not just soulless big cities where people just drink by themselves. Places where there are always actual community events around town with most people actively participating in them.
It feels like colorado is the only state like this. The west and east coast are individualist as shit.
Interesting, this is your second post about this exact topic right?
first post schizo
Nah, I've seen this exact thread even referencing Fort Collins, just with a different pic. Dishonest reply in a dishonest thread.
Communal events in *any* country almost always include sporting events.
As a foreigner it's always a great experience to see the local sports team, and bond with the fans. Everyone there is for the same reason, to see the Derpville Herpadongs to victory.
Strike up a conversation with the local fans and have them teach you the customs, songs, and cheers. Buy some sports swag, and have a good time.
Of course, some teams have more fervent fans than others, and more communal events.
Here is an absolute scorching hot opinion. I grew up in a small town (5k people), moved to the medium city (150k people) for undergrad, and then moved to a big city (1 million people) for med school. Then I moved 2000 miles to another small town (10k people) and have spent a few years establishing myself with the locals.
The true substance of american life cannot be experienced by outsiders. You cannot go to an american community and expect to experience like you would a european city. We are not soulless ants who are reliant in superstructures like cities to connect with one another. We are relatively isolated and have ample land holdings. America is family centric, not city centric. We have community events, but they spring from individual and their families coming together. As an outsider, you cannot pay to be a part of this. It takes decades of connections to be part of it meaningfully. You need to commit yourself to getting to know people and their family histories here.
So then the vast majority of Americans (80%) do not understand American life?
Yes, the vast majority of americans are cattle that exist solely to slave away for their corporate masters. But I’d say more like 60%, you shouldn’t just look at the urbanization rate because that metric is extremely broken in how its defined.
America’s small town populations and upper middle class populations (around 20% to 30% by usafacts metrics) live exceptional lives by global standards. The rest of the american lived experiences are soul crushing, and I’d rather be a europoor than experience it again.
most people just live in america
they are not americans at heart
+1. I agree. A lot of important American events are things like birthday parties, work parties, proms, college parties, graduations and weddings. You can't really experience that shit if you're just in town visiting from another country. The best you can experience is to show up and do some sort of neighborhood cultural festival.
I'm from Maryland and outsiders can't really eat our crabs correctly because it takes years to perfect picking them. Maryland crabs are practically a religion. We start as literal babies. Most people who have never had them open one crab, and give up frustrated and embarrassed.
That really explains things well. Europeans will say Americans are so "atomized" and Americans will say they don't know what they mean by this.
In europe every town will have a festival to St. Doofus, the Patron Saint of Gonorrhea or some such shit that you can just go to. Europeans will think Americans are lacking for not having this but in the US have school football draws the whole town on Friday and a bbq on Saturday with will have close to 100 people in attendance at their huge American house. We look at europeans as lacking for not having these things. But the latter does require connections, even the football game is really enjoyable when you know other people there, who their kids are that might be playing etc.
As far as OPs pic my town hosts a night market every week during the summer which is kinda cool, lots of street food and bars to go afterwards. Colorado seems to have more community oriented stuff but there's also a lot of rich young people that live there.
I laughed really fricking hard at a festival to Saint Doofus the Patron Saint of Gonorrhea.
There are definitely a lot of community events in most US towns you can go to. I'm actually going to a beer festival today in my neighborhood. I go to art openings sometimes with my homosexual friends who went to art school. There are like 20 hiking groups in my area. Practically every small town in the US does a 4th of July fireworks display. There's a xmas boat parade with vendors that runs for a week every year in December. Halloween is huge here. Everyone does BBQ's on Labor Day and Memorial day. Probably the biggest cultural event that you wont ever get to experience as a European is an American Thanksgiving.
>Europeans will think Americans are lacking for not having this but in the US have school football draws the whole town on Friday and a bbq on Saturday with will have close to 100 people in attendance at their huge American house. We look at europeans as lacking for not having these things. But the latter does require connections, even the football game is really enjoyable when you know other people there, who their kids are that might be playing etc.
