Re:One Year in San Francisco as a Software Engineer
by lhorie on Friday January 04, 2019 @12:51AM
(#18822250)
> I find white people's spins on ethnic food to be just plain annoying
I read an article a while back about a couple of americans who went to china and opened a "chinese" food restaurant because real chinese food looked nothing like the americanized "chinese" delivery food and they missed their sweet-&-sour chicken balls and fortune cookies. It flopped hard... until they rebranded and called it "american comfort food". It's always amusing to learn about the quirky dissonances between expectation of people from different cultures.
> SF is filled with the segments of the community that I don't identify with
I'm married and straight so I don't have much contact with the LGBT community in SF, but for some reason the few times have always been somewhat awkward. Imagine looking at marathon runners with funny costumes and then having to explain to your 5/yo not to be pointing and yelling at the naked guy with the rainbow cape. Another time my wife took my daughter to what she thought was a generic kids activity at a library and it turned out to be a transgender seminar, dumbed down to kids vocab level.
I've also found the gay parade in particular to be a bit surreal: the SF parade seemed more like a corporate sponsorship show and had a distinct "spectacle" feel, nothing like the communal street party feel of the Toronto Pride parade.
It almost feels like the culture here is that LGBT identity is this unusual curious thing to be on display on a similar level to the animal shows at the library. Just feels very weird, coming from Toronto, where people are generally nonchalant/indifferent towards sexual orientation.
I read an article a while back about a couple of americans who went to china and opened a "chinese" food restaurant because real chinese food looked nothing like the americanized "chinese" delivery food and they missed their sweet-&-sour chicken balls and fortune cookies. It flopped hard... until they rebranded and called it "american comfort food". It's always amusing to learn about the quirky dissonances between expectation of people from different cultures.
> SF is filled with the segments of the community that I don't identify with
I'm married and straight so I don't have much contact with the LGBT community in SF, but for some reason the few times have always been somewhat awkward. Imagine looking at marathon runners with funny costumes and then having to explain to your 5/yo not to be pointing and yelling at the naked guy with the rainbow cape. Another time my wife took my daughter to what she thought was a generic kids activity at a library and it turned out to be a transgender seminar, dumbed down to kids vocab level.
I've also found the gay parade in particular to be a bit surreal: the SF parade seemed more like a corporate sponsorship show and had a distinct "spectacle" feel, nothing like the communal street party feel of the Toronto Pride parade.
It almost feels like the culture here is that LGBT identity is this unusual curious thing to be on display on a similar level to the animal shows at the library. Just feels very weird, coming from Toronto, where people are generally nonchalant/indifferent towards sexual orientation.