The Darunian Culture Test

Based on The American Culture Test. Please keep in mind that the opinions of the majority of Darunians do not necessarily reflect my opinions.

If you're Darunian...

• Between male and female there are no other genders. Gender is defined entirely by presentation. Anyone who presents as female is considered a woman, and anyone who presents as male is considered a man. About 1 out of 50 people are cross-sexedthat is, their bodies do not match the sex they are. You dont care whether a person is cross-sexed or not, but foreigners think of them as the sex that matches their bodies, which you think is crazy. You know this is why cross-sexed people are famous for hating foreignersespecially if they come from foreign countries themselves.
• You're familiar with Platea Sesamu (Sesame Street), Baywatch, Cane Aloa, Star Trek, Umu Fema, Casa Petufocu (The Flintstones), In siclu XX, Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, Aiko Mini, Fonzie, Esanu in tera, Casa Simpson (The Simpsons) and Amicu (Friends). In general, you watch many series, both Darunian and foreign. The latter are, in decreasing order of probability, American, English, French, German, Japanese, Scandinavian, and other. Because of TV serials featuring American lawyers and court dramas, you know the American court practices far better than the Darunian ones.
• You know how soccer is played. Of course, you call this sport football. If you're male, you can argue intricate points about its rules. You've heard of American football but don't know how it works. You dont play soccer much, but you do play a lot of chess, whether youre male or female; the best way to meet people is the chess scene, where you bring your chess set to the park and play with someone who seems nice. (If you arent good at chess, you bring a different game.)
• You consider six weeks of vacation a year normal, and in many professions count on a 36-hour working week.
• Immigrants are mostly either cross-sexed people seeking freedom or Europeans who wish to live away from non-Europeans.
• Most likely you are not religious, or religious in a very loose way. To you, the religion of Daruny is Darunianism. There are people in your country who have very strict religions. You consider this either quaint or somewhat scary. Except for some Jehovah's witnesses or Mormons knocking on your door, nobody will ask you whether you believe in Heaven. There are some Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim immigrant minorities, but you really dont like them, because their religions stop them from assimilating into Darunian culturewhich all immigrants need to do.
• You think of McDonald's, Burger King, KFC etc. as cheap food.
• You own a telephone and a TV. Your place is heated in the winter and has its own bathroom. You do your laundry in a machine. You don't kill your own food. You don't have a dirt floor. You eat at a table, sitting on chairs.
• You don't consider insects, dogs, cats, monkeys, or guinea pigs to be food.
• New houses have bathrooms with a toilet, old houses have separate toilets and bathrooms.
• The telephone system, the mail, railroads, and power companies are state-owned; you can hardly imagine things working any other way.
• You expect, as a matter of course, that the phones will work. Getting a new phone is routine.
• You believe in a Pan-European cuisine for Daruny.
• The train system is good, although trains may be late. Trains are about as fast as cars. Traveling by plane inside your own country is something for people with too much money or not enough time. If youre over 3, you own at least one bicycle and use it, too.
• You need to be 21 to get a drivers license. You have to take paid lessons and cannot practice on your own. This makes getting a drivers license very expensive.

