Kinda like when people lump California and Alabama together when talking about Americans. Annoying, isn’t it?
The differences between California and Alabama are still an order of magnitude or more smaller than between e.g. Portugal and Latvia.
I live in California. I’ve been to Alabama, Portugal, and Latvia (just this year for the Baltics, great places). I disagree.
Parts of the deep south are just fucking alien in a way I’ve never felt anywhere else.
Different places in Europe are, of course, different. But different in a way you can wrap your head around with an undercurrent of commonality. The same things being done in interestingly different ways by normal people.
The sense of dislocation and strangeness I feel in certain (not all) places in the deep south is far beyond anything I’ve experienced, not just in Europe, but also Asia, South America, and North Africa.
All you just told me is that you haven’t been to either. You couldn’t be more wrong.
Not really, that would be more like lumping the states Bavaria and Schleswig-Holstein together when talking about Germans.
Naw, that’s more like LA vs SF when talking about Californians. Different beliefs, social behavior, dialects, history, architecture, etc.
You guys really need to get away from lumping Americans in the same bin in conversation. The US is huge and covers more diverse cultures in a single state than most people understand. We’re friends with Europeans, regardless of what country you’re from. We love you guys! Stop falling victim to propaganda and remember that we are allies.
As a Virginian living in Sweden, I think it’s actually true that that the US is more culturally homogeneous than Europe. Someone from the East Coast and the West Coast still watches the same TV shows, goes to the same restaurants, and votes for the same president. It’s hard to tell the differences in accent between the West Coast and the East Coast.
There’s probably a bigger cultural difference between Richmond, VA and Lynchburg, VA (home of Liberty University), than there is between Richmond and Seattle.
In Europe, you can go 100 miles and find people who watch different shows, have different political parties, and speak an entirely different language.
The US was founded all roughly at the same time under the same government, with minor differences based on immigration and former colonial history. In contrast, Europe is dozens of different countries with widely different histories and language groups.
Other countries, like Russia and China probably have more cultural diversity than the US due to their languages and histories, but not as much as the EU.
One of the goals of the EU is to bridge these gaps between countries so that business can be conducted across political and language barriers, to make Europe have as much unified strength as the US. The EU has a larger population than the US, and nearly as much GDP, but you couldn’t tell on the global stage, because it’s not a unified force.
But you do know the cultural differences there are TINY in comparison, right?
Dang…6 day old response and I just got the notification. Sorry!
They are not tiny by comparison, which is what I’m trying to convey. For one, we have every culture in the world fully represented here across multiple regions. If that isn’t enough to convince you, take a trip that includes maybe LA, Seattle, Idaho, Minnesota or anything adjacent, NYC, south Florida, Alabama or Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. I doubt this will convince you, but I have to at least try. It really bothers me when people say shit like “Americans are x,” completely discounting the fact that we are a federation of 50 different countries, each with it’s own unique laws and cultures.
/rant
It’s beyond bizarre to me that you’d think the differences between states in the US would be comparable to that of countries in Europe. Think of the language alone.
