March 15, 2004

• Over here in Oz, if you live in a big place with lots of large concrete structures called buildings, you are from the city. If you live in a place with lots of arid, flat and bushy details and no large concrete structures, you live in the country.
• In Sunny Singapore (yech), we have no countryside. There are little bits here and there that might fool you into thinking you're in the countryside. Walk on another fifteen minutes and you'll find out - you never left the city. *thunder, lightning and diverse alarums*
• Nostrildamus: Any more interesting gauges for remoteness of any given area? Like a missing-tooth index for the locals or some other meter based on the number of kangaroo per square km. Stuff like that.
• Where I live, if you're a farmer, you're from the country. If you aren't a farmer, you're a hideous evil townie who is destroying the country way of life.
• Japan is pretty much along the lines of Nostrildamus' statement. Though I think the border might be a little more pronounced. When you are out of the city, you can see grass and rice patties. Everywhere.
• rice paddies, lkc? /pedant
• lkc: My experience living in Japan is one of the main reasons I posted this question. In Japan, so much of the country is dense forest and steep volcanic mountains that any easily habitable place is very much inhabited. Once you're in the mountains you feel like you're in a very rural setting, even if you're only a 10 minute drive from a city. So far I've found the best measure for countrification (ruality?) in Japan is language. No matter where you are in the Japan, if you are far enough from a urban area people hardly ever use 敬語 (keigo). There's no real need for formal speech on a farm. If you meet someone from rural Japan, like northern Kyoto Prefecture or Akita Prefecture, chances are they can't speak standard Japanese much less formal Japanese. But places like Nagano are by most standards rural, but close enough to big cities (Nagano, Tokyo, and Nagoya) that the usual Nagano accent is very close to standard Japanese and most people have to problem using formal speech (Nagano gets lots of people from big cities during ski season that expect to be addressed using 敬語). Alnedra: Any Mos Burger in Japan server rice patties. They're mostly in cities, though.
• oh yeah... Mos Burger. I like. Love their Sukiyaki beef. And their rice burgers. And peach milk tea. And... NM. Back to our subject... possibly Singapore is one of the very few Asian cities where the countryside is not easily accessible, resulting in a whole urban-only generation.
• mexican: you forgot the verbal cues! In the city, the name of the state is pronounced "Missour-EE". In the sticks, it's pronounced "Missour-UH". Also: cityfolk pronounce "four" as "far." When someone says they they were backed up in traffic on highway "Farty-far", you know they live in the city. I live on the east side, though, and our criteria are a little different. There are no cities, just varying degrees of country. If you were gauging on, say, a 1-10 gradient with 1 being the most citified (the East St. Louis-West Belleville axis, certain parts of Sauget and Centreville) and 10 being the most countrified (anything east and south of Troy to, say Memphis or so), the definer is definitely the first six slots on your car radio. If WIL, KSHE, and the big 550 are on there? You are from the country. KDHX? City. Another tip-off: the presence of a Jim White the Big Bumper "You can't fix stupid!" bumpersticker on your vehicle, regardless of make, marks you as both country and old. And probably not very bright. Also: If you own a four-wheeler? Country. If you drive it to work? REAL country. Cityfolk also will describe where they live in relation to the Anheuser-Busch brewery. "Where do you live?" "Oh, about 2 miles from the Brewery." People who live in the estates out in Ladue and Town and Country (read: wealthy cityfolks) have been known to describe where they live as "about 12 miles from the Brewery, a little northward." So, mexican: where'd you go to high school? St. Louis is a funny burg, no doubt about it.
• back in illinois it's kind of amusing: there's Chicago, and the entire rest of the state is known as "downstate." heh. i think in america there are many gradations of living spaces, but it comes down to three. city, suburb, country. start in the middle of a city, walk for long enough you'll hit a suburb. walk some more, you'll hit country. "country" is where barns are.