Literally almost no one hosts 100 people at a bbq or for food unless it is special event. And the obsession with school sports is why the USA has become a nation of morons because so many kids are focused on the 2-4 sports during the school year their superfan parents pressure them into joining because they have no lives besides watching sports on tv and reminiscing about when they were in their high school team so they teach their kids to become mindless idiots like them. Sort of like the fictional shoe salesman Al Bundy dreaming about his Polk High football days. I read an article about this that attributes one of the reasons why Americans are lagging behind other nations academically -- most other nations don't allow the stupidity of school sports. If you want your kids to play organized team sports they join a league outside of school as it should be. That way school is school and sport and sport.
Also since Americans cities and towns have shit tier public transport parents are burdened with schlepping their hellspawn not only back and forth from school but to any team practices. Sounds like a great life right? Being a personal taxi for your bratty kids...
You sir are a pseudo-intellectual. Europeans also have families and family only events that tourists don't partake in. European cities are surprise full of European families.
Another moron, you think Europeans or other people in other continents don't have birthdays, work parties, graduation celebrations, weddings?
>I'm from Maryland and outsiders can't really eat our crabs correctly because it takes years to perfect picking them.
I am fairly certain a crab is a crab and it is the same as eating a hard sea spider from anywhere else.
>As a foreigner it's always a great experience to see the local sports team, and bond with the fans.
This is moronic and only for highly extroverted people who have no will or independence. I don't care about things I am not into no matter what all the people around me are into. Most my co-workers can't talk about anything besides sports because they spend so much of their free time watching stupid sports, I simply don't care and won't take up their waste of time to have something to talk to among people I am forced to be around.
Another moron. The difference is that America is a multi-cultural wasteland where people can't really relate to their neighbors. I live in New Jersey and I don't interact with my neighbors. But I talk to my with my brothers neighbor Sophia who is a fellow Greek, I also sometimes call or communicate my dad's ex-neighbors in Greece. I can't relate much to the Latinos, whites, etc. that are my neighbors. There is no common cultural rituals, worldview or bonds and frankly especially white American neighbors love calling the cops on their neighbors. So frick them.
Multicultural societies have low societal trust. It takes years and years to learn how the people from a foreign culture think and their cultural expectations and attitudes. But if you're in Denmark - you know you can literally leave your baby in its stroller outside unattended and no one will bother it.
You sound very angry and lonely. I'm sure those aren't mutually exclusive aspects of your life. Your comment about "white neighbors calling the cops" is very telling. If you don't want the neighbors to call the cops on you, don't be a creepy, angry little shit.
I highly doubt you get invited to very many weddings or parties, and therefore zero idea what you're talking about. So let me school you on American weddings. Americans spend 5 times the money on a wedding than in most European countries. The last wedding I went to in Palm Springs was easily a $100,000 party. That would be 4 years salary in Spain. You know what they spend in Spain for the average wedding? It's 5k. Comparing an American Wedding to a Spanish wedding is like comparing a luxury Yacht to an inflatable kayak.
You sound like a stupid white American. My comment about white Americans calling the cops obviously offended your white sensibilities. Clearly you people have a weird relationship to authorities and the cops since you are used to them helping you as you lynched blacks for over a century while you dressed up in your best clothes and posed for family photos and celebrated and partied over the lynching. So as a group you love snitching to authorities since for centuries the same authorities helping you enslave, expropriate native American land, rob and defraud immigrant laborers, etc. Whites love calling the cops to resolve family and neighbor relations because it is culturally patterned behavior and it has served them very well in the past.
I literally and actively don't want to go to weddings. The last wedding I went to was my first cousins I think back in 2016 or something. Lots of second cousins that I never see keep inviting me and I keep not coming.
Spending $100,000 on a wedding isn't something to gloat about it -- it is just moronic. Literally most cultures in the world, even most Americans think that is moronic. Only greedy money grubbing women who are raised to have princess complexes and stupid Prince charming fantasies about the perfect marriage with the perfect guy want to hemorrhage that absurd sum to invite mostly people they marginally know. Case in point: all the second cousins who never visit me but who invite me to their wedding when they draft their invitation list because we are still technically second cousins.
Incidentally one of my white co-workers who is typically an alcoholic said he loves to go weddings because of the free alcohol... So I can see your milieu love them since your standard of a good time is free alcohol...
