Topic: Your Country

i live in america.
where we slap people and eat non single meat hamburgers.
i live in texas.
where we slap people and slaughter cows for non single meat hamburgers.
you all have a delicious week.

Precisely the reason I cycled across Liechtenstein! ..that was a fun hour!

@NaviAndMii An hour? I guess you took your time then! I've never been in Liechtenstein, but I've been to Switzerland and Austria plenty of times. But whenever I go to Switzerland, I don't like to stay there for longer than a day, it's way too expensive.

I've only been out of the USA once, which was on a brief cruise with my family to the Bahamas (Nassau, basically) when I was roughly eight or nine. If I had the money, I would definitely hit up Japan, some of Central America, Canada (particularly British Columbia), Australia, and parts of Europe. I would definitely like to hit up Germany and Switzerland at some point in my lifetime since those are where a lot of my ancestry, or at least what we can trace, is from. I'd also like to go to the UK, Belgium, Spain....Well, okay, most of Europe. XD

@ilikeike: I was in New Orleans a few scant years after Katrina hit, so it was interesting to see some of the lingering effects from that as well. I would definitely visit the area again, but I don't think I would ever live there; it's by far the most humid place I've been to.

From what I understand, eastern Washington is fairly similar (some very distant cousins live there), though I'm sure you have way more hills. Illinois is FLAT and full of plains for the most part until you get to a certain point in the southern part of the state, then gets gradually more hilly and wooded until you get to Shawnee National Forest. Go glaciation!

The cultural diversity here is similar to the area you hail from, though there is a large Hispanic minority here. Perhaps the most interesting group culture-wise, until you get to a city, is the Amish; there's a settlement in the east-central part of the state.

@Octane I think it was only something like 6x3miles, so I guess you could probably just power right across it in a few minutes if you wanted! ..but we decided that there was no need to rush - so casually just cruised around, drinking it all in! (..not often you get to experience a full country in just one day!)

My friend and I were backpacking around Europe at the time - and you won't be surprised to hear that we decided to skip Switzerland due to budget constraints! I do hope to go one day though - seems like a pretty cool country!

Austria we did do - and did it well! My kind of place! Good beer - good prices - nice vibes - lots of culture, sites and attractions - and I even managed to get a selfie with a town sign for a little place which shares a name with a certain naughty f-word in the English language! ..what's not to love?

I like that!
I live in England - we have seagulls at the coast, pigeons everywhere else.
You have a delicious week too!

This is what a superhero looks like here in 'MURICA!
He fights for gun rights and free speech.
His weakness is facts... and big women

Oh, THAT town. XD I ran across it when looking up weird town names awhile back. Tbh I would be more likely to visit Austria because of The Sound of Music, but admittedly I'd like to see that town, too. Apparently they've had problems with their town signs disappearing....I can't imagine why....

That's a ******* scandal!

So the hamburgers are made of beef and people?

i live in the us in south caloina on the beach IT is nice for most of the year but dec-feb it gets could below 50 sometimes for a few weeks cold and we had snow and ice this year the horror

@Gi-45 what part i know most of the it cold unless for Florida it takes 5 hour drive to the border and 8 to orlando from where i am at

There is a "Beer St." in the state I live in, the street signs have been welded to the post. I'm guessing it has the same habit of wandering off. Nothing a cordless angle grinder and the cover of darkness couldn't fix.

@shaneoh Last time I was in London I saw the Abbey Road sign bolted high up on a building with a metal cage around it.

I am from Germany.
Originally I am from Cologne, the city of carnival and really tiny beer glasses.
Right now I live in Dresden (since 8,5 years). I studied horticulture and became a graveyard manager.

Talking about graveyards:
Dresden is Germany's city with the most graveyards per person and one of my two graveyards is the third biggest and has a massive building designed by a scholar of Gottfried Semper (you know, the Semper Opera, one of the buildings Dresden is famous for). The other one "inhabits" (? ) the first wife of Richard Wagner and a lot of artists no normal person knows.
Cologne on the other side has the graveyard Melaten as a major attraction. It is huge and you can find the tomb of the founder (or current manager) of the Saturn electronics stores. He has an impressive mosaic of the last supper and a tomb cover made of glass to let everybody see his coffin and remains. His wife didn't want to be burried in a glass tomb, so she has her grave next to it with a marble statue of herself.
Both are not yet dead, as far as I know.

