(no subject)

[camwyn]

Tell me something about the area that you're from- some detail that a local would know, or would take for granted- that wouldn't necessarily be immediately obvious to somebody from out of town or far away.

(I've been talking to enough people lately from elsewhere in the United States that it's become painfully obvious just how much research I need to do in order to make decently plausible NPCs or fic characters, and while it's possible to dig area info out of a library or the Net in general, it helps to have a point to start from. I've traveled a fair amount within the States, but most of it was with the Red Cross, and just-post-flood or just-post-fire is not really the best time to get to know a region.)

For example:

While it's no longer as heavily/exclusively Greek as it used to be, Astoria- the Queens neighborhood I lived in for most of my childhood- is still so heavily Greek that you'd have trouble finding a hot dog stand there. You're more likely to find a souvlaki stand on any given corner, and the air in the shopping 'district'- mostly along Ditmars Boulevard and 21st Street- tends to smell of charcoal as a result. The subway in Astoria doesn't run underground, but up on trestles over the streets; it gets called the El a lot as a result. You get a lot of airplanes overhead, both jets and little pontoon jobbies, because the Marine Air Terminal of LaGuardia Airport isn't far away- Astoria is next to Jackson Heights is pretty much next to LaGuardia.

You don't get freestanding houses in Manhattan except way way way up in the northern part of the island. They've all been replaced by row houses or apartment buildings. Gas stations are very hard to find in Manhattan; they're vital and all, but you can't really build anything over them, and real estate in that borough is at a premium. Same deal with cemetaries. If you find them in Manhattan they're pretty nearly invariably attached to old churches. The dead are more likely to be buried in Queens or Brooklyn, or sometimes the Bronx. One of the weirdest patches of quiet in Manhattan can be found on 47th Street between 6th Avenue (aka Avenue of the Americas) and 7th Avenue on any given Jewish holy day; that's the Diamond District, and so many of its businesses are run by Hassidic Jews that the street is effectively dead on Yom Kippur despite normally doing enough business to put the Bazaar at Deva to shame.

There are four automobile tunnels into Manhattan: the Lincoln Tunnel, the Holland Tunnel, the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, and the Queens-Midtown tunnel. They are all long. As in, the shortest one is around a mile and a quarter long. You cannot bike or walk through them unless one or more tubes are closed off to car traffic or you work for the city; don't even try.

New Yorkers (and to a lesser extent residents of Jersey City) may refer to the front steps of a house or apartment building as the stoop. New Yorkers may refer to the thing you sit on and slide down at the playground as being a 'sliding pond'; it's from an old Dutch term, from what I understand, same as 'stoop'. New Yorkers generally don't stand in line, they stand on line, and they've been using that phrasing since computers took up three rooms and would melt if you brought a telephone near them.

... you get the idea.

Comments

[muji]

Hrm. I live in the wilds of American suburbia, but I always appreciate the 'Hon' Baltimore culture, and I think the best example of that is Cafe Hon in Hampden. An addition to that is the Bawlmerese page halfway down.

...>_>;; Yeah, interesting to me is linguistically interesting. I'm somewhat helpless and/or predictable.

[darthrami.livejournal.com]

The most important thing I can think of about DC is that it's far more racist and segregated than anybody actually cares to talk about.

The buildings are all low, due to an obscure law made back in the 1800's (meant to mean that you could always see the statue on top of the capital building) saying that a building can be no taller than twice the width of the street on which it stands. Which means you DO get taller buildings, but they're all in the further outskirts of the cities, where roads were built later, and so are much wider. Or in Arlington, which might as well be part of the city, and the people who live there feel fiercely about this. It actually WAS part of the city (it was originally a diamond) until Virginia put up a fuss (in I can't remember the year) and the land on that side of the Potomac was given back, which is why you have three straight lines, and then a river, as the boundaries of the city.

The people who live IN the city tend to be either Very Rich or Very Poor, the middle class within the city limits is nearly non-existent, and most of the people who work in the city commute from MD or VA. Which means that "downtown," which would be the thriving area in other cities, is pretty much dead after about 6 or 7pm. Restaurants aren't open, stores aren't open, even the Starbucks across from my work closes at 8.

There are two things people from (the DC area) talk about: Food, and Transit. And how to take transit to get to food. We have the third worst traffic in the country (although now I think that this has been upgraded to second), and it shows, and our public transit system is horribly backwards and outdated, and it pisses just about everybody off. (Those who aren't pissed off by it either drive, or work for Metro.)

Because this is where the seat of the government is, so very much is built around that, and that shows. Many businesses even get off for Inauguration Day. The joke is that if you work in DC, you either work for the government, a law firm, or a non-profit, and it has a large basis in reality (though most of the non-profits are in Alexandria, for whatever reason. But that's still considered "metro DC").

There isn't any one set way of doing things or saying things, because people come here from all over the country and the world, and stick strongly to their roots. It's very much the feel of a small city, but as opposed to places like Baltimore or Pittsburgh (which aren't small cities, but have that feel), it's like it has a giant chip on its shoulder, and WANTS to have a big-city-feel, but can't quite pull it off.

People walk slowly, and they really *can't* drive (which adds to the traffic problems). Beware cars with Diplomatic plates, as they will run you over.


Aaaaaaaand I'm rambling and am not even sure this is the kind of thing you're looking for. Maybe? :D?

[gramarye1971]

And the racism in DC is actually reflected in the layout/development of the Metro system. No Metrorail stops in Georgetown. Only one line (Green) running into Southwest DC. Bus systems and schedules that almost make it mandatory for people to own cars. *sigh*

[maps-or-guitars.livejournal.com]

I've never heard the "sliding pond" bit, but then again I moved to the city at an age when I was no longer sliding upon them. Stoop is certainly Dutch.

So is "cookie."

[sarekofvulcan.livejournal.com]

In Bangor, you refer to Union St. and Kenduskeag Ave, but _the_ Odlin Road.

In Providence, New York System Weiners have meat sauce, celery salt, onions, and mustard.

[derien.livejournal.com]

Yet another Maineiac. AND a Bujold fan!

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Nashville, TN is divided by the Cumberland RIver, which loops around the city like this (http://mapserver.maptech.com/homepage/index.cfm?lat=36.1813&lon=-86.7373&scale=250000&zoom=50&type=1&icon=0&searchscope=dom&CFID=3679579&CFTOKEN=93850689&scriptfile=http://mapserver.maptech.com/homepage/index.cfm&latlontype=DMS); other bodies of water include the Stones River on the southeast side of town, and the Harpeth River on the west side, an well as Mill Creek, which flows all over the place, and tends to flood in heavy rains. The Cumberland is an old river, with a lot of bends in it, which means that getting from point A to point B will probably involve crossing the river. Central Tennessee is an area of karst topography, with a lot of caves and sinkholes, including the unexpected variety of sinkhole that appears, suddenly, one day, without warning. There's not a lot of naturally flat ground in the area, with; it's a gigantic eroded limestone plateau. Only one of the bridges is built specifically to withstand the result of a 7.0 New Madrid earthquake. There are two railroad bridges across the Cumberland that were built in the 1850s with center spans that rotate, to allow steam boats to pass by, as they weren't high enough for them to go under.

