so, just a curious little thought that I got myself thinking. Where is everybody from? Or at least, what continent? I myself I am from Australia, but I am actually a Swiss citizen and aim to move back there one day.
I was born in California to Canadian parents. They moved me back to Canada when I was a baby. I lived there for the next 35 years or so. Moved back to California to join my partner's business. Hated California; finally managed to move as far north as Washington State, which has a climate very similar to Victoria, BC, which is my favorite city to live in. So I'm happy here.
I'm currently living in the United States, but I grew up military and spent my formative years in Italy. I also have plans on permanently moving to the U.K.
I am originally from and currently living on a wee island in the middle of the Caribbean, which is technically under the umbrella of North America, but I feel like only a geographer would make that distinction. These islands don't even sit on the same tectonic plate. Regards, Li'l Puerto Rican Dude
Always wondered how the USA managed to keep hold of puerto rico -- when you think about it, it should probably have been it's own little nation.... But the imperialistic tendencies of the USA had to go somewhere i suppose....
Between Russia and Swedustan is a country of lakes, forests and Nac Mac Feegle -type folks. There are more than million saunas. We love them. Folks are kind and easy to make friends. Sometimes it takes less than three generations. We have a language that is very easy to learn. Tolkien loved it. In resent DNA studies have been found out that in Europe is two "races": Europeans and Finns. (And this is true.) This is the only country in the world where you can be autistic and no one spots anything. We love to eat mixture of chlorine and ammonia. We call it salmiakki. We can'tt understand why most other people don't like it. We love and cherish our wars. We have some sport heroes we admire. Like Simo. We do have some industry. None has ever heard about it. Lapua, Sako/Tikka, Bittium, Patria, few shipyards, some paper mills, Nokia... And we have four seasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_Häyhä https://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/27207/20160822/finns-genetically-unique-genes-vary-significantly-europeans.htm https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/finland/articles/reasons-to-visit-finland/
Oh, bless your heart. I do appreciate the sentiment with which this was intended, but... as much as the U.S. is a big pile of polychromatic crazy at the moment, if Puerto Rico were suddenly set adrift - right now, today - as a sovereign and independent nation, I would swim my ass to Miami with my U.S. documents inside of several layers of pressure seal plastic baggies. Sad to say, but unless you reach back to Precolumbian times, Puerto Rico (Borinquén is the name we give the island here) has never known a time when it wasn't under the imperialistic tendencies of one empire or another. Spain held the yoke the longest, obviously, but the French, English, and the Dutch all made a play for the island with varying levels of success and each managed to own at least portions of it for a brief time, leaving surnames and DNA as evidence. That's the very abbreviated version of things. Regardless, the end result is that there is very little history of any kind of genuine self-governance here; thus, no talent for it has really been honed. Puerto Rico was won from the Spanish at the end of the Spanish-American war, and - insult to injury for the locals - we weren't even the spoil that the U.S. was really after. The U.S. wanted Cuba, not Puerto Rico. Cuba is roughly the size of Florida and a much meatier prize than little Puerto Rico represented. To draw a literary parallel, the U.S. was Mr. Albert come to court Nettie Harris, but Pa wasn't about to let his prettiest daughter go to this man, no sir, and offered Celie instead, with a hard eye and a tone of voice that indicated you can take Celie, but if you touch Nettie we can get right back to fight'n, suits me just fine. And while we do come to love Celie and empathize with her, the road to that empathy is a long and troubled one. Thus starts the propaganda smear campaign in the U.S. wherein Puerto Rico and its denizens were painted in unflattering colors by the press of the day, making Cuba out to be the raven-haired beauty bedecked in flamenco garb that got away, and Puerto Rico the sad, lumpy scullery maid that you have to beat to even wash the dishes. But it's too easy to point an indicting finger at "imperialistic tendencies of the USA" as though this were a malady unique to Muricans. That's neither true nor fair. The USA itself (and your own Australia) are also products of imperialistic tendencies, in our case of primarily Spain and England, and in your case, England pretty much alone. In fact, the U.S. and Australia have remarkably similar histories, though each would be loath to admit it for differing reasons. Imperialistic tendencies have shaped the globe and will continue to shape it for the foreseeable future because humans are humans are humans. Constantly singling out the U.S. as a punching bag for modern moralistic self-validation is a sure road that leads to all of you currently wearing boxing gloves to become the punching bags of the future. As a Puerto Rican, and as an American, in my pov the best end result would be the same end result we get in The Color Purple, mentioned above. I have a pet theory that all the women in that book are Miss Celie, different facets of a single personality, and Nettie and Celie are one and the same. Nettie is the idealized Celie. She's loving, caring, thoughtful, tuned-in, beautiful, smart, charming, and sharp as a tack. She is Celie as Celie should have been had this trainwreck of a life not hurtled down the tracks. That's why she is hidden away in Africa for nearly the whole book. There she is safe in a world of fantasy and amazing things until Celie can repair her life and collect her pieces - beautiful but sad Shug, strong but stubborn Sophia, ambitious but silly Squeak, privileged but oblivious Miss Millie (who is very different in the book), etc. etc. etc. Alice Walker is an honest writer and recognizes that we are each made of as many ugly pieces as pretty ones. So there's no point in hating on Mr. Albert, terrible as his track record may be. It gets Celie nowhere and though she certainly rebels against him, in the end, the way for Celie to move on is for Celie to recognize and own Shug, and Sophia, and Squeak, and Miss Millie, and all the rest so that she can be Nettie and be happy. We have to learn to be Nettie, and then Mr. Albert doesn't really matter anymore. ... Jesus, what a ramble....