Talking about Cologne:
Cologne is grey, dirty and people are not very friendly. When I grew up there, in my neighborhood there were always troublemakers hanging around yelling stupid stuff at you.
I love Cologne anyway. The Kölner Dom (cathedral) is really impressive and I recommend climbing the tower. We have a nice zoo and really great museums. There are also nonetheless quite a lot of Parks around. I love the dialect and the strange traditions. When the carnival season starts (11th of november) we for example put Nubbel (a puppet made of straw) above the pubs. As long as carnival lasts they hang around and absorb the sins drunk idiots commit in there. As soon as carnival is over (Veilchendienstag), crowds gather to accuse the Nubbel of having led them to do those things. They carry the Nubbel through the streets and a fake preacher delivers a fake sermon to encourage the people to set the puppet on fire, which in the end happens. It is as strange and creepy as it sounds.

Talking about Dresden:
Dresden is currently (since 3 years) in the newspapers for being pretty racist.
That is unfortunate, because there are a lot of great people in this town.
But they are the birthplace of PegIdA (patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the occident), who kind were the first of a huge wave of right-wing groupings all over Germany.
I was pretty shocked that these kind of things are still possible and that anybody can be that passionate about stopping something they didn't even know yet (it all started because people were scared of the refugee wave coming).
They still march through the city every monday.
For me it is very remarkable how people usually are much more scared of foreigners in areas, where there actually really aren't any.
But there also is a strong left-wing movement on the other side (literally, one side of the river there are a lot of conservatives and on the other side there are a lot of leftists).
Otherwise Dresden has beautiful architecture, great people and a lot of diverse beautiful landscapes closeby (Elbsandsteingebirge, Lausitz, Erzgebirge, Dresdner Heide).

Perth, 4th largest city in Australia. Closing in on 3rd but really it's still pretty quiet. Great place to live but, I would guess, a pretty boring place to visit unless you want to drive for hours to look at some beaches and/or dirt

@Octane Haha, nice. It's like they don't trust people XD

I live in the US and the "lovely" state of Oklahoma. (If you didn't catch it, the word 'lovely' being in quotations is to indicate much sarcasm). The Western portion of the state at least has interesting geography with the mesas and such. The Eastern portion of the state where I have always lived is just dull, hilly, and green. People like country music (gags), but at least we have a nice culture of marching bands, I was fortunate to grow up in schools that valued their band programs altogether and it really shaped me.

I don't have much else to say. Not anything positive anyway (I could go on about the messed up climate, the religiosity, and politics, but this is not the place, at least not for the latter two). Lol. My family is thinking of moving to the Northeast and I couldn't be happier.

@Tiefseemiez I have very happy memories of Cologne - a friend of mine lived there for several years, and visiting was always a good time.

Personally, I live in the south of England, a small, chilly, and increasingly insular country where sometimes it doesn't rain. On the plus side, the culture and comedy are good. I'm only first-generation British, though, as my family hails from Ireland and particularly Sweden, where I spent large chunks of my childhood.

@Late - I feel like I used to have most of those Donald Duck (Kalle Anka) pocket books too... There was one point when they went up to 264 pages, and all in colour, but I gather they've gone back to half colour, half black-and-white again these days. B&W Disney, eh? Sometimes it feels like the world is going backwards.

Poland (but live in the UK). We had a pope, Lech Walesa with Solidarnosc, and difficult World War history. It's a beautiful country that has it all: mountains, its own lake district, and access to sea; great cities like Krakow, Wroclaw, Gdansk. Oh, and CD Projekt Red, famous for the Witcher games.

Well here goes an historical bit about my homeland.

When the Spanish conquered Mexico, they started exploring the land. Eventually they traveled by ship across what we now know as the Sea of Cortez, and found a nice unknown island on the other side.

Having heard of the mythical island of California in legends, they decided to call it that. And thus California was born.

Then they decided to head north and see just how big this new island was.

They walked. And walked. And walked. This island was huge!

Eventually they realized it was a peninsula. Oops.

And that's why the three states that share the California name (two in Mexico, one in US) have that name.

The end.