Everyone knows that Nashville is the home of country music; what they may not realize is that, as a result of all those studio musicians and all that available studio space, Nashville is also a center for other types of music recording, including the recording of jingles for commercials. People have found birds' nests made of magnetic tape from songwriters' old demo tapes. Nashville was occupied by Union troops for most of the Civil War, and there are the remains of three forts built on top of hills at that time; two have been repurposed into water reservoirs; the third is undergoing restoration as an historic site.

There are three interstate highways that pass through Nashville--I-40, I-24, and I-65; as a result, it's also a center for the trucking industry; there's one trucking line that has a dedicated exit off of Briley Parkway, a major local limited-access highway. It's also where they build Peterbilt trucks; Nissan has a major plant in a southern suburb. There are two medical schools in Nashville, both private, rather than state institutions. In the early 1960s, the governments of the city of Nashville and Davidson County were combined into one entity--"Metropolitan Nashville and Davidson County", referred to by the shorthand term "Metro", when talking about government entities--Metro Council, Metro jail, and so on.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

There are pauwlonia tress on the river banks in the downtown area, (accidental plantings, rather than purposeful human landscaping); in the spring they bloom with long, trailing clumps of lavender-colored flowers. Nashville Bridge Company used to have a plant downtown on the east side of the river where they built river barges; only a few remnants of this plant remain, and sculptures made of bits of massive industrial hardware have been installed along a riverwalk.

As you would expect in a state capitol, the city has things like a Federal Reserve branch, a US Courthouse, and so on; the old state hospital for the mentally ill, on Murfreesboro Road, was built on an old Indian burial ground, and when the buildings were razed and the property was converted to a Dell assembly plant, both that and the cemetery where patients had been buried received significant purification rituals in more than one faith. No one knows for sure if these worked.

The original white settlers were French fur traders, who settled there to take advantage of the salt springs in the area; one of the largest was known, as a result, as the Great French Lick; it's within a mile of the state capitol building, as is the mineral spring that gave the early professional baseball field its name: Sulphur Dell (thanks to Grantland Rice). The earliest Anglo settlers came to Nashville by going down the Tennessee River to the Ohio, and then up the Cumberland River.

The climate is temperate, with generally mild winters. In the past, there was usually at least one good snowfall, if not more, during a winter, although these usually melted within a few days; winters where snow remained on the ground for a month or more are unknown in living memory. However, in recent years, there have been fewer and fewer snows, although ice storms continue to be a concern.

One of the peculiarities of the local dialect is the use of the term 'hosepipe' for 'garden hose'; however, there are so few people who are native-born, and whose parents were native-born, that this term is heard less and less. As a result of all the incomers from the rest of the US, it's also possible to be a native Nashvillian and NOT have a southern accent.

The local professional hockey team takes its name and logo from the skull of a sabre-toothed cat found during excavations for a bank downtown; there's also an NFL team and a AAA-minor league baseball team in town, but professional basketball is not felt to be have a good chance locally, because the college teams in the area are too good.

The southern US, like a lot of the rest of the small-town US, has a tradition of restaurants generally open for breakfast and lunch, or lunch only--in Nashville, these are called, instead of cafés, "meat-and-threes", because the typical menu item is a choice of meat entree with three side dishes.

[valles-uf.livejournal.com]

I'm from Elkins, West Virginia, which, using my common mental image of WV as a giant mutant frog pointed southwest, is roughly the state's left kidney. Coal, in that area, is relatively rare - as far as I know there are no mines left operating in Randolph or any of the surrounding counties - but there are still more than a few hills in the area that show signs of the mountaintop removal method. What are local industries are logging and quarrying; there's a big limestone quarry right at the eastern outskirts of town that's essentially eaten the end of a ridge, like Big Man just reached down and scooped the mountain away down to below the valley floor.

Biggest thing: WV is not, either culturally or technologically, some throwback to the nineteenth century. The most common local accent is Generic American (and where it fails, you get Kentucky rather than Deep South). What it is, though, is the low-rent industrial sector of the national town. Coal mines in the south third of the state, industrial chemicals along the Kanawha River, heavy industry along the Ohio, and logging pretty much everywhere.

It's a churchy place. I'd be surprised if my hometown of seven thousand or so didn't have ten different churches - I can think of five just off the top of my head. Politically that comes in front of the fact that it's very working class and Unionized.

Most of the people here, I think, descend from your Scots-Irish troublemakers who got chased out of everywhere else; certainly the local genotype (and there very much is one) is for dark hair and pale skin. These will typically be in a dozen or so families that will take up huge swaths of the phone book and have half the local geography named for them. A decent minority - say, 35% - will be have names that point to immigrant workers who got imported long ago from places like Italy or Czechoslovakia, but culturally speaking they're fully assimilated and taken for granted.

The other noteworthy minority is much more recent - hippies and back to the earth types who came in the 60s, and their spawn, including yours truly. 5% would probably be a way high guess; I only make that because I got a good look at them. ^_^

Anyone who's flying into WV is either landing someplace else and driving the last bit or going through Yeager Memorial at Charleston. It's fairly smallish as state capital airports go, because they had to make the runway by slicing off and leveling the top of a mountain and if you've got a window seat then it always feels like the thing just comes up out of nowhere only an instant or two before touchdown.

Local news, um... Corridor H (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corridor_H_%28Appalachian_Development_Highway_System%29) is under construction and pretty much a done deal, but it was controversial for a long time and some people still aren't reconciled to it. The arguments agin' it are that it'll go through some remaining wilderness and that it's a lot of money to be spending on a new road when the local ones are all falling apart.

Personally I'd say it beats being crushed by a logging truck.

[camwyn]

I've been to West Virginia twice, but it was to holler country- Preston County. The first Red Cross job I ever went on, the guy running the IT operations when I got there was from Charleston, and you should've seen the look on his face when I mentioned that to him. Mostly because he wanted to make sure I knew the rest of the state wasn't like that. The impression I got of the holler country regional accent was something like Kentucky spoken at New York City speeds (and we talk fast).

[aisforamy]

In the Pheonix area, new houses are generally built so close together that you could stick your arm out of the side window and nearly touch the wall separating you and your nearest neighbor. New neighborhoods have Homeowners Associations that charge a monthly fee to bitch at you about where you keep your garbage cans, or if you park on the street for too long, or paint your house the wrong shade of brown.

It is illegal to harm a saguaro cactus (the ones with the arms on then), because they are supposedly endangered.

