopping 9.5%. |
||||||||
| Deborah |
When I lived in NYC, the tax was 8.5%. When people at in restaurants, an easy way of figuring out how much to leave for a tip was to add 25% of the cost of the meal, without tax. That would cover the tax and the tip. Of course, if you want to leave a 20% tip, that's even easier to figure out. | ||||||||
| Uriel |
Retail should always be .99 or .95, but when I buy medical supplies, I get some weird prices! Things that make you tilt your head like a dog and make that little noise.
Walker, your fingers are supposed to get dirty when you eat -- so you can lick them off later! I can see that it would be lost on you to explain the joys of eating corn on the cob, butter all over your cheeks and chin and fingers all burnt from trying to hold the hot ends (unless you have those little handles, of course) 
the transcendent experience of burying your face in a giant wedge of watermelon, scraping the rind clean with your teeth, and spitting the seeds for distance as you go 
barbecued ribs 
and need I mention the words turkey drumstick? 
|
||||||||
| Walker |
Lick your fingers? I used to eat watermelon like that little girl when I was little. But I'm not a child anymore. I don't mind getting my fingers dirty when I eat alone, but when there's other people around I prefer to be a bit civilized. BTW, how clean do you get by licking your fingers? That's just... ew! | ||||||||
| Uriel |
I guess we remain childlike forever!
Well, they say cats are very clean animals -- but how clean can they be when they're covered in saliva? 
|
||||||||
| Walker |
|
||||||||
| Uriel |
Hairball? 
|
||||||||
| Walker |
I actually saw a cat lick his own... once. Not nice! | ||||||||
| Josh Lalonde |
We have two different sales taxes here: GST (federal) and PST (provincial), which apply to different products. The rules are stupid sometimes, like if you buy one donut, there's GST, but if you buy a dozen, there isn't (groceries don't have GST, but snack foods do). Flights to the continental US have no GST, but flights to Alaska have it (I can't remember about Hawaii. They reduced the GST from 7% to 6% last year, so I've probably saved at least $4 in taxes this year. That got the Conservative Party elected too, which is pretty sad. | ||||||||
| Uriel |
Hmmm....I bet you'd be singing a different tune if you could do it, too! Josh: any weird Canadianisms we should be aware of? I know as your neighbor, I should already know what they are, but really, we've made a solid policy of completely ignoring you all for so long.... (and we know it pisses you off. You hate to have to admit it, but we know.... )
|
||||||||
| Josh Lalonde |
I'm sure you've all heard of poutine: french fries with gravy and cheese curds. It's actually pretty gross, but it's basically the only Canadian food I can think of. Restaurants sometimes have real maple syrup, which I've never seen in the US. We put vinegar on our fries; apparently when McDonald's first expanded here they were always running out of vinegar, because they didn't know that (so my Grade 12 business teacher told me.) Moving to sports: Canadians actually care about hockey (though I don't), our football field is ten yards longer, and you only get three downs. Some people do curling, but I'm not convinced it's a sport. A cold day is when it goes below -25 Celsius; anything else is just to be expected (thats' -13 Fahrenheit). Of course, contrary to what some Americans believe, that's only in winter; we do get three other seasons here, and summers are generally in the 30s Celsius (high 80s to 90s Fahrenheit). That reminds me of measurements: roads and temperatures are in metric, pretty much everything else is in Imperial. Packages are in Imperial sizes, but written in metric, so we have 454 gram packages of butter. That's all I can think of for now... | ||||||||
| Uriel |
For real maple syrup, you can't go to Denny's. You'll need one of the better restaurants -- mainly because the real stuff is so damn expensive! My parents were maple syrup purists; Mrs. Butterworth was not invited to the table. THey also used to send it back to their German friends in exchange for big packages of lebkuchen; apparently it was pretty unknown and/or exorbitantly priced in Germany in the 70's and 80's.
Poutine -- heard of it, never seen it. In real life, anyway. Vinegar on fries ... I don't know about that. I'm not even that thrilled with it on potato chips (although I like chile limon and regular limon, which is just as sour -- go figure). Of course, ketchup is simply vinegar + tomato sauce.... Fries with ranch dressing are really good.
