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Month: April 2016
What cultures don’t value gold?
Australia during the gold rush? I can’t find online corroboration of this, probably because I read this on a tourist placard somewhere. But apparently when Prince Alfred came to visit Australia in 1868, the streets of Bendigo (or was it Ballarat?) were paved with silver. Gold was too plentiful. Answered 2016-04-29 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-cultures-dont-value-gold/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
What’s it like to be mistaken for being a different ethnicity than you actually are?
*Stumbles on Quora question with 100+ answers* *Quora, instead of futzing around with UI details that already work, should be working on 100+ answer navigation* By virtue of my surname and my un-Hellenically pale skin, I got Russian in high school. Given the high intellectual caliber of Russian Jews that I socialised with in high […]
Why are Norwegians so cold and unapproachable?
Positive Politeness vs Negative Politeness. What say you Wikipedia? Negative politeness: Making a request less infringing, such as “If you don’t mind…” or “If it isn’t too much trouble…”; respects a person’s right to act freely. In other words, deference. There is a greater use of indirect speech acts. Positive politeness: Seeks to establish a […]
What is the scariest thing about living in Australia?
That we are still, 52 years after the book was published, The Lucky Country. Which is meant to be a bad thing: prospering through luck, rather than competent planning. The original indictment the author intended was that the luck was inertia in following British habits—Australia Forrest Gump’d it into prosperity. The popular understanding is that […]
Europeans: would you feel emotionally disappointed if the UK left the EU?
Just to chime in with Achilleas Vortselas’ answer: I’m not sure Brits know how big a deal it has been for Greeks to embrace a European identity. Or Germans or Spaniards or Poles, but it was a seismic shift for Greeks. Because of that investment, Achilleas is spot on: continental Europeans will feel massively betrayed. […]
What do you know about Finland?
Three Finns and a bottle of vodka. They drink in silence for three hours. After three hours, one Finn says: “Nice vodka.” The other Finn says, “Did we come here to talk, or did we come here to drink?!” Mayakovsky was acting like an avantgarde artist (or, as we call it in my country, an […]
What do Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland think of each other?
Answering as a Greek. The Greek humorist Freddy Germanos (Φρέντυ Γερμανός, Freddie Germanos), God rest him, visited Denmark in the ’60s. This was his take on OP’s question (Ταξίδι στην Δανία, from the collection Το Δις Εξαμαρτείν): The first thing you work out in Scandinavia is that the Danes do not adore the Swedes and […]
People who spent a long time out of their country, what was your biggest surprise when you came back?
Jocular answer: When I was spending three years in the wilds of Orange County, US, I was hankering for the culinary variety of Old Melbourne Town. I kept telling anyone who would listen (and that wasn’t many) about how when I’d go back, eat at my favourite Malay-Chinese restaurant on Lygon St, and swim on […]