Where the Americans go wrong

• You find a multi-party system natural, and can hardly imagine another fair way to run a country. You expect your country to be ruled by a coalition of two or three major parties, not by a single party. It would scare you to give one point of view so much power. You think consensus is more important in politics than rhetoric. You expect politicians to be inefficient at times, and sometimes stupid, but you don't expect them to get into politics for self-enrichment. You find two-party systems (like the UK's or the USA's) unfair and restricting. You find it very strange that the USA doesn't have any left party.
• You see no contradiction in having both a democratic government and a queen who is head of state.
• You'd respect someone who speaks fluent English, French, or Japanese, but you likely dont speak any of them (except maybe English) well enough to communicate with a monolingual foreigner. You think the schools should teach kids English, which is probably the only foreign language you are semifluent in. People can travel across Europe using nothing but English, and possibly get by pretty well in the rest of the world, too.
• Socialism is OK, if not taken to extremes. Undiluted capitalism scares you; you expect the government to protect you from corporate greed.
• People volunteer to teach immigrants to speak Darunian and acclimatize them to Darunian culture. This is a good thing.
• You can tell with good approximation the region someone comes from by the dialectal inflections in the language. Even the town, if it's close enough to you.
• Communists are the people who saved your country from the Germans and then turned on you during the Cold War. You still dont quite trust the Russian government.
• Between black and white, there are no other races. Someone who is darker-skinned than the Italians looks black to you, and skin color is more important than facial features in determining race. A light-skinned Asian, for example, is white, but a Mexican or Arab who isn't particularly light-skinned is black. But where people come from is far more important than their skin color, and someone who speaks good Darunian and has assimilated into Darunian culture is Darunian enough.
• You dont bother to think much about race anyway. You and almost everyone you know are white. Even most immigrants are white. Still, if youre considering having children, race definitely comes into play when youre selecting a partner or adopting a child.
• You think most problems could be solved if only people would put aside their prejudices and work together.
• You have never heard of creationism.
• You take a strong court system for granted, even if you don't use it. You know that if you went into business and had problems with a customer, partner, or supplier, you could take them to court.

When in Daruny, speak Darunian

• You take it on faith that nobody abroad speaks your language, and are amazed if anybody has bothered to learn it--unless, of course, theyre immigrants, in which case you expect them to learn Darunian.
• An income tax rate of 60% is high, but you think that people who earn a lot of money should pay high taxes. You don't believe in trickle-down economics.
• Multiculturalism sounds like a bad joke. Some countries are obviously destroying themselves by compromising their cultures to immigrants; you hope this never happens to Daruny. However, you see nothing wrong with all the foreign movies, television shows, and books everyone is exposed to. (Cultural imperialism? What's that?)
• School is free through high school (at least, it's an option, even if you went to private school); university isn't. You expect the state to help you pay for university, if your parents can't.
• University is (normally, and excluding graduate study) five years long.
• Mustard comes in jars. Shaving cream comes in cans. Milk comes in cardboard boxes or (rarely) bottles.
• The date comes first, then the month, then the year: 25/6/1940. (And you know what happened on that date.)
• The decimal point is a comma. Certainly not a dot.
• A billion is a million times a million. A thousand times a million is a milyad.

When elephants battle...

• World War II was the biggest and worst thing that happened to your country in the 20th century. Your poor, neutral country was used as a battleground between Germans and Russians, with Darunians caught in the middle and mistreated by the Nazis. You know many older people who suffered at the hands of the Nazis. You were liberated by the Americans. The war showed that neutrality didn't work, so now you depend on other countries for your security.
• You don't believe in the European Union. You may have heard it was all designed to keep eternal peace between Germany and France, which is grand, but not really your business unless the Germans fight in Daruny again.
• You expect marriages to be made for love, not arranged by third parties. You marry at city hall, with a nice ceremony and speech from the civil servant who marries you. After that, you may also have a church wedding, but this has no legal status. All your friends and family members are there when you marry. And, naturally, a man gets only one wife at a time, and vice versa. Premarital sex is not chastised (except in some religious subcultures), and young people (of both sexes) often want to finish their studies and enjoy "a life of their own" before marriage. Most couples just "live together" for some time, before getting officially married. Some marry only after the birth of the first child, some never.
• Youre proud of the way your country handles immigration. Only those who have a skill that makes them useful to Daruny are allowed in. Unlike some countries you can name, yours doesnt cater to people who live in your country illegally or to immigrants who dont assimilate. Foreigners who teach their children the ways of the old country arent considered criminals, but you wish they were. You are proud of the fact that your country has no bilingual signs or foreign flags except in foreign embassies.
• If a man has sex with another man, that's his own business. Similarly, no one cares if a woman has sex with a woman. Really close friends do stuff like that. However, you wonder how same-sex relationships can work out without a clear male role and a clear female role. Foreigners think cross-sexed people in heterosexual relationships (a male-bodied woman with a man, for example) and their partners are homosexuals, no matter how much you try to tell them otherwise.
• With most people you know, you use the informal ti form; the honorific vu is used in more formal situations, like speaking to older people or to businesspeople from another company.

