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 Wed Jan 02, 2008 1:00 am New Year's Celebration |
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A get together as usual. This year my family had all relatives come over and had a barbeque. It's not so much of celebrating new year, but more to another reason to gather everybody. I did nothing in particular, except yelling on the phone demanding for everybody's attention! Being away sucks at time like this.
And on a New Year's day in Japan, everybody, well almost, especially girls, goes shopping for "Fukubukuro". A paper bag filled with a lot of stuffs that you might want and do not need, sold at a very, very low price. Girls go crazy for them. The number sold is limited so some set a camp the night before just to make sure they can buy it and then for the rest of the morning running around from one shop to another.
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Okotteru Papa mo suki dakedo, nikoniko yasashii Papa ha mo~tto suki! |
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NinaZara
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Location: Japan
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| Wed Jan 02, 2008 1:36 am New Year's Celebration |
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Well, in Ireland there's nothing but hangovers on New Year's Day. On New Year's Eve, you start with a dinner ceremony that's not much different from Christmas. A family affair with turkey and mulled wine and mascarpone without midnight mass. Baileys, Buckaroo, Brandy Butter, Belgian Chocolate and BT Luxury Crackers. Bertie Aherns lovey-dovey speech on the evening news. Smoked salmon, sherry trifle, charades and hot port and paper hats . Plum pudding, red candles and "Mind the Woterford Crystal!", but no wrapping paper covering the floor this time. Around 8 in the evening, everyone starts swarming into the city centre to get boozed up to the brim. At midnight those who can still stand get up and cheer to the New Year; then it's like any other Friday night.
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Ralf
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| Wed Jan 02, 2008 1:58 am New Year's Celebration |
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Sounds yummy. Maybe next year I'd spend new year in Ireland. 
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Okotteru Papa mo suki dakedo, nikoniko yasashii Papa ha mo~tto suki! |
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NinaZara
I'm here quite often ;-)
Joined: 04 Jan 2007
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Location: Japan
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| Wed Jan 02, 2008 3:46 am New Year's Celebration |
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| Ralf wrote: | | How do you celebrate the New Year in your country? What do you do on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day? |
When I was younger I thought I had to go to parties and get drunk on New Year's Eve. Then I realized I always hated those parties, and so I started using it as a quiet evening to stay at home and think.
When I lived in Eastern Europe, one year I was partying on New Year's Eve with a couple of girls and one girl's brother. We decided to ring in the new year with her grandmother, who was home alone. Midnight came, and we all began to toast and wish each other good luck, when suddenly there was a BOOM and the glass in all the windows blew in. Some idiot had evidently gotten his hands on some semtex or something and exploded it in the street. All the windows on the block were destroyed.
I was surprised to hear a fire cracker or two go off here last night. Americans don't usually light fireworks on New Year's, but save them for Independence Day. Some of them shoot guns in the air, but not in my neighborhood. |
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Jamie (K)
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Joined: 24 Feb 2006
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Location: Detroit, Michigan, USA
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| Wed Jan 02, 2008 22:39 pm New Year's Celebration |
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| Jamie (K) wrote: | | Americans don't usually light fireworks on New Year's, but save them for Independence Day. Some of them shoot guns in the air, but not in my neighborhood. |
Take it your hood is pretty safe then. What happened to the black bottom East Side of Detroit? I happened to pass through this pretty louche looking suburb on a bus some 15 years ago.
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Ralf
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Ralf
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| Wed Jan 02, 2008 23:57 pm New Year's Celebration |
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| Ralf wrote: | | Jamie (K) wrote: | | Americans don't usually light fireworks on New Year's, but save them for Independence Day. Some of them shoot guns in the air, but not in my neighborhood. |
Take it your hood is pretty safe then. What happened to the black bottom East Side of Detroit? I happened to pass through this pretty louche looking suburb on a bus some 15 years ago. |
Well, in the first place, it's not a suburb.
Sometimes people claim that the place was called "Black Bottom" because of so many African-Americans living there, but my understanding is that the place was called that even earlier, because the French found such black, lush soil there that was good for farming, and had startling numbers of fruit trees.
The Black Bottom neighborhood was razed in the 1960s and has since been replaced with clean, modern townhouses and condominiums, including even some Mies Van der Rohe buildings. So if you rode a bus through a really scuzzy neighborhood, you only thought you were in Black Bottom, but you were in some other area.
Going east along Jefferson Ave., toward the suburbs, many of the neighborhoods have been incinerated or otherwise destroyed, and the inhabitants and perpetrators have moved to another part of town. The neighborhoods therefore resemble a prairie ribboned with broken asphalt and dotted with a falling-down house here and there. If you want to survey the damage, download and install Google Earth and type in "Detroit, MI 48215". |
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Jamie (K)
I'm a Communicator ;-)
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Location: Detroit, Michigan, USA
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| Thu Jan 03, 2008 18:39 pm New Year's Celebration |
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| Jamie (K) wrote: | | Going east along Jefferson Ave., toward the suburbs, many of the neighborhoods have been incinerated or otherwise destroyed, and the inhabitants and perpetrators have moved to another part of town. The neighborhoods therefore resemble a prairie ribboned with broken asphalt and dotted with a falling-down house here and there. If you want to survey the damage, download and install Google Earth and type in "Detroit, MI 48215". |
That may have been the one, Jefferson Avenue. All I can remember is that the bus took us to a big shopping centre where I went to get a replacement camera for the one I had left in my bag on the Greyhound the day before.
