My favorite thing is that Europe is spooky because it’s old and America is spooky because it’s big
“The difference between America and England is that Americans think 100 years is a long time, while the English think 100 miles is a long way.” –Earle Hitchner
A fave of mine was always the american tales where people freaked out because ‘someone died in this house’ and all the europeans would go ‘…Yes? That would be pretty much every house over 40 years old.’
‘…My school is older than your entire town.’
‘Sorry, you think *how far* is okay to travel for a shopping trip?’
*American looks up at the beams in a country pub* ‘Uh, this place has woodworm, isn’t that a bit unsafe?’ ‘Eh, the woodworm’s 400 years old, it’s holding those beams together.’
A few years ago when I was in college I did a summer program at Cambridge aimed specifically at Americans and Canadians, and my year it was all Americans and one Australian. We ended the program with a week in Wessex, and on the last day as we all piled onto the bus in Salisbury (or Bath? I can’t remember), the professors went to the front to warn us that we wouldn’t be making any stops unless absolutely necessary. We’re headed to Heathrow to drop off anyone flying off the same day, then back to Cambridge.
“All right, it’s going to be a long bus ride, so make sure you’re prepared for that.”
We all brace ourselves. A long bus ride? How long? We’re Americans; a long bus ride for us is a minimum of six hours with the double digits perfectly plausible. We can handle a twelve hour bus ride as long as we get a bathroom break.
The answer. “Two hours.”
Oh.
English people trying to travel around Australia and wildly underestimating distance are my favourite thing
a tour guide in France told my school group that a particular cathedral wouldn’t interest us much because “it’s not very old; only from the early 1600s”
to which we had to respond that it was still older than the oldest surviving European-style buildings in our country
China is both old and big. I had some Chinese colleagues over; we were discussing whether they wanted to see the Vasa ship (hugely expensive war ship which sank on it’s maiden voyage after 12 min). They asked if it was old, I said “not THAT old” (bearing in mind they were Chinese) “it’s from the 1500s.” To my surprise they still looked impressed, nodding enthusiatically. Then I realised I’d forgotten something: “…I mean it’s from the 1500s AFTER the birth of Christ” and they went “oh, AFTER…”.
My dad’s favorite quote from various tours in Italy was “Pay no attention to the tower – it was a [scornful tone] tenth century addition.”
Being in a country that used to be huge and changed through history but now is confined in a tiny small part at the end of Europe in similarly baffling especially. When people whose families originated in some of the places that are no longer part of the country. Trying to explain how an important temple is old, front eh 9th cent. But it s not as Old as the baths it was built on dating from the 5th cent BC, and then explaining how the temple is modeled after a huge temple that is now in territory of another country built 3 centuries earlier and then you have to explain 5 centuries of history as to why they modeled the same temple in a city that far away…
It is also interesting that when US or European say something is from the 1500s, as a racially chinese han, I’ll first convert it to “Ok, this is around the Ming Dynasty, so it’s somewhat old”. And when you said the temple is from 5 century BC, I was thinking “Oh, this is before the Qin Dynasty, so this IS legit old.”
lol having a fixed place in history as crhonological reference like that is helpful. Funny reading this cause basically the only Dynasties i actually know where they are placed in time are these two. And the ming Dynasty i only knew because i did research in order to draw Sun Wukong and i had to look up time periods and clothes…so now i can recognise the clothes and place them in Ming dynasty and that’s about it lmao….things you learn for art….
Anyway it’s just weird getting in the whole “this is legit old” meentality and how it differes in each country hahaha. And how it differs from each ear of the country cause it had different borders lol.
For most of us Byzantine history isnt even archeology, it’s mid history. Usually you are imprssed when sth is before the 3-4th century BC because it belongs in the Classic period (Athens) but that’s also very common for us because classical Athens is the most explored historical period if you truly wanna consider sth OLD and be like “wow people existed then” you go back to Homer’s times, or Minoans, ad then you are impressed by how people were living their lives.
do you get that about a certain period of your history?
I think the most similar case would be the Xia dynasty. In our general understanding, the Xia dynasty is the earliest dynasty that was recorded in history books (it existed somewhere between
2070BC to 1559BC). But details about the Xia dynasty is only fond in records of it’s successor,
the Shang dynasty. The lack of archeological finding of actual written words from the Xia dynasty made it difficult to hard-prove it’s existence (or how legit those description are because ancient records in that time can be a mixture of facts and legends) even though we know culture did exist before that.
Era before it are all mythology, but I just found out that archeologist dug out a bone flute that was made around 6000BC, which is super cool XD
Btw, I think China is one of the few culture to believe that a female Goddess created the human kind. She has human upper body and snake lower body…
A Force Sensitive Phasesixer 