This dude is about to cry. Someone struck a nerve
Butthurt cultural-less white Americans detected. I suspect the same idiots who brought up such gems as:
sublimate and pretend to give a frick about stupid local sports teams
America is "family centric" not "city centric" as if Americans don't have sky high divorce rates, single parenting, mixed parenting and as if Europeans or other people don't have families
The incel is strong with this one.
kinda based imo. Hes speaking what Americans dare not say
lmao watch the white americans start calling the cops because a post on SighSee angered them
Black please.
just letting you know I think you're based and cool anon x
>pic unrelated
rural country where there is nothing to do so everyone gets excited to go out to see whatever band is playing at whatever bar yall go to every wednesday evening
Mother fricking wine festivals. In the US, they're always like 80 percent female. The tickets are usually pretty cheap compared to what you would pay in a bar, usually like $30-60. You can walk around and chat up anyone because everyone is wasted. People dress up fancier than normal, sort of like church attire. There are usually live local bands and food. No one has a bad time at a wine festival in the US.
what are the best ones?
I've done the Maryland Wine Festival a couple times. It was one of the better ones. The tickets are like $30 for unlimited tastings and the festival lasts 6 hours. There were never really any lines for tastings. The crowd is younger. By the time the live music started later in the day, people were wasted and it was always a good party.
Another really good one that I've done a few times is an industry event that is by invitation only. All of the Italian wineries come to the US to find distributers and they do a couple cities in the US. There were like 150 wineries at the San Francisco event last year. There were people who were tasting the wine and spitting it out, but they tried so much that they still got wasted . The wineries send mostly hot chicks to the event because the distributers are mostly men. The whole fricking event was smoking hot Italian ladies. There were endless milfs. I ended up getting like 3 phone numbers last time.
There are a lot of good festivals in California. The Newport Beach boat Parade is really fun. The rich people really go all out and decorate the shit out of their yachts. Oktoberfest in Lake Tahoe and Big Bear are both awesome. Lake Tahoe especially is a fricking great place to be in October. Dia De Los Muertos in Santa Ana is always amazing. A lot of locals come out and set up just to cook food for the event. I've never had better Pazole in my life. And it's super cheap.
Nowhere. Manhattan is too empty, especially compared to Tokyo or Osaka, Manhattan is nothing but Mcdonalds and moronicly overpriced shithole places, lots of empty blocks, lots of blocks woth nothing but like 1 mcdonalds, Brooklyn and Queens are too ghetto and also empty. LA is even less dense and the downtown area sucks, the beach area is too bougie. Chicago, Philly, Dallas, Houston, DC, all complete shitholes with dead af night life, especially on weekdays. Boston is dead from the weather 9 months out of the year and too cold, Portland, the Bay Area, and Seattle are all super super druggy and homelessy, Denver is completely dead and nothing but shitty food, shitty everything, lots of crime.
And small towns are fricking dead and empty, most of them shut down at like 10 pm even on weekends since Covid, maybe some have like a few shitty dive bars but not really.
No where in the US is half as lively as Tokyo, Osaka or European cities.
>Denver is completely dead and nothing but shitty food, shitty everything, lots of crime.
I don't even necessarily disagree with your overall thesis, but a lot of these takes sound like you didn't live and integrate in these cities.
Denver has parks where people come together to play volleyball from like 11am to sunset every weekend day + after work on 2-3 weekdays.
They'll even play in the winter when it isn't freezing.
Then you have all sorts of gyms to join. idk...I did end up leaving, but I would not call it dead. 16th street mall is dead and post-apocalyptic, but everything cool about Denver is in a ring around the actual downtown. The downside is...everything is in a decentralized ring around downtown with bad discoverability.
I'm just saying compared to non American cities, American cities are dead as FRICK, even Jap coties with like 400k people like Nagasaki have way more to do and way more open at night, especially on weekdays, American cities are totally dead on weekdays
I just don’t understand what you mean by “things to do”. I went to Japan last month and was super bored. Do you mean get drunk every night at a bar? Is that your sole expectation in life? What about church and family? What could cities possibly have to offer a normal human who wants meaningful connections, and not petty hedonism?