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Ralf
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| Thu Jan 03, 2008 19:16 pm New Year's Celebration |
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| Ralf wrote: | | That may have been the one, Jefferson Avenue. All I can remember is that the bus took us to a big shopping centre where I went to get a replacement camera for the one I had left in my bag on the Greyhound the day before. |
If you were on the Jefferson bus, it probably took you to Eastland Center, which is now what Chris Rock might classify in a comedy routine as "the mall the white people used to go to". (He says that in every community there are two malls -- "the one the white people go to, and the one the while people USED to go to." Americans find this remark tragically hilarious.) It might also have taken you to Macomb Mall, which is a longer ride, and you'd have been on the Gratiot bus, passes the former Black Bottom neighborhood and goes through seemingly endless ruined neighborhoods, and through some blue-collar suburbs. It turns into a divided boulevard. That Gratiot route would have been more shockingly scenic. |
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Jamie (K)
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Location: Detroit, Michigan, USA
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| Thu Jan 03, 2008 19:45 pm New Year's Celebration |
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| Jamie (K) wrote: | | Ralf wrote: | | That may have been the one, Jefferson Avenue. All I can remember is that the bus took us to a big shopping centre where I went to get a replacement camera for the one I had left in my bag on the Greyhound the day before. |
If you were on the Jefferson bus, it probably took you to Eastland Center, which is now what Chris Rock might classify in a comedy routine as "the mall the white people used to go to". (He says that in every community there are two malls -- "the one the white people go to, and the one the while people USED to go to." Americans find this remark tragically hilarious.) It might also have taken you to Macomb Mall, which is a longer ride, and you'd have been on the Gratiot bus, passes the former Black Bottom neighborhood and goes through seemingly endless ruined neighborhoods, and through some blue-collar suburbs. It turns into a divided boulevard. That Gratiot route would have been more shockingly scenic. |
Macomb! I can remember the name because my pronunciation of the word lead to surprised looks on people's faces (or maybe my accent in general). At one point we got off the bus because we spotted a Salvation Army Store and thought it a good idea to pop in for a while. The shop was alright, but all those people begging for money later on when we stood waiting for the next bus were a bit scary. We must have looked like aliens to them. For us it felt exactly like some places in northern Dublin at the time, only that the milk-bottle complexion was lacking.
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Ralf
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| Thu Jan 03, 2008 20:27 pm New Year's Celebration |
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| Ralf wrote: | | Macomb! I can remember the name because my pronunciation of the word lead to surprised looks on people's faces (or maybe my accent in general). At one point we got off the bus because we spotted a Salvation Army Store and thought it a good idea to pop in for a while. The shop was alright, but all those people begging for money later on when we stood waiting for the next bus were a bit scary. We must have looked like aliens to them. For us it felt exactly like some places in northern Dublin at the time, only that the milk-bottle complexion was lacking. |
Those people tell you they need money for food, but if you offer them food, or to take them to the store and buy them any food they want, or to buy them lunch at a restaurant, they'll refuse. They're already decently fed. They want the money for booze or drugs.
The tragic thing is that it's very easy to stay out of poverty in America, if you follow some really simple rules, but these people don't do it. They live in a much more degraded state than people of their class and ethnicity did before Uncle Sam started giving away money in socialist programs. And there's more crime. The strangest statistic of all is that almost 90% of the kids in that area have no father in the house, and/or don't even know who their father is. Since a lot of government benefits aren't available to women who have an able-bodied husband in the house, women decades ago started kicking Dad out. Now that's developed into a culture in those areas where when women want to have a child, they just find someone to have a quick tryst with, then he goes away, and nine months later, the baby comes. It's well known that boys who grow up without fathers -- even without imperfect fathers -- are far more likely to end up in prison than boys who had them. So there's a lot of talk in the US about "strengthening the black family". But in the middle and upper classes, the black families don't need that help. In that underclass, such a task requires teaching fatherhood to millions of boys who not only didn't have a father of their own to observe, but who didn't even have any neighbors with fathers. They've got no idea what a father does from day to day. |
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Jamie (K)
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Joined: 24 Feb 2006
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Location: Detroit, Michigan, USA
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| Thu Jan 03, 2008 20:44 pm New Year's Celebration |
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| Jamie (K) wrote: | | Since a lot of government benefits aren't available to women who have an able-bodied husband in the house, women decades ago started kicking Dad out. Now that's developed into a culture in those areas where when women want to have a child, they just find someone to have a quick tryst with, then he goes away, and nine months later, the baby comes. |
Hope not for mind in women; at their best
Sweetness and wit they are but mummy possessed.
John Donne, 1633
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Ralf
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| Mon Jan 07, 2008 7:40 am New Year's Celebration |
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| Ralf wrote: | | The shop was alright, but all those people begging for money later on when we stood waiting for the next bus were a bit scary. We must have looked like aliens to them. For us it felt exactly like some places in northern Dublin at the time, only that the milk-bottle complexion was lacking. |
Ralf, remember also that what people call "Detroit" is a huge megalopolis, and fewer than a quarter of the people actually live inside the city you saw. |
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Jamie (K)
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