Starcraft community is made by a mix of different people from different countries. We all have our origins that of course don't define what kind of players or mapers we are but these origins more or less put on their marks in our hearts.
More or less we like to identify and be proud of our country, where we were born, where we grew and where we live.
As the title says, when do you celebrate your national day, what's the reasson behind the specific date - is it an independence day, a commemorative day or unification day ? - and how do you celebrate that day are people acting like it's an usual day or do they get more unified and hopeful for a better tomorrow for their nation?
WARNING In no way I incourage to racism,chauvinism or cosmopolitism. If this thread proves to become unconstructive and ends up in a rage war , instead of being an culture exchange like the religion thread ended up, I'll be more that glad if it gets locked by the moderators.
The purpose of this thred is to make a paceful, cultural and historical conversation(I know that these things never get working together) but If you can't accept the opinions of others or you can't crate a mature a constructive argument, than keep your ideas to yourself.
I know that I could search these things by myself(and I do) but I want to read what a person at thousands of miles away from me has to say.
Well, here in Holland we have three very Dutch-specific celebrations that outsiders will most likely not know.
The first is Sinterklaas, a 500-year old catholic pimp with a cane and a boat full of black slaves (it's awesome how non-racist-phobic this country is). He arrives in the Netherlands per boat and basically plays the role that Santa Claus plays for you guys during Christmas (you stole that name, btw), except he does it end-November up till 6 December, when we get to open our packages. The second celebration is Koninginnedag on the 30th of April, which is the queen's birthday. For the ocassion, people usually dress up in weird, lame, orange pieces of clothing, get drunk, and hold en masse garage sales with stupid crap. The third celebration is Carnaval, which is a period that usually falls in February or March, has very little historical truth whatsoever, involves people dressing up in random outfits and is usually just an excuse for people who live in the southern part of the Netherlands to get drunk as fuck, party, make an unnessicarily large amount of noise, be inconsiderate pricks in general and accuse everyone who calls them out on it of not knowing how to have a good time.
Also, thanks for taking the effort in keeping this clean and all Bogdan - I'll keep an eye out and shout at anybody who makes fun of more than his own country.
As for me, tomorrow, on 1st December 2012, we romanians celebrate 94 years since the unification of Transylvania with all the other romanian provinces, forming the Romanian Kingdom under the rule of Ferdinand I .
[After a while things started to get worse and worse, incredibly long story switching side a lot of times between Hitler and Stalin...ended up losing Bessarabia (the actual Rep. Moldovia) because of the ribbentrop-molotov pact, also we lost 90% of our treasury(Dacian gold/roman empire annexes, art and a lot of documents that are our identity card, "secret" pages of centuries that archeoloists are hungry to read) to USSR, how?The treasury was held by USSR as in a bank and when we unified with Moldovea and allied with the nazis, Stalin was like U no loyalty? Fine I have most of your money, I'll keep them. After so many years Putin will negociate with us the tresury, after all, those are just vodka money for a big country like Russia, but for us it's every thing....]
This year I was surprised to see that people are much more united, I think the poverty brings people together, everybodey is planting flags everywhere, I think that that's a normal tyhing to do in every other country, but people here where turned each other, transylvanians,valahian and moldovenians were hating each other for so long in the last 22 years(don't ask me why). For the first time in a lot of years people are brought together by the hope, the hope in a better future, the hope that king Michael I(the kning that shorted the WW 2 by a few months, betraying Hitler and so saving millions of lifes) and the monarchy will regain the power. Paradoxically the royal family has german-prussian origins, so not romanians and yet they are the only leaders that never betryed the people.
The fate of a country is in the hands of it's people , if we deliberately leave the politicians to rape our asses than we deserve our fate.
In Brazil we have the independence day (September 7th), and the day Republic was founded here (November 15th). We also have all kinds of catholic holidays and all kinds of natonal holidays dedicated to important people in Brazilian history. People here don't have strong feelings for the holidays except Christmas and New Year's Eve. National holidays are usually an opportunity to travel or anything else that isn't work.
Capitalism plays the major role making some holidays way more important like Mother's and Father's day, Valentine's day, and others were people are supposed to spend their money on gifts.
We also have some American influence so Halloween (and the growing culture of Zombie Walks) and some other things happen here too, just not as strong.