• well, i've lived in some pretty small towns. and i've lived in the country. guess in my experience it comes down to a couple of things. here in michigan it's partly a matter of what part of the state you live in. my friends from the detroit area say they live in the city of X or Y, but to me it's all suburbs. you hit a cross street, then you're in a different city? if there's no open, grassy, relatively building-free space between your town and the next, you're in a suburb of whichever one is bigger. in the southwest part of the state, my hometown is small but i wouldn't consider it rural. (the tiny village next to it, with >50% of the kids living on farms? rural.) if the majority of the people in the school district live outside of city/village limits i'd say you're pretty rural. not necessarily country though. although not having at least one decent coffee shop makes me feel like i'm in the country... my hometown attitude seems to be "why should i pay $3 for a cappuccino, when i can get one out of the machine at the gas station for only $1?" (uh... how am i going to respond to that, without seeming like a snooty uppity too-good-for-my-roots person?) out west (montana) i lived in the big city of manhattan (named after a malting company from new york... the area used to be famous for the wheat and barley grown there; it probably helped a good part of the world get drunk in the early 1900's). it has (or had, anyway) exactly one traffic light. even in town, you felt like you were in the country a little bit. grain silos, old milling plant, etc. in the middle of town; the whole thing split by a large open field with the train tracks running through the middle. we had a grocery store in town, but the nearest mall was about a half-hour drive away, through some remarkably empty country. so, uh... cites have suburbs, but have good coffee shops. towns don't have good coffee shops (unless they're lucky enough to have a more sophisticated population than my own), but have one or two places to get a cup (plus the aforementioned gas-station coffee machine). villages have more farmers than "city-folk", and fairly few (if any) stoplights; if you want coffee you get it at the local bar/restaurant that EVERYONE in town goes to ('cause it's the only place). country means that you need to walk or drive a long, long way before you get to the nearest neighbor or store. if you want coffee you make it your damn self, 'cause that's cheaper than wasting gas to get into town.
• Don't forget the painted barns advertising the Jesse James Wax Museum! As for East Lansing, Mr. live frogs, how can you tell that it's country or not when you have all those plots of university farmland a stone's throw from all the deadhead stores and parking structures that are the bread-and-butter of a college town?
• If you have to drive more than a half hour to get to any movie theater or any non fast-food restaurant then you live in the country. tangentially, i theorize that, across America at least, once someone is twenty miles outside of a city/burbs, everyone starts to talk like a hick. as a hick, this is what i've noticed at least.
• To preserve our "rural" (country?) way of life, our town has 2-acre lot minimums, 200-foot wetlands setbacks, no sewer (everyone has their own septic systems), and almost no sidewalks. Also, I think there is some sort of rule against taking down old stone walls. We can burn stuff if we let the fire dept know. We can keep all types of domestic animals.
• I have never seen a "Live Bait" sign in a city.
• sorry, everso, but my pet shop in the heart of inner-city DC sells live bait! and has a sign that says so!
• Here in lovely Blue Springs,Mo (the other side of the state), if you live anywhere outside of say a 35/40 mile radius of downtown, you live in the country. Of course that doesn't count the sections of overland park that think they're city, but really are just suburban. Or something like that.
• If you pump your own water from a well and perk your own septic, you're country. 5-acre density here, everso.
• Ah, all you Monkey posters/posers so far are city. I live in Idaho, where men are men, and sheep fear them. Judging by what they say about Boise, we ain't got no stinkin' citys. We do got Famous Potatoes, though.
• Eversohumble, no sidewalks?? How does that foster community spirit? In good ol' Ireland, people in Dublin refer to people from outside Dublin as hicks or 'culchies'. Within the hick-sphere, however, which is where I come from, there are further divisions: anyone from a town (ie a settlement of more than one building) is a 'townie', whereas everyone else is a 'culchie.' Irish author and journalist John Waters wrote a great memoir, dealing in part with the subdivides, called Jiving at the Crossroads. I can't find a review of it anywhere, but for the 0.006% of you who would like to learn more about rural Irish life in the 70s, I highly recommend it.
• Incidentally, based on my extensive (/sarcasm) travels in the US, you could drop the entire city of Dublin (complete with suburbs) into the urban sprawl along the New Jersey Turnpike, and no-one would notice.
• start in the middle of a city, walk for long enough you'll hit a suburb. walk some more, you'll hit country. "country" is where barns are. What SideDish said, except you can also hear the difference in Minnesota. The more that people talk like characters from the movie Fargo, the more likely it is they're from the suburbs. Thar be lots of minivans doncha know. North, west and south of the 'burbs is farmland, and the Fargo accent is blended with remnants from Scandinavian farmers and a little Canadian to boot, eh. As far as I can tell, the northeast 1/4 of Minnesota is nothing but trees, poison ivy, swamps, mosquitos, blackflies, ticks, and a few moose and deer. People claim they like to camp there. Here's another dead giveaway: if a guy's preferred footwear is white ankle socks with tassled loafers, he's from the suburbs.
• city mouse/country mouse
• jjray - east lansing directly abuts the university. the U has campus buildings on the north side of campus, you don't get to open farmland until well south of the main border between campus and the city. (there are indeed vast portions of michigan state university campus that consist of nothing more than farmland or pasture, but what do you expect from an agricultural university?) on a side note, i don't know offhand of any other universities that have two golf courses on campus... and they take up a very small percentage of the total, indeed. we gots us a lot o' room, here. thanks, land grant!
• Another discriminant. Walking on the road, you meet a stranger. If you greet them, you're country.
• or goetter, from what i understand, you're at least not from the east coast. one of my friends moved to michigan from boston; took her a while to figure out why people were smiling at her as she walked by. she thought they wanted something. the local michiganders were just being friendly. we usually are pretty friendly that way, unless of course we're driving. (on the left. tailgating. with no turn signals. at least 20 mph over the limit.)