Many people have misconceptions about what it means to live in a desert region, and often envision something resembling the Sahara Desert before they arrive, but there isn't really any sand.

Just because something has the word "River" attached to it's name, it doesn't mean there is going to be water in it.

If it is raining, there will be flooded streets and washes. If you drive into one and get stuck and need to be rescued, you have violated the "Stupid Motorist" law, and will be expected to pay for the cost of the helicopter, emergency equipment or whatever it took to enable your rescue. I am not kidding.

There is a larger Asian community here than one might expect, and many Asian markets and restaurants to choose from.

The city and surround area are very easy to navigate...everything is basically built on a grid, with major roads every mile in each direction. So if you were to call to get directions to a business, they will tell you something like, I am on the northeast corner of Stapely and Basline roads...and that is all you need to find them, no driving directions needed if you've lived here for more than a few months.

It is not hot here in the winter (it can even be freezing)but usually mild. We consider it cold if it is below forty five or fifty degrees. The summers can be unbearable, and you can get second degree burns from the buckle of your seatbelt or sitting on the pavement for too long at the height of summer.

Joe's BBQ has the best BBQ in the state (in my opinion, anyway).

[e-mily.livejournal.com]

The city and surround area are very easy to navigate...everything is basically built on a grid, with major roads every mile in each direction. So if you were to call to get directions to a business, they will tell you something like, I am on the northeast corner of Stapely and Basline roads...and that is all you need to find them, no driving directions needed if you've lived here for more than a few months.

Same with SLC, with the exception of some of the weirder roads. But, basically? Everything is built on a grid with NUMBERS. I live on 7800S, east right off of State street (which is a major street that's actually a highway that runs parallel to the freeway, just a few blocks away.).

This has made moving here SO much easier. I can find things like job interviews like that. *snaps fingers*

[ebony14.livejournal.com]

Interstate Highway 35 runs through both Dallas and Fort Worth, which are about 30 miles apart, separated by a collection of smaller cities, including Arlington (home of the Texas Rangers and soon to be home of the Dallas Cowboys); Hurst, Euless, and Bedford (known collectively as the "Mid Cities"); Irving (current home of the Dallas Cowboys); and Grapevine (home of several wineries, hence the name). Approximately 65 miles south of Dallas, just north of the town of Hillsboro, I-35 splits into I-35E (which runs through Dallas) and I-35W (which runs through Ft. Worth). The two highways rejoin in Denton, about 30-40 miles north of Dallas, where the University of North Texas is located.

The massive sprawl of urban area that encompasses Dallas, Fort Worth, and their surrounding suburbs is collectively referred to as "the Metroplex" or "the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex."

The Dallas Zoo is smaller and generally less developed than the Fort Worth Zoo. The Dallas City Aquarium is a beautiful old building in Fair Park (the complex of buildings used to hold the State Fair of Texas, which also includes most of Dallas' museums), but it is small and poorly maintained. The Dallas World Aquarium is a private venture that is much better designed, and is actually more of a zoological garden than simply an aquarium, with a number of terrestrial animals in addition to fish and aquatic mammals, including a sloth, a jaguar, and a collection of marmosets. It is correspondingly more expensive; the City Aquarium costs $3 and the World Aquarium costs almost $20 for admission.

Dallas Museum personnel are paid on the same scale as the workers that maintain city parks and public lands (e.g., the guys who mow the medians on public streets).

[firestrike.livejournal.com]

The Dallas zoo used to send their large reptiles (alligators, etc.) out of town for the winter. I don't know if they still do.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

People above a certain age who are Boston-area natives call soda "tonic." That's all soda, not just the stuff you mix with gin for a G&T.

Those chocolate things that go on ice cream are "jimmies" (and, no, it's not a racist term; that's a complete myth). The multicolored ones are "sprinkles" to some and "colored jimmies" to others.

The Boston Celtics and Boston Bruins play at The Garden. It doesn't matter that it hasn't been The Boston Garden for years. Even when it was the Shawmut Center and then the Fleet Center, some people still called it The Garden. And now that it's the TD Banknorth Garden, people still just call it The Garden.

Locals call the public transit system "The T." While the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority runs the buses and the rapid transit (trolleys and subways), "The T" usually refers only to the rapid transit part of it (as in the sentence "Take the T or the bus to Harvard Square." Not technically correct, but very common).

More Boston stuff

[genarti]

Massachusetts Avenue is one of the main roads of the city, running straight through much of Cambridge and on through the Back Bay and Fenway. Everybody calls it Mass Ave. Similarly, Commonwealth Avenue is nearly always Comm Ave, that I've heard.

The Prudential Center is the Pru. It's one of the more easily recognized landmarks of downtown Boston.

Back Bay is so called because it used to be part of the harbor. They wanted more land to build on, so they filled it in, and it's now one of the pricier areas of the city. This is why people will say that half of Boston is built on a landfill.

Liquor stores are often called "packies" by native Bostonians. It's not a racist term; I believe it's derived from "package store," or something like that? I am not Boston-native enough to use it, but I've heard it periodically.

Boston proper is actually very small. What most people think of as Boston includes a lot of other towns -- Cambridge, Somerville, Medford, Brighton, Allston, Arlington, etc etc. Some of them are cities in their own right, I think. And that's just the part that's on the T (er, the subway system), without getting into the wider suburbs. The extent to which the towns are differentiated from the larger city is both individual and contextual. Like, I'd say that I live in Somerville, and it's the City of Somerville I pay my taxes to and get my parking permit from and so forth, but I'd tell anyone from out of town I lived "in Boston," not "near Boston" or "outside of Boston." Also, I believe some of them are officially incorporated more than others.

Boston does not have streets on a grid system. Boston has streets on a "drunken cows wandered around three centuries ago" system. There are approximately 50 million streets with the same name as other streets; sometimes they even intersect. Often they have two or three names. Street signs do not always reflect reality here. Sometimes the natives use one name, the street signs use another, and maps use a third. Also, major streets often do not get street signs at most intersections, under the theory that if you're on it you know what it is. The underlying principle seems to be "If you don't know how to get where you're going, you don't deserve to." I tend to refer to navigating Boston as "vehicular Darwinism." Natives joke about it, and get frustrated by it too, but it's mostly affectionate frustration, and heavily dosed with pride that we can get around, unlike tourists; many of us get hives at the thought of a city where the traffic makes sense. It's all geometric and unnatural!

Parking around downtown Boston, Harvard Square, or any of the other major squares is an exercise in futility. Usually there are a limited number of spots with parking meters, all of them full, and then a lot of tantalizing side streets where you can't park without a resident's permit.

Every tiny little intersection in Boston is a square of some sort, it seems. This does not mean that anyone calls them squares or refers to them by name. (For example: there's an intersection called Private First Class John J. Halloran Square. Everyone calls it "where Powderhouse and Curtis intersect.") That said, if you're an out-of-towner trying to drive there, it's worth noting that the signs naming these squares may be much more visible than the more useful street signs.