I thought you just had the two seasons: snow removal and road repair.
|
||||||||
| Josh Lalonde |
It feels like that sometimes. My house is almost surrounded by construction right now, and a big section of the downtown is too. |
||||||||
| Uriel |
Ha! You use "downtown" too. 
|
||||||||
| Deborah |
Haven't you had fish and chips? (And not the Americanized version with tartar sauce.) Maple syrup -- mmmmm! The "maple-flavored" cane syrup is a joke. Restaurants that serve the real stuff are too rare in the US. |
||||||||
| Uriel |
Nope, never had fish and chips. But when they serve it at the lunch line inthe cafeteria at work, no vinegar is ever involved -- it's all tartar sauce and ketchup. I usually abstain -- not a big fan of processed fish. | ||||||||
| Deborah |
What, you mean fish sticks, or something like that?? I'm talking about what I had in England, namely, big pieces of fresh cod or haddock, dipped in a thin batter and deep-fried, with chips that are even chunkier than steak fries, all sprinkled with salt and malt vinegar. I admit that when I first heard of vinegar on fried potatoes I recoiled a bit, but it turned out that I loved the stuff. |
||||||||
| Benjamin [inactive] |
Incidentally, I usually eat fish and chips with either mayonnaise or curry sauce. |
||||||||
| Deborah |
You would be a nonconformist! (Or is that what people usually eat nowadays?) Welcome back from the US!(?) |
||||||||
| Benjamin [inactive] |
Curry sauce is very popular, but I'd say that salt and vinegar is still the most popular. Mayonnaise on chips is really more of a Dutch/Belgian thing, but people eat them like that here as well. However, in Edinburgh, fish and chips are generally eaten with a kind of sauce that's like a mixture of brown sauce and spirit vinegar.
Yes! But tomorrow (actually, 'today'), I'm going on a cruise around the Baltic — to Oslo, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, St Petersburg, Tallinn, Riga, Gdansk, and then also Brugge. 
|
||||||||
| Deborah |
Here's more than enyone would ever want to know about fish and chips.
Give my regards to St. Petersburg, Benjamin! |
||||||||
| Uriel |
Of course they're nasty fishsticks! We're talking about a hospital cafeteria, not Fishermans' Wharf!
|
||||||||
| Travis |
At least around here, the traditional thing is to eat potato pancakes with fish, not french fries (even though you can probably find french fries at some less traditional fish fries here). And on those potato pancakes it is traditional to put applesauce of all things. Of course, you'll probably have coleslaw on the side and tartar sauce to put on the fish, and at more traditional fish fries, will also have caraway rye bread on the side. However, all of this has little to do with the British sort of fish and chips, and is more of a secularized German Catholic thing that happened to become popular with the population in general here. | ||||||||
| Deborah |
Mmm...I love potato pancakes with applesauce! | ||||||||
| Lazar |
Me too! But they come from the Jewish side of my family, and we know them as latkes. | ||||||||
| Travis |
Here they're apparently just German in general rather than being tied to any more specific group; it is really the fish part and the eating of said fish on Friday part which is at all tied to religion, the idea of such having been originally tied to Catholicism before it got secularized here. |
||||||||
| Deborah |
Actually, I know them as latkes, too. So much of what we in the US know as "Jewish" cooking has German or East European roots. |
||||||||
| Benjamin [inactive] |
Do you mean these sort of things?
We call them potato scones, or tattie scones. |
||||||||
| Travis |
That is one thing that always sticks out to me - that much of what is called "Jewish" (i.e. Ashkenazi) in the US which is not actually religious in nature seems to me to be simply German or Eastern European underneath it all and not really specifically Jewish per se. |
||||||||
| Travis |
Those don't look like any potato pancakes I've seen; all the ones I've seen either look like very finely cut hash browns compressed together tightly into a flat, round patty shape and then cooked as a whole or simply somewhat compressed (but much looser and more coarsely cut) hash browns. |
||||||||
| Elaine |
Potato pancakes, aka latkes:
|
||||||||
| Rio |
I suppose the funny thing I've noticed about Australia is the signage for walks. If you are in a (national) park and intend to go on a walk, for example, the sign will say that the walk will take 30 minutes and it is of moderate difficulty. Yet when I go on these walks, it might take me 15 minutes and its pretty easy. I don't think this has anything to do with my fitness or any personal quality but there's bizaare catch-all quality that exists in Australia, and I've experienced this on multiple walks. Likewise if you take a bend in the road, the recommended speed might say for example that you should do it at 45 km/hr, yet you could easily do it at 65 km/hr and be very safe from killing yourself.
However, I noticed when I went to NZ, that if a walk is estimated to be 30 mins in length and of moderate level, then it will be! |
||||||||
| Deborah |
Can we deduce from this that New Zealanders are -- or at least are expected to be -- more fit than Australians? |
||||||||
| Rio |
Hmmmm, maybe but I think its more due to Australia's generally over-cautious approach to anything in life. "When in doubt, regulate" - that's Australia's motto. |
||||||||
| Rio |
Hmmmm, maybe but I think its more due to Australia's generally over-cautious approach to anything in life. "When in doubt, regulate" - that's Australia's motto. |
||||||||