I thought people usually get drunk there everyday :P What I know is that Nethrlands is a very opened society that accepts everybody and people are free to do things that are illegal or missjudged in other countries, in the end people settel down once they become old. Do you think that netherland should be more restrict from some angles? Do you ever get anoyed by excesses of others?
Anyway it's interesting to discover that Netherlands is the origin of Santa Clus as in todays form,a lot of people see in Netherland only a place where you can get drunk, stoned etc, today you showed me a face of this country I never thought of it.
I was told that by in the commusim era we didn't have Santa Claus(we call him Christmas old man now). He had(and still have) Saint Nicolaus that comes on 7 December and fills the boots of kids with candy and we had "Mos Gerila"-Iceman(replaced by Santa Clous now) from Siberia that came in the end of December to kidnap the bad kids and give candy to goodkids.
There weren't any Jesus related celebrations back then, communists states(at least in the old Romania Rep.) were atheist and banned a lot of people for their belifes, also priests were imprisoned for sharing biblical information.
I thought people usually get drunk there everyday :P What I know is that Nethrlands is a very opened society that accepts everybody and people are free to do things that are illegal or missjudged in other countries, in the end people settel down once they become old. Do you think that netherland should be more restrict from some angles? Do you ever get anoyed by excesses of others?
Well, no, not really. For all the bitching I do about my country (not necessarily here, but in general) it is probably in the top 10-15 best countries to live in. My only two real complaints are small; bike stealing is fucking RAMPANT and the noise and agitation Carnaval causes can be annoying, but unless you live in a city center you're not gonna get bothered by it too much if you don't go out and look for it. And one thing Dutch people themselves always regard as 'typical Dutch' is our 'nuchterheid', which translates to soberness. Sinterklaas kind of proves my point - the black petes next to him are literally historically seen his slaves. Can you imagine a celebration like that in America? Dutch people just don't give a fuck. They know the whole thing is tradition and isn't per definition disrespectful to black people yade yade yada. The standard mentality here is to keep your nose out of other peoples' business. We're not as introvert as I'd imagine a country like Japan or China to be, but we rarely have racist-related incidents and such because nobody here ever seems to get butthurt. This has its downsides, but the upsides tend to show more.
On another related note; I've found that the most drug users in Holland are actually Germans and French people. Statistics over years have shown they make up between 50 and 80% of the profit made of drugs. There are also Dutch drug users, but these are usually some more free-spirited youths who smoke weed every once in a while. The downside is that there seems to be criminality involved in nearly every transaction - the people who really grow shitloads of weed are usually white trash type folks who are generally involved with more shady business.
I was told that by in the commusim era we didn't have Santa Claus(we call him Christmas old man now). He had(and still have) Saint Nicolaus that comes on 7 December and fills the boots of kids with candy and we had "Mos Gerila"-Iceman(replaced by Santa Clous now) from Siberia that came in the end of December to kidnap the bad kids and give candy to goodkids.
There weren't any Jesus related celebrations back then, communists states(at least in the old Romania Rep.) were atheist and banned a lot of people for their belifes, also priests were imprisoned for sharing biblical information.
There's a girl from Romania in my year and we talked about this in a group discussion some weeks back. The effect of forced atheism by the USSR on now ex-satellite states is pretty interesting.
@Mozared: Go Interesting that you mentioned Carnaval. I wasn't thinking about this kind of holiday/celebration. Well, most people have at least a notion of what Carnaval means in Brazil, maybe a wrong notion, but still they imagine something.
In Brazil Carnaval IS a big celebration, bigger than any other. Some people finish their Carnaval days imaginning how it's going to be in the next year. And there's a popular saying the Brazilian businesses and everything else only get started after Carnaval. Like Mozared said, people fill the streets, most of the time dressed in a fantasy or something like one, get drunk, make out with some stranger if they're single (and many times even if they aren't). Loud music all the time, car traffic gets stuck because many streets are blocked and all that mess.
For the people who like it it's like a hell of a party the can last the entire month if you're going for it. For the ones who doesn't is a great chance for travelling away from the big cities (specially Rio de Janeiro where I live). Coastal cities are the main target as February/March is top summer around here. So I usually go back to my mountain-top town and stay there during the main Carnaval weeks.