Boston is proud of its Revolutionary-and-earlier history. This does not mean that anyone but tourists walks the Freedom Trail.

The North End is where you go for Italian food. (Well, there are lots of Italian restaurants all over. But the North End is essentially the Little Italy of a town with lots of Italian heritage.)

[colubra.livejournal.com]

The first columbarium on the west coast (and quite possibly, in the US) is located a brief walk from my home. The columbarium was erected, originally, in a sprawling cemetery that covered the entire area from the hill that Masonic Street runs along the crest of all the way to Ocean Beach. When this cemetery was exhumed and everybody transplanted to one in Colma, this became the Richmond district. The columbarium is the only interrment option for a San Franciscan who wishes to be buried in the county he lived in.

Additionally, people in the Bay Area do not refer to their highways the same as nearly anybody. We don't have The 101, we have 101, or Highway 101. We don't have the 280, we have 280. If you said 'I was gonna go down to San Jose on the 101, or is that a parkinglot at this hour?', everybody in earshot would know you don't live locally.

[e-mily.livejournal.com]

I've noticed that SLC is similar re: freeways. There are some people who say "the," but mostly it's just "fifteen."

Although the major major freeway is sometimes likely to be called "I15."

[lienne.livejournal.com]

Ooh. All right, I'll give this a shot with random facts about Toronto, where I go to university, and its suburbs, where I grew up. Warning: I am to relevance and intelligibility what Walter Peck is to kindness and understanding.



Coffee shops: Tim Hortons is Timmy's and they're everywhere in the suburbs but rare-ish downtown. Timothy's World Coffee is Timothy's and they're on the rise downtown and barely present in the suburbs. Starbuck's is Starbuck's and Second Cup is Second Cup.

Roads: Take everything I say here with a grain of salt because I don't drive. The Don Valley Parkway is the DVP or, if you're on it and impatient, the Don Valley Parking Lot. The Gardiner Expressway is the Gardiner, pronounced Gardener. No sane person drives down Yonge Street if an alternate route is available; the major roads to either side, Bayview to the east and Bathurst to the west, are preferred. Highway 7 isn't a highway; call it Seven.

General rambling, geography and transit-related: South is down, really. The city is on a slope from Lake Ontario upwards. Steeles is the northern border of the TTC transit system, after which you get the YRT and the VIVA (http://www.vivayork.com/), whose website really speaks for itself. There's a mall at Yonge and Steeles; it's tiny and crap and nobody goes there if they can possibly avoid it. The southernmost subway stop is Union; the northernmost is Finch (or possibly Downsview). There are exactly three subway lines (http://img168.imageshack.us/img168/8738/torontopv7.gif) in the city and nobody cares about Sheppard, as it's a recent addition. You can't actually see the CN Tower from most places, but you get a nice clean view from St. George and College. There're lights on it at night. Very pretty.

The Eaton's Centre: I forget what it was renamed to, something about Sears, but everyone still calls it the Eaton's Centre. Big mall. Stretches from Dundas to Queen along the west side of Yonge.

The chalk guy: Some guy draws elaborate chalk... things... on the sidewalk at Yonge and Dundas, presumably other places too. Apparently he has videos on youtube, but the search terms I recall being written by the chalk drawings turn up nothing relevant (http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=chalk+like+me&search=Search). He has a humorous way of requesting tips whereby if you give him a five-dollar bill he'll draw a checkmark and give you a hug, or if you're a cute girl, you can get the hug for a mere two dollars.

Food trucks: You can buy Chinese food from a horde of trucks along St. George Street from College to Bloor. They're omnipresent. In the summer they're accompanied by ice cream trucks, not the version with the siren for children. They just sit at the side of the road and sell you food.

Markham: The suburb of Toronto where I spent my formative years. Apartment building floors go 1 2 3 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 15 16, because most of the population of Markham is Chinese immigrants and four is an unlucky number. Presumably thirteen still is, too. But yeah, the majority of restaurant and shop signs are English-Cantonese bilingual, with the remainder an even split between English and Cantonese-- except in the malls; Markville Mall is wholly English and Pacific Mall is wholly Cantonese.



Can't think of anything else at the moment. Might go and ask other Torontonians I know. Was any of this useful, or am I an the wrong track?

[adiva_calandia]

There are moose in the backyard. This is more a cause for "Goddammit, they better not eat my apple tree again!" than anything.

Buildings in Anchorage are built to withstand earthquakes, because shit like this is probably going to happen again. That means that the tallest buildings in downtown are maybe 15 stories, and no higher. It also means that my mom's office building, which is on the edge of Cook Inlet, is built so that the bootlegger's clay under it will slide out from under it, instead of taking the building into the water with it.

Also on the earthquake subject -- yeah, every school in America has fire drills and lockdown drills. We have earthquake drills, too. I didn't realize until this year how weird that is. I mean, of course we had earthquake drills in elementary school, didn't you . . . ? No, no, you wouldn't have, would you.

If you want to call someone a whore in Anchorage, you say you saw them walking around Spendard on Friday night. If you want to call someone a stoner, you say they're from Girdwood, or Talkeetna. If you want to call someone a hick, you say they're from the Valley, or Mat-Su (the Matinuska-Susitna Valley is the farming area of the greater Anchorage area; Roosevelt sent people up there during the Depression to try and get them work).

The most famous bar in town is Chilkoot Charlie's, also known as Koots. People get killed in the parking lot on a distressingly regular basis.

You can almost always orient yourself in town by finding the Chugach Range, because it's in the east. We have mountains. I find horizons that aren't the ocean a little unsettling.

To get out of Anchorage proper, you have to drive at least forty minutes to Eagle River, and technically even then you're not out of Anchorage. You have to drive at least an hour to get out.

Tourists, especially cruise tourists, can be easily spotted by their matching colorful windbreakers and cameras around their necks. They are considered fair targets for ridicule, but not to their faces, because they bring in a lot of money. In fact, there are villages in the Southeast, where the cruise lines usually go, that are essentially ghost towns in the evenings. A ship will come in and the population of the town will triple with tourists buying jewelry and trinkets; then the ship has to move on, and the town goes quiet again.

[adiva_calandia]

PS! Yes, they pay us to live here. :D

[agonistes]

OTP means something entirely different to denizens of Atlanta: Outside The Perimeter. If you live outside of the round ring of I-285, what's inside is a VERY SCARY CITY WHERE PEOPLE GET KILLED. If you live inside the perimeter, what's outside is the boondocks and home to suburbanite yuppies with no good taste or sense to speak of.

When you speak of the man Ponce de Leon, you pronounce his name with appropriate Spanish-language vowel sounds. When you speak of Ponce de Leon Avenue, Anglo it up. If you try to pronounce it with Spanish vowels, you will get stared at and mocked. If you only say "Ponce" and refer to the road -- as though you are calling somebody a ponce -- people will know what you're talking about.

