What I meant by generational line wasn’t genetics, but location and culture. Many European countries wouldn’t make the top 10 list for the biggest states in the US. If you look at a map of the US, Maine is about the same size as Portugal. The distance from Rome to Brussels, for example, is about 100 miles less than Boston to Altanta. So if you live in southern France, and your parents moved there from northern France, that’s like moving from one end of a state to the other. An American visiting family across the country would be like if you went to visit relatives in Latvia or something (in terms of distance). Americans have such a different sense of scale when it comes to distance. And then you add in the amount of immigration that the US has (or at least had historically), and you get very diverse groups that, while they are American, may be first-generation Americans whose grandparents still live across the world in different countries. I myself am 100% American, but like 50% French and 45% Portugese due to my grandparents being immigrants on both sides.

The culture here is weird as well, because it’s both homogeneous and not at the same time, and I think that massive scale of distance plays a part in that. Because you could listen to somebody from Boston, NYC, London, and somebody with a southern drawl, and you’d swear that they’re all from different countries despite everybody speaking English because of the difference in dialect/accent. Oddly enough, I took French in school from a Belgian immigrant, so if I still spoke it, I’d have a bit of a Belgian accent (enough that people picked up on it in Montreal and Paris when I was a kid, at least), and I’d say the difference between Boston English and New York English is about the same as Belgian French to Parisian French, while a Boston accent to a Southern drawl is more like Quebecois French to European French. The distance from Brussels to Paris is less than from Boston to NYC. And the same goes for culture. We all eat Mac and Cheese, but Cajun food is specific to a “small” area of the southern US because the spices and ingredients simply don’t grow in other parts of the US. And then you add in stuff like immigrant owned restaurants, and it gets even more varied. And as you go across the country, you can see stuff like massive architectural differences in the way houses are built. New England houses largely look like houses from the UK (with the occasional Slavic style house popping up here and there in my experience), while the south and the west have very different styles. And the reason that New England wouldn’t look out of place in Europe is because the culture there is very much influenced by those European roots. When people immigrated here, they brought their culture with them, and many settled into little enclaves of fellow immigrants from their country. Everybody speaks English, but you know when you’re in an Italian neighborhood in NYC or an Irish neighborhood in Boston. Many places are starting to put both Spanish and English on things like road signs (especially in the south near Mexico), but I’ve seen cities where roads are marked in both English and Chinese due to the large amount of Chinese immigrants to those cities.

The US is such a weird situation as a country that I don’t think there’s anything you can compare it to. It’s like that 10 year period in Japanese history where they went from feudal fiefdoms to a countrywide rail network, electricity, and an army armed with gatling guns supplied by the US. There’s no real frame of reference to draw parallels to.

I remember from my pub roaming days in paris, stumbling upon a depressed US guy next to the opera. He told me that he had recently been promoted by his firm in bumfuck in some flyover state and that it was his first time out of the US.

And for some reason he thought everyone would be in awe of an actual US guy. Someone who actually had a car and electricity! But instead, nobody gave a fuck. So there he was, drowning his illusions in a pint.

By far my most surreal meeting in a bar.

Tabernak!

Québécois here. I have never understood when people tell me I am not French. I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.

Of course we’re not French, we haven’t been for centuries! We share a language and an ancestry.

I think most Québécois would agree with me that your statement is just confusing. You’re just stating something like we’re not aware of it.

I used to sell wine in retail and for the most part only at nationally recognized stores. My favorite thing to do with French people is talk all about the culture that didn’t invent wines but perfected them as I brought them over to the Italian sections