Re: Culture / Ethnicity
English/Scotch/Irish/German is my ethnic composition. However, my family has been in Texas for at least 8 generations on both sides. It may seem strange to act as though a state is a cultural background, but I believe this is one of those things that makes Texas different from most other places in the Union.
I was born and raised in Houston, a city of about 4 million(metro area). I had every modern convenience, so it is not as though I went to school on a horse in a red schoolhouse. But...even so, I had family that lived in deep east Texas, where it was about as rural as you could get. It is difficult to live in Texas and not get a sense of the past, either from the Western point of view, or the growing pains era from about 1950 onward.
The other thing that you gain as a native Texan is a rather odd sense of the size of things. It is not uncommon to drive an hour to get somewhere in the same city...and it's not because of the traffic. Driving from one of our cities to another will almost certainly take longer than that. A three-hour car ride is really no big deal to us. Being in Texas, you are constantly aware of its sheer magnitude.
It is because of this that I can say my only traditions that I carry from the "old country" are a love of Bass Ale, Guinness, and whatever that stuff they serve at the Hofbrau Haus in Munich is. Slainte! [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]
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