Music Banter - View Single Post

Guybrush · 02-08-2010, 05:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by NumberNineDream

What I like about my country:

_I think it is the easier Arabic country to live in, there's a bit more freedom to women. We don't have to wrap a towel on our head, or be banned from driving.
_There's some artists we can be proud of, and that I don't think I would be able to know if I wasn't born here.
_The people in Music and Film are part of a very small society. Which makes it much easier to know everyone in the business, and to be known in the whole country. And if you're known in Lebanon, you're known in all the Arabic countries.

My many dislikes:

_We have no decent internet connection, DVD, music or book store, and the good artists are always shadowed by fake commercial ones.
_Lebanese people tend to feel they're the higher population on Earth, which is ridiculous considering how retarded they are.
_We have no civil law, the law treats everyone considering his religion. So we're not all equal in the face of the law.
_A mother can't give her nationality to her son or husband (mostly to ban Palestinians from getting the Lebanese nationality this way).
_Gay people are considered perverts and criminals, and can be put in jail for being so.
_Everyone is born with his parents' religion, and there's nothing called "Atheist" or "Agnostic" in law. So now, I'm considered to be a Christian Maronite, though in reality I'm not. Plus, we don't have civil marriage, which makes inter-sectarian marriages even more difficult.

Wow, you're from Lebanon? That's quite exotic! I know there's recently been some internal strife and power struggle in Lebanon. Has that all died down or is there still tension? How is tourism at the moment?

Quote:

Originally Posted by adidasss

Sure, Lord knows nobody else is gonna give a ****...

Ok so you may or may not know this but we have a similar language situation in the Balkans, there are 4 nations/countries where people understand each other perfectly well (with slight variations in accent): Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia and Bosnia. That's why in the olden days when we were all a part of the same country (Yugoslavia, you young'ns may not have heard of it) it was called serbo-croatian. Then all the bad shit happened in the 90s and we became very touchy about distinguishing them and proving they're VERY VERY DIFFERENT AND SEPARATE! Edit: Oh yeah, and we write phonetically so as soon as you know the alphabet you know how to spell. (:

Anyhow, my likes: Absolute freedom of press (excluding promoting violence or hatred etc), which I think a lot of people take for granted.
I like the coastline, it's very diverse and well, without sounding too patriotic, beautiful. Especially in the south.
Oh and I like it's location, it's very close to all the European cultural centers, for example, Venice is like an hour and a half away from the city I live in. Vienna, Bologna, Budapest and Munchen are like 5 hours, which is still manageable.
Also, this may sound weird, but compared to some other nations, we're not an "ugly" nation. Plenty of beautiful men and women walking around.

Dislikes: The people. General mentality is still fairly conservative, but the proximity of the European union is slowly changing that, at least in terms of legal rights and stuff (for example, homosexuality has been decriminalized in the 70s, similarly to other western nations and we even have some limited domestic partnership rights. Still a long way away from marriage and adoption rights).
Artistically, we're probably the least talented of the ex-Yugoslav nations. Seriously, there hasn't been a good film produced in this country for....well I don't think we ever made any good films! In comparison, Serbia and/or Bosnia have Kusturica, Makavejev and Denis Tanović (who won the Oscar for No man's land). It's similar with music, especially contemporary and alternative music. I feel sick when I think a nation like Iceland, which has like 300 thousand people has produced a fair number of internationally recognized artists. I don't think that's ever gonna happen here.

I saw a travel program once about sailing along the Croatian coast. I remember it well because it looked like an awesome.

I'd like it if more people would post some summaries of their respective country. Especially those from weird ones.

I'll post some trivia about Norway :

GEOGRAPHY :

It's north in Europe
It's a long country, so long that if you swivelled it around it's southern point, the north end could easily end up somewhere down in mid-Italy.
Warm waters from the Gulf current warm up our west coast while the inlands are much colder
"Norway" usually also includes Svalbard, an archipelago of islands in the high arctic at about 77~80 degress latitude whose largest settlement is Longyearbyen, the world's northernmost settlement with a complete infrastructure (police, hospital, school, even a university of sorts)
The person to area ratio is quite low, there are only about 4.5 to 5 million norwegians.

POLITICS

Norway was under Denmark in the Danish-Norwegian union which lasted for 436 years from 1521 to 1814.
Then Norway was under Sweden much to the norwegian people's discontent until 1905 when there was a peaceful separation and we became fully indepentent.
After the separation, the people voted for Norway to be a kingdom as it had been back in the days, so we still have royals although they don't actually interfer much with politics.
Because of our vast oil reserves in the north sea discovered in the 60s/70s, Norway may be the richest country in the world, at least of a decent size (I mean Louxembourg? That's not a real country).
Norway is social democratic. The current government is "red-green", meaning they're somewhat socialistic and care for environmental issues.
People enjoy a lot of freedom here - freedom of speech, free health care, reasonably equal rights, freedom of speech, functioning democracy - and we generally have trust in our government
Svalbard has no immigration laws, so anyone who want can go there. The only requirement is that you have the resources/ability to keep a roof over your head while you're there.
Although there's a lot of positives to norwegian politics, we have a hard time integrating many of the immigrants who come to Norway which, among other things, leads to crime.
There have been public votings on whether or not we should be part of the EU or not. Norwegians generally worry that being in the union would force farmers to compete with products from countries where agriculture is cheaper, so many vote no in order to preserve norwegian agriculture although that means we pay more for our meat, milk and eggs.

CULTURE

Our language is a bit more melodic, so members of some of the neighbouring countries (ex. Sweden/Finland) think we sound happy all the time.
The typical norwegian of old is born with skis on his feet and likes to be out in nature. He or she is also down to earth, not wasteful and does not brag or excess (or like people who do). He or she may be becoming increasingly rare, though.
Although we're friendly, I've heard from some immigrants that norwegians are hard to make friends with. I think we're a bit "stiff" meaning we adhere to standards of behaving which are friendly even if we're not feeling very warm towards those we talk to.
In some coastal areas, minke whales have traditionally been hunted for hundreds of years. Today, we have a small sustainable whaling industry which seems a focus of much animosity from outside our borders. Norwegians themselves have generally little problem with it.
The amount of swearwords used in daily speech correlates positively with how far north you go, meaning they swear much more up north than they do down south.
We have an indigenous population/culture called sami whose distribution cross the borders of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia up north. Much of their culture revolves around the use of reindeer which, traditionally, is is a source for not just food for them, but also the skins and other things to make their clothes, tents, tools, instruments and so on.
The amount of distinct dialects in Norway is very high considering the total population number (4.5~5M). We have two written languages in Norway, one based on dialects and one based on a norwegianized danish. These two are only written languages, though, they both try to represent the actual spoken norwegian.

Darn that 10000 characters limit! Anyways, if anyone have any questions, fire away.

EDIT :

Some more trivia!

The main religion here is christian protestant, although less than half the population consider themselves religious at all
Aside from the exploding harpoon and advances in oil related engineering, the cheese slicer is a norwegian invention
Black Metal is a major cultural export
Since we're not part of the EU, the map in the old 2 euro coins didn't have Norway in it. It (and also the lack of Latvia, Lithauen, etc) made Sweden look like a giant penis with Finland as it's balls.

It's a pity they changed it.