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| Mara Jade Skywalker wrote: |
No idea where to put this, so:
I live in a large area, meaning I do not live in the middle of nowhere. We have everything we could want in our own parish (like a county), and if we're in a city mood, we can hop right across the lake to New Orleans. But this is not to mean we live in a densely populated region like New York City or DC. This is not walking territory, you must drive where you wish to go. So...a minimum of 15 miles is expected to get most anywhere. A maximum of 50-75 is when something becomes a "drive". We just grow up that way, these distances aren't considered long, they're normal.
As an aside, we also don't measure things in distance, we measure them in time. I used miles for your sake, but when someone here asks how far Walmart is, "20 miles" as an answer would be meaningless. We don't think in terms of miles. It's like most Americans trying to think using the metric system. Centimeters don't have a meaning, we cannot grasp how long 56 centimeters is unless we stop to convert. And that's how we are with miles where I live. The correct answer to "How far is Walmart" would be "About 20 minutes". And to me this makes sense, because what good is knowing how far something is when you have no idea how long it will take you to get there? The distance is meaningless when you have to consider red lights and traffic and speed limits. 25 miles in the country will be much more quickly traveled than 25 miles in the city. But anyway, I digress.
So we have these two visitors in the office today from DC. And I hear one of them talking about where they have to go later, "But Bob, we need to leave earlier than that. It's 25 miles away!" And I snickered at his distress, because 25 miles for us is a quite average distance. I drove further than that to get to school. I drive farther than that to go to my friend's house. I drive farther than that to go shopping. That's normal.
Anyway, I just think it's funny comparing differing in-country cultures. The things we're used to that other people just don't understand. We're all so alike, and yet we're not. It's fun to observe/study.  |
Being from the DC area, this is SO TRUE.
I grew up in Southern Maryland, where the average speed limit is about 60mph. So when something is 10 miles away, we'd just say 10 minutes away. When I started commuting to DC, it was 45 miles away and took me about an hour to get there. The first half hour flew by with ease, but once I'd get into DC, the combination of traffic, lower speed, and SO MANY TRAFFIC LIGHTS just made it impossible.
I ended up moving to a city in Maryland right outside of DC. Literally, I'm five minutes from the MD/DC border now. To get to work, it's about 10 miles. Yet now, I will STILL typically spend 45-60 minutes driving there because of the city driving. It's absolutely horrendous. So when people from a crowded metropolitan area are gasping because something is 25 miles away, it isn't because we're not used to driving that distance (especially DC, when the vast majority of the population probably commutes an average of 60-90 miles), it's just that - in our heads - 25 miles is going to take HOURS to get there.
But you and me, we both know that down there, it'll take 25 minutes tops. 
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