On Sat, 20 Aug 2005 16:14:24 GMT, "-=jd=-"
wrote:

On Sat 20 Aug 2005 11:00:38a, Andrew Oakley
wrote in message :
Wife's choice, and not a bad one really. NY was sort of like Paris but
much more conservative.
{THUD!!} That was my jaw impacting the floor.
Note to self: avoid Paris like the "plague"...

Oh, Paris is lovely. It could, of course, just be that I just know
Paris better, but I found NY a bit... well, quiet. I'm not one for
nightlife (I don't drink alcohol, for one thing), but in Paris (or any
European town, including London etc) you can't avoid the nightlife;
every street has a pub/bar/cafe and in the evenings the entire city
centre is heaving with people. In New York everything outside Times
Square seemed dead after 8pm. I'm not complaining, since I actually
enjoyed being able to walk around without lots of drunk people
hassling me, but it was so very different from the European
experience. For instance, in my nearby town of Cheltenham (which has a
reputation for being "posh") I just wouldn't walk around in town after
10pm because of all the drunk people.

For instance, in NY after spending an entire week walking around the
city I can only remember noticing ONE bar/pub. In any European town it
would be amazing if you found one street without one bar/pub! Maybe NY
bars blend in to the background? Or maybe there are specific nightlife
districts such as Times Square - maybe it's just planned better
compared to the historical higgledy-piggledy nature of European towns?

What I found similar between NY and Paris was the architecture and the
landmark monuments. Paris and NY both have a large number of
modern-era landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of
Liberty, or the Grand Arch of the Defence and the Empire State
Building. London is a lot older, the landmark buildings are things
like the Tower of London (a medium sized medieval castle).

Peak which was breathtaking. Was also nice to chat to people who, like
me, were country folk. Mind you, they do like their Christianity
there, don't they?
Ehhh... something like that.

What I found really odd everywhere I've been in the USA (Huston, NY,
Boston and California) is that there is virtually no pagan/wiccan
culture.

In the UK there is this underlying understanding that Christianity is
a "new" religion introduced only two thousand years ago and which only
really got going about a thousand years ago. For instance, the church
in the village where I grew up is only nine hundred years old. Whereas
there are pagan standing stones which are three or four thousand years
old, and the local government council in my parent's village recently
gave a grant to rebuild the pagan meeting place in the forest (really
nicely done, with seven tree stumps encircling a wooden stage
platform, and six rows of benches up along the hillside- can be used
for all kinds of outdoor performances, but essentially it's a coven
ground).

What this means is that in the UK you get a lot of shops selling pagan
trinkets, such as pentacle jewellery, wickerwork, crystals,
alternative medicene, incense, that kind of thing. These shops are not
at all difficult to find, they tend to be busy giftshops in prime
tourist areas. Additionally in older towns you get dedicated
witchcraft shops, selling books, ingredients, and a larger range of
trinkets.

The only places in the UK you'll find selling Christian artifacts
(crucifixes, rosaries, scrolls with passages from the Bible etc) are
shops right next to, or inside, cathedrals, or dedicated Christian
bookshops, maybe only one per large town.

Now I've never found ONE shop in the USA selling pagan gifts. Whereas
lots of tourist shops seem to sell crucifix jewellery or small statues
of the virgin Mary or Jesus, for instance. Also my wife is really into
pagan crystals, and I could only find one shop in the whole week I was
driving through California which sold crystals, and that was a geology
shop, not a witchcraft shop.

It was just kind of spooky to see that the USA seemed to take
Christianity so seriously, even in tourist areas, even in modern
cities such as New York.

Maybe this is the Catholic influence? But there are lots of European
countries which are predominantly Catholic too, such as France, and
they don't have this huge imbalance between paganism and new
religions.

--
Andrew Oakley andrew/atsymbol/aoakley/stop/com
Gloucestershire, UK