I don't know, lots of restaurants are open, lots of people are out, even arcades are open all night
I think what he’s really talking about is what we can refer to as “public life”. Basically, in most cities, and even towns, in the world, there are public squares, downtowns, piazzas, etc. where people are just out and about doing things or else just sort of hanging out. They’re usually places you can safely walk around, talk, eat, drink, and do various other sorts of activities. It basically doesn’t exist in America. If you consider the large downtown area of the city nearest to you, it’s probably a road with a series of restaurants and stores lining the road, but that’s all and there’s a a high chance that it’s not busy for much of the day/night. When Americans aren’t at work, they’re at home. There is no public life.
/n/ and /leftypol/ is that way, moron
It’s not an argument. What I said is true and that’s why you have to resort to ad hom like pretending I’m a leftist.
>Not being content with a totally atomized private existence revolving around consumption or owning things makes you a pinko communist
Average American everybody.
My Colorado town of 5,000 probably has more people playing in the park than Denver does. Denver is hollowed out. Majority of street life is bums, addicts and crazies.
This is beyond moronic bait from some delusional weeb, Japanese cities are fricking lifeless compared to anywhere in SEA. Tons of storefronts are shuttered from covid never to return, the majority of the local population still LARPs as if it's still 2020 from all of the mask usage and the atmosphere feels like you're walking around in an endless hospital waiting room sprawl.
>no way bro Japan has restaurants and arcades open at night???? surely it's the only place on earth that has such a thing
SEA cities are all dilapidated shitholes conpared to Japan except for singapore, you're just a delusional SEAaboo
I'm sure they are fun though so you aren't wrong, just saying pretty much everywhere has livelier cities than America
>Manhattan is too empty
Black person, it's full of people everywhere.
yeah but compared to Jap cities theres very few businesses, restaurants, bars etc.
Actually I take it back, Vegas and Miami are pretty crazy, only of you have a buttload of money tho
Nowhere. The closest you’ll get are college campuses. Otherwise, public life is dead or non-existent in the United States.
Colorado definitely has the best towns in the American interior. Summer is short up here, so everyone gets out and enjoys it. The New England coast towns are also lively, and the girls are more fashionable over there. Some towns in New York state have a great street scene as well - Watkins Glen in the Finger Lakes region, for instance. New Orleans is another city that is very much alive. Savannah, Georgia. Terlingua, Texas if you want middle-of-nowhere social vibes. Prescott, Arizona has a beautiful plaza in the center of town and plenty of street life. Ocean Beach, San Diego, California. State College, Pennsylvania. I liked Waynesboro, Virginia. Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. These are a few places off the top of my head from my years of USA travel...most during the winter months, when very little happens in public places.
State College is nice but it’s a bit weird if you’re not a student nor do you work for the university. There are some companies there but mostly, the town is almost entirely oriented around the university. The place is crawling with students, professors, administrators and their families almost exclusively.
Asheville, NC is the only town that comes to mind where I've had strangers invite me to barbecues for no particular reason and then having random hippie music festivals, drum circles, etc. happen in the middle of the day for no reason.
Also I'm a little gatekeepy about this particular town in West Virginia, but I was out on a field study there in the Applachians and the locals invited me to hoedowns and we did arm wrestling, betting, singing all night etc. It truly felt like a community. It did have a very good ol' boy feel so there were a couple times where I got chased by guys in a pickup for looking at them sideways. I don't know how else to explain it lol.
I had some great times in West Virginia as well. Shot a gun for the first time with some bear hunters I encountered at a public campground. Kinda looked like a hillbilly myself at that time, despite being from New Jersey. The part about guys chasing you down multiple times just for looking at them sounds fishy. They were probably just mountain kids used to driving at breakneck speeds on curvy back roads, which might have seemed like aggression to you.
Basically every small and medium town that isn't a garbage commuter truck stop. If it's in the south you have to be whatever weird ass evangelical or Baptist cult they're in or they'll ice you out. New Englanders are cold unless you're into the Yankees, Red Sox, or Pats. West cost idk everyone is nice but phony, hard to find communities that are genuinely accepting and not just going through the motions.
If it's anything like Canada you just hit 18 and be a loner for the rest of your life.
The defining feature of America is that nothing feels alive topkek.
Pretty much any city in Texas I guess. Lots of Hispanic fiestas, Texan fiestas, and for some reason German (word for party in German)
Crowded streets, roads closed, intersections turn into gatherings, happens every few months.