I-75 northbound and southbound directly north of the perimeter constitute some of the widest highway in the world -- nine lanes on each side. At rush hour, morning and night, it is near impassable.

The quarter of 285 down by the airport can be relied upon to be clear at any hour, because nobody actually lives there, and most of the people who work there live close enough that they don't need to take 285 for anything.

No matter what, in Atlanta, you are thirty minutes away from anywhere, minimum. It's just a thing you get used to.

The Peachtree Road Race is on July 4, and t-shirts that participants get are regarded as prize trophies, because you have to be out of your mind to run a marathon in July in Atlanta.

[agonistes]

Also: Gwinnett County high school football is some of the best in the country, but Cobb County high school marching bands are some of the best in the world. No joke.

Asheville NC

[isustrikanda.livejournal.com]

Asheville, NC, is the largest city in the NC Appalachians (and down here the mountains are called APP-a-LATCH-an, not APP-a-LAYSH-an, and this is important to anyone who has lived there for any length of time. You will tick people off by pronouncing it wrong, and they will immediately know you're from up north, or at least elsewhere). You can locate the area quickly on a map of NC by looking at the point where NC/VA/TN all meet. If you use that point to cut off the western triangle of the state, Asheville is right about in the middle of it all.

Asheville is mostly in a valley, from certain points you can see a big bunch of it spread out in front of you, but there are mountains in the middle, too--Tunnel Road, one of the big main drags, runs right through one of them, and if you get up there where you can see the older part of downtown on one side and the newer strip and mall on the other, all laid out ahead of you, but it is a pain in the rear getting up there.

Tunnel Road technically turns off to the East before you ever even get to the Asheville Mall, and always has, but nobody ever really thinks of it that way, it's just Tunnel Road unless you need the other part of it, in which case it's still... Tunnel Road. Patton Avenue is the other main drag, heading out into West Asheville, and has traditionally been the site for kids who wanted to go cruising in the evenings. The only two mini-golf places I ever knew of in Asheville were off Patton.

The major landmarks for the city in general are the courthouse and the city-county building, they'll show up on a lot of the touristy stuff, and they are quite lovely buildings from an architectural standpoint, as is a lot of Downtown. There's an Angel statue for Thomas Wolfe (looking homeward), and the Thomas Wolfe house, although the fact that he was a local boy doesn't make most of us any fonder of his books, which were wordy, and there was a reason he Couldn't Go Home Again--he wrote his books about 'Altamont' and managed to air everyone's dirty laundry under a very thin disguise. The Thomas Wolfe House had a fire a few years back (checks Google) in 1998, and they've done heavy restoration since then. Anyone growing up in the area probably did school tours of the house in a couple different grades.

Re: Asheville NC

[isustrikanda.livejournal.com]

The Downtown area is a mix of little antique shops and quite a lot of crafty/hippy/world-bazaar kind of shops, along with some of the older stores that are still around, because Asheville has become a very crafty/hippy place--most of the people you talk to downtown will not have a southern/country accent, but if you get out of the towns in any direction this will change, although you'll have to go farther in some diredtions than in others. Weaverville to the north, then into Madison County and the mix becomes mostly the farm people whose families have been there for generations, mixed in with a sprinkling of professional people who just want to live farther out and a few more wealthy people getting their mountain estates. As everywhere, places that were the absolute sticks ten or twenty years ago are now practically in the middle of everything.

Downtown the main area that everyone knows goes from the Civic Center and Pack Memorial library (the main branch) all the way around through city county plaza because that is the bit that's blocked off for Bele Chere, which is a yearly street festival at the end of July and a lot of darn fun. There's Malaprop's bookstore and cafe, where you might be hit on by members of either sex if you just hang out in the cafe but probably not if you're browsing the books (you asked for local color, this is it. Malaprop's has a reputation. and a decent selection of books, but only if you're not looking for fantasy or sci-fi, alas). Places all over the city will provide parking and a shuttle bus for Bele Chere--for a fee, of course--but most of the locals know that you can just go park at the parking garage behind the library--it's cheaper, and it's pretty much never full, and then you don't have to worry about shuttles or any of that crud.

There is a bus system, but I have no experience with it, having lived far enough out of town that I'd have had to drive 15-20 minutes to get to a bus stop.

The French Broad River flows through town, right under Patton Avenue--you'll hear people talk about 'on the bridge' or 'before the bridge' or such, but which side they mean is all dependent on where they are, there's no agreed on before or after. Farther north the French Broad is a popular rafting site, altho they don't get anything higher than about a class 3 rapid, if I recall correctly. The French Broad is one of two rivers in America that flows North, which I always thought was really neat.

We don't so much have 'stoops', if you don't have a proper porch it's just the steps. Winters get some cold going on for someplace so far south; altitude is everything. :) To an extent coke is coke even if it's pepsi, or root beer, although that's changing a lot in Asheville proper as more and more people come from elsewhere. Farther out, pretty much everything is still a coke.

If you want crafting supplies, real ones, like an actual free-standing loom or spinning wheel or some basket reed or things like that, you go to Earth Guild, which is about a block away from Pack Library. If you want vegetarian meals you go to the Laughing Seed, which is fantastic but a bit expensive, and you lament the passing of Max and Rosie's and their juice bar that sold the Elvis Parsley (carrot, parsley, celery, and a hefty shot of lemon juice)--or at least, I do. I loved those things. If you want Shakespeare, you go see the Montford Park Players, and if you are me, you never try again to take your immediate family especially to Richard III (they ended up going to the car at intermission to read their books, but I enjoyed the rest of it, and they were trying to be supportive). If you want used books, there are lots of little places, although not so many as there used to be. alas.

[just-the-ash.livejournal.com]

I say "Lancaster, PA" and people think "Amish." This is kind of true -- there are many Amish in Lancaster County, and numerous Amish stallholders at Central Market, the oldest continuously-operating farmers' market in the US -- but weirdly enough, tourists don't seem to understand that this self-segregating community prefers to live, you know, in a self-segregated way, not in the city itself. The farmers' market also has a Spanish/Latino food stand; a Middle Eastern food stand; a Thai food stand; and an African food stand. There are sizable black and Latino communities in the city. Out in the rest of the county, totally, horse-and-buggy territory, but not really in town.

Oo. I love this idea.

[traveller-blues.livejournal.com]

Being originally from Queens itself, the scariest thing is how much has changed in 10 years. And yet I still caught myself nodding about some of the stuff in this, remembering it from my childhood. I remember playing stoop handball and going down sliding ponds. >.>

Hokay!

San Jose,CA is 45 minutes driving from San Francisco, and if you want to fly into the area, SJC is the far closer airport. It's referred to as the Bay Area despite the huge expanse -- it's the equivalent of including Long Island as part of New York City.