My face is up here, sir

• Its no big deal for a woman to show her breasts if she bathing or nursing, or if she is young and small-breasted.
• A pricy hotel room has a private bath, a cheap one has a bathroom in the corridor.
• More foreign movies and TV series than not are subtitled, except for those designed for children (which are all dubbed); it's cheaper to hire a translator than to hire a translator and a voice actor, so only the most popular ones are dubbed.
• You are shocked if anyone offers you a bribe, or asks for one.
• If a politician has been unfaithful in marriage, you dont question their ability to govern, unless theyre from some conservative religious party.
• You don't have to give tips to taxi drivers, waiters or barbers.
• If you adopt a child, the child is yours. The biological parents have no rights once they give the child up for adoption.
• For a politician to show off their family during an election campaign is ridiculous, since you don't understand what they have to do with their work. You don't even know whether most party leaders are married, divorced, single or whatever.
• You feel sorry for the cross-sexed, but mostly because of the difficulties they encounter when traveling in other countries. Other than that, they dont have any real problems that a lot of other people dont have--for example, there are lots of women who aren't cross-sexed but still can't have babies.
• Credit cards are accepted in many shops, though, but they are mostly for yuppies and snobs, and you don't have one. You pay cash in shops, or use a debit card.
• A company can't fire just anybody it wants. For this reason, many companies hire temporary workers through an employment agency.
• You don't eat very much bacon, and if you do, it's as part of something else, like a pizza or an omelet.
• Labor Day is the first of May, but it is not a holiday.

Contributions to world civilization

• You've probably seen most of the Hollywood canon of movies, plus Visitatore (the French movie Les Visiteurs), a few other European movies, and most Disney movies.
• You know "the western canon" of popular music. If youre an intellectual, youre very familiar with the great classical composers.
• You count on excellent medical treatment. You know you're not going to die of cholera or other Third World diseases. You expect very strong measures to be taken to save very ill babies or people in their eighties. You think dying at 65 would be a tragedy. You take it for granted that health care insurance is universal.
• Darunian films aren't all that bad, but their low budgets show through, and you can see the same stars in TV dramas anyway, so why bother?
• You went over Darunian and European history in school, not much Russian, Chinese, or American. You couldn't name any wars that your country was involved in, except World War II.
• You expect the military to contribute to peacekeeping operations, not get involved in politics. Having successfully led a military operation is not an advantage in a political career. You used to have conscription, but now it's an all-volunteer force. You have never heard of the names of the heads of the services.
• You're used to a wide variety of choices for almost anything you buy.
• You use the metric system. The only exception is that a libra (pound) is half a kilogram, and an ons (ounce) is 100 grams.
• You are not a farmer.

Those crazy Russians!

• Comics typically appear as hardbound books (abu). Comics sometimes but not always appear first in specialized comics magazines. All newspapers and most magazines carry at least one comic, too. Comics are mainly Darunian, French, Japanese, or American in origin. Comics come in two varieties: serious and humorous.
• The people who appear on the most popular talk shows are mostly entertainers and politicians. Authors are seen on TV too, to promote their books.
• You drive on the right side of the road. You stop at red lights even if nobody's around. If you're a pedestrian and cars are stopped at a red light, you will fearlessly cross the street in front of them.
• You consider the Volkswagen Beetle to be a small to medium sized car.
• The police are armed, but not with submachine guns.
• If a woman is plumper than the average, it doesn't improve her looks. (And yet, many people are fat. But then, women are supposed to earn their own living so that good looks and getting a husband won't mean the whole world.)
• The biggest meal of the day is at noon.
• The nationality people most often make jokes about is the Russians.
• There's parts of the city where you walk carefully at night.
• You feel that the government is a bit out of touch with the citizens, sometimes.
• You wouldn't expect both inflation and unemployment to be very high (say, over 15%) at the same time. High unemployment may occur, high inflation never.
• You don't care very much what family someone comes from, unless theyre an aristocrat.
• The normal thing, when a couple dies, is for their estate to be divided equally between their children.
• You think of opera and ballet as somewhat elite entertainments. It's likely you don't see that many plays, either.

