18 ways to hate your neighbor

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

Michael:
> To be fair, if you're comparing boringness, you can't compare 
> Moscow to Tuebingen.  You have to compare Moscow with Berlin 
> or Munich, and Tuebingen with a Russian provincial town.  
> There's always a huge within-country gulf between cultural 
> capitals and their backwaters.

An excellent point.  One lesson one learns from traveling is that he
within-country differences are genreally greater than between-country
ones.

However, one difference  between the US and W. Europe is that in the
latter the tenor of the national culture is set in the center, whereas
in the former - in the hinterland.

Wojtek