People do not speak in California surferisms hereabouts in Silicon Valley, which roughly covers the townships of Santa Clara county: San Jose, Mountain View, Santa Clara (town of), Sunnyvale, Milpitas, Saratoga, Palo Alto, and East Palo Alto. I'm probably leaving one out. It is at least 40 minutes to the nearest beach from my desk at work.

The closest equivalent of the train transport in the area is either the light rail which runs in a bizarre loop around the city, and ends up only servicing the downtown from a narrow corridor set, or the Caltrain and Bart, which pretty much just goes up to San Fran / Almeda County / Oakland.

Busses (Valley Transit Authority) are slightly better schedulewise than the ones in New York, running about +/- 5 minutes to on time, and about 15-30 minutes apart (I remember waiting 50 minutes for busses in NYC in the Bronx).

Taxis don't have that yellow cab mentality -- there are bunches of multicolored cabs (green/white seems to be a predominant color) and they need to be phoned for instead of being able to hail them from a corner at will.

The car, therefore, is the best way to go. Highways and expressways (two-to-four-lane roads with stoplights that have a speed limit of 45 or 50)
crisscross the area, and you can usually get most places by surface streets regardless of the nearby highways.

We don't have thunderstorms; we have Seattle-like spit weather as 'rain' most of the time.

Albertsons and Safeway tend to own the largest chunk of the grocery chains in the area, though Albertsons has backed out recently and some of the Albertsons have reverted to being Luckys.

Costco somehow manages to keep multiple stores in the area open.

The thing that struck me as the most different about the area, though, is the ability to see really far to the horizon; most of the buildings are under three stories, and you can see the hills most of the time when you are driving.

We don't have a lot of palm trees this far north.

Cuisine tends to be concentrated in areas -- you can tell when you're in one of the ethnic concentration zones when the signs stop being in English. We have a larger population of Vietnamese and Koreans than you might expect, but they coexist pretty peacefully with the Chinese and Japanese businesses; just down the road from my workplace is an Asian shopping plaza where there is a Chinese restaurant next to a sushi place next to a Thai place, and across the street is a Vietnamese-French bakery and one of those Angry Food 99 Ranch Markets.

Gas prices are over $3 right now, and yet we have a lot of people still driving SUVs and H2s. But just as many people driving Priuses, too.

Okay, need to get work done now. But a fun notion indeed...
-Traveller

[midnightlurker.livejournal.com]

In Santa Cruz, California, county building ordinances have been deliberately designed to make the construction of a Wal-Mart illegal.

The University of California at Santa Cruz campus is a great sprawling thing, mostly forest and farmland with colleges scattered about. Deer and mountain lions are spotted with alarming frequency.

Marijuana possession, while still technically illegal, has been made the "lowest priority" for law enforcement.

Despite what you may see in The Lost Boys, the Beach Boardwalk amusement park does not actually have a comic book store. :P

For a half-college half-tourism town, Santa Cruz is surprisingly devoid of late-night hangouts. Especially on weekends, the city just rolls up and shuts down after 10.

Halloween and New Years' Eve are the biggest celebrations around here, with vast throngs of people crowding downtown.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Cleveland, and its suburbs, used to be part of Connecticut (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Reserve).

In 1900, the City of San Francisco outlawed the construction of more cemeteries. In 1912, another ordinance ordered the removal of the cemeteries' contents. San Francisco does still have two or three cemeteries remaining within its limits, but these are not on land controlled by the City (e.g., the Presidio). The graves' contents were all moved to a new necropolis, Colma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colma,_California). The town has fewer than fifteen hundred residents--above ground, but when World War Z breaks out, the one and a half million below it are going to cause a bit of a stir.

Also? It's always a good time to (http://www.notfrisco.com/nortoniana/) mention (http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist1/norton.html) Emperor (http://www.emperornorton.net/) Norton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_A._Norton)...

-- Lorrie

[skyshark.livejournal.com]

West Virginia is coal. I am not kidding. You drive through it and you pass through all these mountains that were blasted to put roads through them, and to your right and left there's thick sparkling seams of black running through the rock. I could hit the earth in my side yard with a shovel and smear tiny black specks.

The thing that makes it scary, though. . . old coal mines. Seriously, people could build thin little tunnels in the early days and they'd never go on official record, and when the people were done they'd just close 'em up without anything so dangerous as collapsing them. What this means is, where I grew up? You had insurance in case an old coal mine you never knew was below your house collapsed and caused you structural damage.

[skyshark.livejournal.com]

Oh. Another word on houses and mines? One family knew their house was over an abandoned mine, and used this to their advantage--that was where the house's sewage went.

They were upset when they legally had to change that; I'm not sure how it came around in the area, but they had to hook up all the plumbing with great time and installation expense.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Berkeley, California is east of the San Francisco Bay, meaning that it's slightly distanced from the Pacific Ocean. You can't see, hear or smell the ocean from here, but if you're standing in the center of the UCB campus on a clear day, you can see the bay, the Bay Bridge and the silhouette of San Francisco.

It's also consistently ten degrees warmer in Berkeley than it is in San Francisco. This has something to do with the location of the Bay and the various East Bay hills. People have tried to explain the phenomenon to me, but I am a humanities scholar and I don't get it.

Then, of course, there are the Berkeley people. There are the goth kids who sit on Telegraph Avenue with signs saying "GIVE US MONEY FOR OUR HERBAL REMEDY". There's the balding man with the beard and the paunch who always wears a blue shirt that says "YOSHUA" in English and Hebrew; he's apparently an evangelist for a religion of his own, which he advertises by screaming the few Hebrew words he knows. (I discovered just now, googling 'YOSHUA', that the Daily Cal (http://www.dailycal.org/article/5435/yahweh_or_the_highway) has written about him and his antics are recorded on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nt97DBbxi8s).) There's an older man who gives speeches about the moral dangers of modern life -- by which he means, technology, possessions, and materialist culture in general -- every Tuesday afternoon on the plaza in front of Dwinelle Hall. He's an excellent speaker, actually, and he's usually surrounded by a crowd of enthralled undergraduates. There's a scruffy man in white robes who can be found silently doing martial arts exercises (I think) in the lobby of the English department building. Etc...

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Oh, look, the orator (http://www.collegeotr.com/university_of_california_berkeley/hobo_roundup_stoney_burke_2895) has also been immortalized on the Web!

[minkhollow]

Cincinnati has no subway.
...Well, this is mostly true. They started to build one in the 1920s, I think using an old canal path for the first tunnel under Central Parkway. But they never finished - since they started in the '20s, I'd say money issues got the better of them - so now the tunnel's just used for storage. There was a thing in the paper about it a few years ago, wherein an expert said if they finished the subway on the original model, it'd be a lot more efficient than most modern systems. I rather wish they'd get on it; Cincinnati could use a subway.