Carnaval is interesting in that it's big pretty much only in old Spanish/Portugese colonies and (south-)Holland. I wonder how history connects these two ends of the world. I'm thinking it's probably something Spanish related and got introduced to Holland during the Dutch-Spanish wars 300 years ago (Spain used to rule over large parts of the Netherlands for a relatively long time).
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Starcraft community is made by a mix of different people from different countries. We all have our origins that of course don't define what kind of players or mapers we are but these origins more or less put on their marks in our hearts.
More or less we like to identify and be proud of our country, where we were born, where we grew and where we live.
As the title says, when do you celebrate your national day, what's the reasson behind the specific date - is it an independence day, a commemorative day or unification day ? - and how do you celebrate that day are people acting like it's an usual day or do they get more unified and hopeful for a better tomorrow for their nation?
WARNING In no way I incourage to racism,chauvinism or cosmopolitism. If this thread proves to become unconstructive and ends up in a rage war , instead of being an culture exchange like the religion thread ended up, I'll be more that glad if it gets locked by the moderators.
The purpose of this thred is to make a paceful, cultural and historical conversation(I know that these things never get working together) but If you can't accept the opinions of others or you can't crate a mature a constructive argument, than keep your ideas to yourself.
I know that I could search these things by myself(and I do) but I want to read what a person at thousands of miles away from me has to say.
@Bogdan254: Go
Well, here in Holland we have three very Dutch-specific celebrations that outsiders will most likely not know.
The first is Sinterklaas, a 500-year old catholic pimp with a cane and a boat full of black slaves (it's awesome how non-racist-phobic this country is). He arrives in the Netherlands per boat and basically plays the role that Santa Claus plays for you guys during Christmas (you stole that name, btw), except he does it end-November up till 6 December, when we get to open our packages. The second celebration is Koninginnedag on the 30th of April, which is the queen's birthday. For the ocassion, people usually dress up in weird, lame, orange pieces of clothing, get drunk, and hold en masse garage sales with stupid crap. The third celebration is Carnaval, which is a period that usually falls in February or March, has very little historical truth whatsoever, involves people dressing up in random outfits and is usually just an excuse for people who live in the southern part of the Netherlands to get drunk as fuck, party, make an unnessicarily large amount of noise, be inconsiderate pricks in general and accuse everyone who calls them out on it of not knowing how to have a good time.
Also, thanks for taking the effort in keeping this clean and all Bogdan - I'll keep an eye out and shout at anybody who makes fun of more than his own country.
As for me, tomorrow, on 1st December 2012, we romanians celebrate 94 years since the unification of Transylvania with all the other romanian provinces, forming the Romanian Kingdom under the rule of Ferdinand I .
[After a while things started to get worse and worse, incredibly long story switching side a lot of times between Hitler and Stalin...ended up losing Bessarabia (the actual Rep. Moldovia) because of the ribbentrop-molotov pact, also we lost 90% of our treasury(Dacian gold/roman empire annexes, art and a lot of documents that are our identity card, "secret" pages of centuries that archeoloists are hungry to read) to USSR, how?The treasury was held by USSR as in a bank and when we unified with Moldovea and allied with the nazis, Stalin was like U no loyalty? Fine I have most of your money, I'll keep them. After so many years Putin will negociate with us the tresury, after all, those are just vodka money for a big country like Russia, but for us it's every thing....]
This year I was surprised to see that people are much more united, I think the poverty brings people together, everybodey is planting flags everywhere, I think that that's a normal tyhing to do in every other country, but people here where turned each other, transylvanians,valahian and moldovenians were hating each other for so long in the last 22 years(don't ask me why). For the first time in a lot of years people are brought together by the hope, the hope in a better future, the hope that king Michael I(the kning that shorted the WW 2 by a few months, betraying Hitler and so saving millions of lifes) and the monarchy will regain the power. Paradoxically the royal family has german-prussian origins, so not romanians and yet they are the only leaders that never betryed the people.
The fate of a country is in the hands of it's people , if we deliberately leave the politicians to rape our asses than we deserve our fate.
In Brazil we have the independence day (September 7th), and the day Republic was founded here (November 15th). We also have all kinds of catholic holidays and all kinds of natonal holidays dedicated to important people in Brazilian history. People here don't have strong feelings for the holidays except Christmas and New Year's Eve. National holidays are usually an opportunity to travel or anything else that isn't work.