• Simple.......If you always try to pay for your gas before you pump it, you're from the city.
• This seems to be a good spot to ask what exactly a turnpike actually is.
• tracicle- "turnpike" originally meant "toll road." Generally this holds true, especially for the Massachusetts Turnpike (a.k.a. "Mass Pike") and the NJ Turnpike. In Colorado, there's a road that the natives refer to as the "Boulder Turnpike" even though it's been many years since tolls were charged. goetter- about greeting people when walking- in Berkeley, when I'm out walking the dog, I always greet people, and they ususally respond in kind. Berkeley is not country by any stretch of the imagination.
• ditto what ambrosia said about greeting folks. everybody talks to one another in my 'hood, dupont circle, the middle of d.c.
• Thanks, ambrosia. I always had it in my head that it was some sort of massive interchange.
• tracicle- your're welcome. You wouldn't have encountered any in Northern California (God forbid Californians should have to *pay money* to drive their cars) but the term originated in colonial times- they would put a long pike across the road, and when you came along and paid the toll, they would "turn" it, and thus the word was born. (Languagehat, please do correct me if I'm remembering wrong.)
• ambrosia, in my experience, dog walkers are much more interactive than the urban norm. The urban walls tumble in the wrinkly face of a pretty English bulldog. Besides, aren't you really reassuring your fellow pedestrians that your huge hound has already been fed?
• that's a fair point, goetter- I do try to appear reassuring, considering I have a 110 pound black furry beast in tow. And it may be that it has simply rubbed off, so that even if I'm out walking around without the dog, I'll still say hello, although I only do that in Berkeley, not in San Francisco, 'cause that would be *weird.*
• hey Caution Live Frogs and Goetter-a native of Boston here. So we don't smile at strangers, or make too much conversation. It isn't unfriendliness, it's just that you get around to thinking that everyone that smiles and wants to chat has either something to sell or a used up old religion to support. I know for certain that anyone that approaches me for with a grin is for certain looking for a donation to some worthy cause or is a Mormon. Or crazy. So they are avoided. All of my life it's been the same, the glad-handers are the ones to avoid, they want something from you, never friendship. I know that I have had plenty of accidental fun with strangers here, especially when walking the dogs. It just never comes from the formal "hello how are you" format. It isn't social coldness, it's just a learned distrust of gregarious types. Here we can spot a salesman at 11 paces, and we fire when we see the whites of his eyes.
• kuujjuarapik - good point. 'round here the mormons looking to recruit are easily spotted, as they're all earnest-looking young men in suits, carrying black bags full of mormon bibles. they tend to stick out a bit, especially on a campus full of casually-dressed people (well, ok, not the business college guys, but they tend to have more expensive suits). i imagine in many larger cities wearing a suit and carrying a large black bag over your shoulder might make you blend in rather than stand out... suppose they'd look less like a religious recruiter and more like an intern carrying a load of paperwork like a good little toadie. i also had it explained to me by my current office mate, an ex-new yorker; he felt that the ever-present crush of other people in the city made it imperative that you ignore them, or you'd go nuts from lack of personal space. his take was that by pretending nobody else was there, you could fake yourself into feeling like you actually had some privacy. people who broke the rules by (gasp!) interacting without a good reason to do so broke the spell, and were thus the subject of derision and suspicion. maybe that's a good city/country definition - the sheer number of people you expect to encounter in a given day...
• kuujjuarapik, Boston is pretty clearly "city," wouldn't you agree? If you went out into deep non-urban Massachusetts, maybe the Connecticut River valley between towns, you'd probably find a change in the rules of engagement. It's not a question of walking up to a stranger with a big ol' aw-shucks grin and an outstretched hand ("Sir, what's it going to take to make you drive a new car off this lot today?"). It's more of acknowledging their presence politely. Even in Twisp (population 1,000), and certainly in Seattle (population 1,000,000,000,000, it seems), there are enough people that the urban rules of engagement apply. But on my road a couple of klicks outside of Mazama (population 100), I can run for an hour and see nobody other than a couple of cars. If I encounter somebody, I'll certainly greet them. And I wave at most of the cars, too, or at least smile and nod. Though that last is mostly thanking them for staying awake and not running me off the county road, Stephen King style. It's much like greeting a dog walker, where one of the subtexts is thanking them for keeping their beast on a leash and hopefully under control. frogs, yeah. If I meet one person every hour, greet them. If it's one a minute, ignore them.
• Fes: Our sports teams may have sucked but we wouldn't go home without stealing some of your school's stuff. I'm an alumnus of the UC.
• City is where the public transit runs, and you can get to the useful shops (culture). Country is where there are pretty fields and/or trees (nature). The wasteland in between in suburbia, aka "the 905".