Southwest Ohio has a rather high population of Mexican immigrants (both legal and otherwise, I'd imagine). Not the sort of thing one would expect from the climate, but there's a fairly decent job market in the area, partly thanks to all the suburbian construction going on.

I come from 'pop' country, which has led to a number of 'it's soda, dammit!' 'no, it's not, it's POP!' arguments at school. We all voted down the Rhode Island native who said it's called 'tonic,' though.

Hamilton's Pleasant Avenue used to be Hamilton Avenue. But then Fairfield sprung up just south of Hamilton, and didn't want Hamilton Avenue running through town. (Fairfield does not, however, have a Main Street.)

Five consecutive state highways go through Hamilton; I believe it's 126 through 130.

According to the ZIP codes used on Sesame Street, Big Bird's grandmother lives in Lindenwald, which is essentially the 'nice part' of Hamilton's east side. Most if not all of the linden trees that gave the neighborhood its name are now gone, I believe. (And I've never seen any elderly giant yellow birds around town.)

During World War II, Hamilton apparently had such a population of ladies of negotiable affection that the Army declared it off-limits to soldiers. (I'm not sure what this meant for the ones from there.)

Cincinnati hosts the largest annual fireworks show in the world - which started with a radio station going, 'hey, we're ten years old, let's celebrate by playing with explosives!' The next year, the city decided to have an all-day party before the pyrotechnics. Half the fun is in going and sitting on the Serpentine Wall (or, if Kentucky's more convenient, on the bank by Newport) all day and watching the gene pool. The fireworks show itself regularly hits half an hour, and the family that puts it together keeps coming up with new colors and designs.

One of the bridges connecting Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky was the prototype for the Brooklyn Bridge. (There's been discussion, lately, of sprucing up the colors/lighting of the bridges. Fortunately, people have the sense to say LEAVE THE HISTORIC BRIDGE ALONE.)

Cincinnati's major airport is actually in Kentucky (there's also Lunken Field, but it mostly comes up in weather reports). And it's mentioned in a Little Feat song about Atlanta.

[angry-geologist.livejournal.com]

It is too, pop!

[e-mily.livejournal.com]

Okay. Because I have spent influential chunks of my life in three different places, you get diff comments.

Also, I'm doing this in Firefox now because freaking IE ate my freaking comment. AAAAAAARRRG.

North Bend/Coos Bay

[e-mily.livejournal.com]

North Bend and Coos Bay are appx 1/3 of the way up the Oregon coast. And I do mean the coast. I lived 20 minutes away from the ocean for 8 years of my life. It's hard to get used to not being there anymore.

They both started out as logging towns. Coos Bay is still one of the major industrial ports on the west coast. It used to be one of the biggest industrial ports in the world, because of the logging. It's the safest, easiest to get into port between Seattle and San Francisco. Portland is bigger, but it has one of the deadliest bars in the world.

The logging is mostly dead, but still there. There's two major piles of woodchips sitting by the bay waiting to be loaded onto a ship and taken just outside the US sea border and made into particleboard or plywood. And where the bay starts to turn into the Coos River, there are tons of logs floating in the water, waiting to be used. There's a logyard right below my first house in North Bend. And they're not as much there anymore, but some of the old lumber houses still exist. Most of them have been torn down, though, because meth-heads use them for labs.

Speaking of which: the bay area (yes, that's what we call it) has more meth lab busts in straight numbers, not percentage, but straight damn NUMBERS, than Portland, per month. See: international port.

Log trucks are a part of life. The trains are only used for freight and logs and plywood. Locals like to look at a log truck and sigh wistfully, wishing for the days when there were "real" trees on the trucks. As in, one log would take up the whole truck. Everything in the bay? Made of wood. Docks. Channel-markers. Log-pontoons. If it's affixed in the water, it was once a tree.

Coos Bay and North Bend have grown so much that their city lines follow each other and zigzag around like a bumblebee on crack. Locals like to jest that there are islands of either city. As in, a dot of North Bend surrounded completely by Coos Bay, etc.

However, both cities are distinctly separate in district, resources, and people. North Benders HATE Coos Bay. It has something do to with a land fued that goes waaaaaay back.

We have so much wooded area still inside the city that deer are a major problem, and there was a cougar that had to be removed from downtown two winters ago. My parents' neighborhood has at least three antlered bucks. One of them was a 6 pointer, until some jerkoff down the street shot him.

Coos Bay was partially the area that kind of made the whole "spotted owl vs. loggers" thing famous.

Trillium is a sign of spring.

Unfortunately, the economy in the bay area sucks. If you don't work at the hospital, the comm college (officially SOCC now, even though locals call it SWOCC still), or your own big business, you are either rich already, retired (we have a fast growing older population), or working for minimum wage. And probably working at our SuperWalmart. (Don't get me started.)

The oregon coast truly is a temperate rainforest. People can't handle temperatures below 40 (and freezing is out of the question. Most of the area is made of hills. A number of them have a good 6 degree slope or better. The city shuts down when it freezes, because of these hills.), and the joke is that we pull out the shorts and tanktops when it hits 65. Or, simply when the sun is shining.

In Coos Bay, the weatherman ALWAYS says that there's a chance of rain. Always.

New Hampshire

[eljuno.livejournal.com]

Random stuff as it comes to mind:

Much more of New Hampshire (as in population-wise, not area) lives in (at least formerly) industrialised and urban areas than is ever implied in the media. About a third of the population, at least, lives in one tiny section down south, and all three of the major cities there are former mill towns. But population disappears wicked fast as soon as you cross city limits, and a lot of the towns outside of the golden triangle are incredibly incredibly tiny and rural. The town I lived in when I was in high school shared a school system with the neighbouring town because they just didn't have enough students to justify having their own, and it's not even particularly small, for New Hampshire.

On paper, this is the richest state in the country. In practice, I very rarely see it. My suspicion is that there are a lot of REALLY RICH people who live out in the woods, more or less, and it's inflating things. I have no idea, though.

There's a general sneering feeling towards Vermont, Maine and Massachusetts, particularly Massachusetts. Maybe sneering isn't the right word, but when I tell people I grew up in Ma I often get an 'I'm sorry.'

I have friends who grew up less than a mile from where I live who spoke French as their first language, and about twice as many people speak French as Spanish. It's the French Canadian aspect.

There are a lot of people who live up here whose families have lived here forever, and there can be an odd amount of one-upmanship and networking if you're one of these people. (I'm 11th generation on my mother's side, for instance). And a lot of these people have family kind of scattershot over both sides of the Canadian border. Telling us that we were about to start needing passports for going to Canada was kind of shocking for us all, because pretty much all of us have bounced north and south constantly.

The main street in Manchester has two dead ends. We make jokes off this constantly.