If I had a bad government, Id pray too

• Christmas is in the winter. You spend it with your family, and put up a tree. Presents are given on the 25th. Christmas is about Santu Nikolu (Santa Claus), not Jesus, so even Jews celebrate Christmas.
• The church has no power to speak of. There is a state church that crowns the new king or queen, but thats all they really do. The government wouldnt dream of starting a meeting with a prayer.
• You know the capitals of Europe, but you know the leaders only for the larger countries. The only US state you can pinpoint is probably California.
• You are familiar with Donald Duck, Lucky Luke, Asterix, Gaston Lagaffe and Tintin, but you aren't familiar with Mafalda, Ralph K殀 or Judge Dredd, although all these comics have been translated into Darunian.
• You've left a message at the beep.
• Taxis are generally operated by locals, who tend to drive a bit too fast.
• Unemployment benefits are your right, you've paid for them after all.
• If you want to be a doctor, you need to get a degree first.
• There aren't that many lawyers, and you will need them only if you go to court, not for a business deal.

The trouble with the neighbors

• Germany and the Germans are overbearing neighbors. You get along well with them, but Germans are known to be arrogant, which you are always alert to point out them. The war is not forgotten, and most people have elderly family members who were killed, deported or otherwise mistreated by the Nazis. Even the most politically correct can make jokes or disparaging remarks about Germans and get away with it.
• France is a country full of arrogant people who look down on non-French. Still, its a nice place for summer vacation, and you like their cheese and wine.
• The USA provides a lot of your entertainment, as well as technical innovation. Many Americans seem OK, but their "I-am-now-suing-you" attitude ranges from comical to dangerous. Their social situation (education, crime, welfare) looks inexplicably primitive to you, but they still say that things are better in the US. Other than this, Americans are warm, friendly people. To you, all Americans live in either Los Angeles, New York, or a farm in the middle of nowhere in the Midwest.
• "America" means the USA, unless specified as "Canada" (which is really a giant U.S. state) or "South America" (where there are dictators ruling over lazy people who wear sombreros or dance samba). Mexico and the Caribbean are part of South America.
• If youre under 30, Japan is best known for Nintendo, with which youre very familiar, and you enjoy Japanese comics, shows, music, and movies. If youre older, Japan is a faraway country that produces cars and electronics, and you havent forgiven them for fighting on the side of the Germans.
• You know something, but not very much, about Asia and Africa; most of what you know comes from cartoons and comics.
• You don't think much about the UK; to you, its a country that has a messed-up royal family, and some nice sightseeing in London.

Man, I feel like a woman

• You think it ridiculous that any private person would want to have a firearm. The government should protect you against such people.
• You think it normal that any woman who wants to can get an abortion, and that sex education and contraceptives are freely available. It's nothing out of the ordinary to see naked breasts on TV and in advertisements.
• If you wish to change your gender, all you need to do is fill out an application and learn how to present as your desired gender.
• Journalists may write about everything but usually avoid the private life of public people. They only talk about private life (I'm not talking about the gutter press here) when people choose to make their private life public.
• You think people shouldn't make themselves more important than they are, we are all normal people after all.
• Youre aware that your country doesnt need a royal family, but you like them anyway.
• If male, you are uncircumcised, unless you are Muslim or Jewish (even then, only if you are highly orthodox); doctors only perform circumcisions when its necessary, and only doctors perform them.
• You were born in a hospital or at home (these are about equally likely) and were delivered by a midwife, general practitioner or gynecologist. Unless she had a cesarean, your mother did not take anesthesia during the delivery. Your father was most likely present at your birth.

Space and time

• If you have an appointment, you'll mutter an excuse if you're five minutes late, and apologize profusely if it's more.
• If you're talking to someone, you get uncomfortable if they approach closer than about a meter.
• You expect to bargain for houses, cars, antiques, and most items sold at open-air markets.

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