Capitalism plays the major role making some holidays way more important like Mother's and Father's day, Valentine's day, and others were people are supposed to spend their money on gifts.
We also have some American influence so Halloween (and the growing culture of Zombie Walks) and some other things happen here too, just not as strong.
@Mozared: Go
I thought people usually get drunk there everyday :P What I know is that Nethrlands is a very opened society that accepts everybody and people are free to do things that are illegal or missjudged in other countries, in the end people settel down once they become old. Do you think that netherland should be more restrict from some angles? Do you ever get anoyed by excesses of others?
Anyway it's interesting to discover that Netherlands is the origin of Santa Clus as in todays form,a lot of people see in Netherland only a place where you can get drunk, stoned etc, today you showed me a face of this country I never thought of it.
I was told that by in the commusim era we didn't have Santa Claus(we call him Christmas old man now). He had(and still have) Saint Nicolaus that comes on 7 December and fills the boots of kids with candy and we had "Mos Gerila"-Iceman(replaced by Santa Clous now) from Siberia that came in the end of December to kidnap the bad kids and give candy to goodkids.
There weren't any Jesus related celebrations back then, communists states(at least in the old Romania Rep.) were atheist and banned a lot of people for their belifes, also priests were imprisoned for sharing biblical information.
Well, no, not really. For all the bitching I do about my country (not necessarily here, but in general) it is probably in the top 10-15 best countries to live in. My only two real complaints are small; bike stealing is fucking RAMPANT and the noise and agitation Carnaval causes can be annoying, but unless you live in a city center you're not gonna get bothered by it too much if you don't go out and look for it. And one thing Dutch people themselves always regard as 'typical Dutch' is our 'nuchterheid', which translates to soberness. Sinterklaas kind of proves my point - the black petes next to him are literally historically seen his slaves. Can you imagine a celebration like that in America? Dutch people just don't give a fuck. They know the whole thing is tradition and isn't per definition disrespectful to black people yade yade yada. The standard mentality here is to keep your nose out of other peoples' business. We're not as introvert as I'd imagine a country like Japan or China to be, but we rarely have racist-related incidents and such because nobody here ever seems to get butthurt. This has its downsides, but the upsides tend to show more.
On another related note; I've found that the most drug users in Holland are actually Germans and French people. Statistics over years have shown they make up between 50 and 80% of the profit made of drugs. There are also Dutch drug users, but these are usually some more free-spirited youths who smoke weed every once in a while. The downside is that there seems to be criminality involved in nearly every transaction - the people who really grow shitloads of weed are usually white trash type folks who are generally involved with more shady business.
There's a girl from Romania in my year and we talked about this in a group discussion some weeks back. The effect of forced atheism by the USSR on now ex-satellite states is pretty interesting.
What there are other countries outside of america? damn did not know that.
:))
@Mozared: Go Interesting that you mentioned Carnaval. I wasn't thinking about this kind of holiday/celebration. Well, most people have at least a notion of what Carnaval means in Brazil, maybe a wrong notion, but still they imagine something.
In Brazil Carnaval IS a big celebration, bigger than any other. Some people finish their Carnaval days imaginning how it's going to be in the next year. And there's a popular saying the Brazilian businesses and everything else only get started after Carnaval. Like Mozared said, people fill the streets, most of the time dressed in a fantasy or something like one, get drunk, make out with some stranger if they're single (and many times even if they aren't). Loud music all the time, car traffic gets stuck because many streets are blocked and all that mess.
For the people who like it it's like a hell of a party the can last the entire month if you're going for it. For the ones who doesn't is a great chance for travelling away from the big cities (specially Rio de Janeiro where I live). Coastal cities are the main target as February/March is top summer around here. So I usually go back to my mountain-top town and stay there during the main Carnaval weeks.
@SoulFilcher: Go
Carnaval is interesting in that it's big pretty much only in old Spanish/Portugese colonies and (south-)Holland. I wonder how history connects these two ends of the world. I'm thinking it's probably something Spanish related and got introduced to Holland during the Dutch-Spanish wars 300 years ago (Spain used to rule over large parts of the Netherlands for a relatively long time).