Sorry... Finnish one is not a version. All the others are. Even the word sauna is from our language. If ever hear about strange holes in ice sheet in the ace age it was Finns warming their saunas.
Can be, can be.... Sweat lodge is sweat lodge. Sauna is sauna. In the past it was more rule than exeption that when some young couple cleared themselves a farm they started by building a sauna. They could use it as a temporary home while building a house, changing forest to fields, draining swamps... And when their house was ready, they could use sauna to bath, to smoke/cure meat, to give birth... Before hospitals sauna was the place were everyone was born.
How interesting... On a side note. Many cultures had what we would term ‘sauna’ Also, wouldn’t a sauna be kind of crowded and a warm place to live in, even temporarily?
It is as warm as you warm it. If you live in it, you don't warm it too much. Long, long time ago living was crowded thing. Houses were small. Here we had lots of forests and swamps. You could clear a "farm" to you - if you could do it. You did yourself a "laavu" so you could sleep outside. Then you built a sauna. It was a crude and small log house with no chimney. Earth was your floor. Logs were free and axe was your main tool. Then you built a house. Now you had even a floor. Earlier you did not have a chimney but a small hole kolled "räppänä". These houses we call a "savutupa". Later houses did have a chimney and a brick made oven. Then you built a "navetta". It was a place for your cow and other animals. After navetta you built a "aitta". It was a small warehouse were it was possible to sleep in summer time. You built these so that if anything gets fire other buildings can be protected. And in a form of rectangle so that you can fence your yard. It was important because of wolves and bears. When you cleared forest you got a lot of stumps. You pulled pine and spruce stumps out of ground, piled them and made a "tervahauta". (A tar pit?) When you got tar, you got money. European ship building needed Finnish tar - a lot. Half modern, half traditional tervahauta. Savupirtti from the year 1865. (You see that the difference to small log sauna is not big.) You used "kaskeaminen" or "kaskenpoltto" to help you when you cleared forest to be your future fields. (Slash-and-burn method.) And when you did not have enough food you put some "pettu" or "petäjäinen" to your rye flours. It was dried phloem between wood and bark in pines.
Yes. If you have -27°C and 70cm of snow a laavu is much better than snow and small sauna is much better than laavu. If you could do something in winter time you did it because you had to use summer to get food for next year. And logging is better at winter time. There is not so much nutrients in wood. It does not catch mould so easily. All the bottom logs you did so that you peeled most bark away or injured trees in so other way so that they made huge amounts of resin. That kind of logs don't decay easily. If you had only a laavu at winter time you did a "rakovalkea" to warm you. It is two logs one on a top of another. Yuo did it in front of your laavu.
Do the fins (finns? finnish? Finlandish?) have surstromming? A swedish friend of mine gave some to me expecting me to hate it. It backfired as I love the stuff... especially on toast with mayo.
Imperialistic tendencies compared to who? Given our relative military strength and economic wealth, we are remarkably un-imperialistic. I'm from Anaheim, California. Home to Disneyland and not much else. I now live in Florida, home to Disney World. As I'm a Canadian citizen, I would someday soon like to live in Toronto, or maybe Vancouver.
No we don't - not the smelly kind our cute and simple neighbours have. Or if we did, we wouldn't confess it. But we have the best sour milk in the world. My favorite is one with acido- and bifidus lactid acid bacteria. Like this. http://www.juustoportti.fi/vapaan_lehman_ab-piima
Yeah, I would have a hard time in a sour-milk-is-a-thing culture. Better, though, than a drink-this-beverage-we-made-by-shewing-stuff-up-and-spitting-it-into-a-bowl-to-ferment culture.