Very few people are totally apolitical. It just doesn't happen. Most people are, generally, socially liberal and fiscally conservative, though we have a lot of Libertarians (thank you, Free State project). And politics can be basically the local 'spectator sport'. It may be a side effect of the primaries.

Speaking of which, we've almost all met at least one candidate.

We can be surprisingly regressive on some random things.

The Manchester Union Leader is a fascist rag of a newspaper. I'm not exaggerating, they've printed pro-Franco editorials within my lifetime.

Manchester, New Hampshire is a UN refugee relocation centre, and has some really weird populations because of this. A good number of Muslims, a large Bosnian population, pretty much name a portion of the world where there's been major tension in the last 20 years, and there have been people from there moving here. As a side effect of this, a number of the really important signs ('Don't swim or fish here, there are PCBs' 'We sell winter coats' 'If you need a translator, ask us') can be printed in about 9 languages, at least.

The drinking water is full of arsenic.

ETA: I should point out that a lot of this refers more to more urban New Hampshire, and the Manchester (which is nicknamed Manch Vegas) area, specifically, though I've lived in other parts of the state, and also south shore Massachusetts.

ETA2: THE JANUARY THAW. There is about a week every winter, in January, when suddenly temperatures rise and it gets almost livable up here. This year's happened to coincide with our primary. After that it gets bitter again. It's about 40 degrees colder today than it was two weeks ago.

And off that note, February I've always thought of as a 'kick you when you're down' month, and people just die in March. It's not suicide, it's just that everyone knows that if an old person is going to just kick off at any point of the year, it's in March. They just give up.

Re: New Hampshire

[wakeupnew]

There's a general sneering feeling towards Vermont, Maine and Massachusetts, particularly Massachusetts.

--See, now I'm curious, since I've never experienced anything of the sort, where I'm from, for New Hampshire. What sorts of things are said about Maine? People typically don't even think of us as a possibility to sneer at! *really amused!*

[pat-trick.livejournal.com]

I live in Honolulu, Hawai'i (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii). Hawai'i is properly pronounced "Hah-vai-ee", with a glottal stop before the ending "-ee".

Hawaii is the only state which used to be a monarchy, and the only state which has a royal palace, namely Iolani Palace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iolani_Palace). In January of 1893, the Kingdom of Hawaii (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Hawaii) was forcibly overthrown at gunpoint by business interests (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_of_Safety_%28Hawaii%29) who did not want the then Queen Liliʻuokalani to draft a new constitution that did not favor businesses.

Hawai'ian peoples to this day have not been completely recognized as a sovereign native peoples. It is very, very important to make the distinction that someone who lives in Hawai'i is not "hawaiian". Only those of Native Hawai'ian descent and blood are actually considered Hawai'ian. Instead, someone who lives in Hawai`i is usually referred to as a "local."

There are 8 major islands in Hawai'i, with numerous smaller atolls and islands (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_Islands) stretching past the main islands for a distance of about 1,500 miles. Of the major islands, I have lived on Kaua'i, and O'ahu, and visited Hawai'i (called the Big Island locally to avoid confusion) and Maui.

Some folks ask how we get from island to island; the major mode of transportation is airplane, about 15 minutes to 1 hour flight time, depending on which island you're going from and to. Boats are also a major mode, but only recently did we have an ocean ferry service (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superferry) start up (amidst major controversy); otherwise, folks occasionally take private personally owned vessels, but due to the rather rough open ocean waters, it isn't very common.

[almightyhat.livejournal.com]

On the right kind of nights and mornings, the fog can roll in so thick in Vallejo that-- at least in the areas closer to the water-- you can't see more than about twenty-five feet in front of you. This makes driving or walking to school an interesting experience.

Fall, winter, and spring tend to blend as seasons in northern California; the leaves start to turn, on those trees that turn, whenever it seems dryest-- and while that could be late August at the top of the hill, it could be November at the bottom of the same hill. Alternating rain and sunshine will confuse flowering trees enough to bloom, regardless of the time of year.

Even those of us who did not know Officer Jeff know where he died, as there's a sign right over by the old drive-in declaring how much he is missed.

There used to be an old historical landmark down at the end of First Street in Benecia-- it was moved up the street a ways because it was built on marshland and that's just not a good place to leave your historical landmarks. It was notable in that it was a Gold Rush and fishing-boom era whorehouse, a beautiful old grand Victorian style house. Before it was moved and restored, the windows had been broken out and subsequently boarded up. Someone decided to paint cheerful, smiling, waving children on the boards over the old cathouse's windows. Interesting impression, that.

Californians, at least Californians over the age of twelve, do not complain about the rain. Flooding, sure, that we'll complain about. We will say "Glad I'm not out in that," or "Whooo, it's really coming down!" or "Stay dry!" but we will not say "Uck, I wish the weather would change" or similar while it's raining. Droughts are no fun at all, and we as a state know it.

Just north of Vallejo is a town called Vacaville. This translates to 'Cow Town.' Everyone snickers over this at least once.

Twenty-two years ago last August, Marine World Africa USA moved from Redwood City to Vallejo. Since then, ownership of the park has changed hands repeatedly, as has the park's name. It has been everything from Marine World Africa USA to The New Marine World Theme Park (causing everyone to go "... whut?") to Marine World to Six Flags Marine World to the latest name, Discovery Kingdom. It's still on Marine World Parkway, though.

Vallejo is easy to find on even an unlabeled topographical map of California. Where the San Francisco Bay narrows to the Carquinez Strait, Vallejo is right there.

Brick buildings are without exception old buildings, not including brick facades. Oh, sure, they're fine if all you have to do is keep the Big Bad Wolf from huffing and puffing and blowing your house down and eating your little piggy self, but after we realized that there were ways to build structures so that they wouldn't fall down as easily in an earthquake, brick buildings started to vanish one by one. Schools were among the first to go, in the 1970s.

Public transportation in San Francisco is fantastic. Public transportation to San Francisco is varied, efficient, and reliable. Public transportation in Vallejo is a joke.

Glen Cove is a general name for an almost completely residential area situated east of the Carquinez bridge, which began construction between twenty-five and thirty years ago. Its 'borders' are marked by a fire station and a Safeway (which is, in most of the country and even the southern part of California, called Vons). Years ago, it was a very nice, very expensive place to live; it has since started to show some wear around the edges. Many people living there, however, are under the impression that Living In Glen Cove is not the same as living in Vallejo (Vallejo has been called 'the little Oakland' and we do have more than our fair share of interesting crime). They believe, instead, that they live in Benecia (a neighboring town and very pretty and very expensive) or that "Oh, no, I don't live in Vallejo, I live in Glen Cove."

I've also been told that Vallejo is a good place to be gay, to the point of being "more tolerant than San Francisco"-- this from a very out gay man who'd just moved from SF to Vallejo.

Vallejo is still kinda mad that Mare Island was closed.