Wales

I have been to Wales twice so far, and I have enjoyed it immensely. It also helped broaden my horizons by realizing how we take things for granted. As you can see in the picture, the Welsh are fond of delineating their fields and pastures with hedges. I've only seen hedges used for gardens by the houses in Slovenia, wire is used to mark the end of a pasture or meadow in Slovenia.

There are of course many other things that people from certain cultures take for granted, like how we take for granted that there is a church on (almost) every hill and that the administration is to be tricked and avoided at all costs.

When cultures collide it almost always causes friction, one of the most basic examples of this is the Americanization (westernization) of the world. Americans are especially notorious for being a melting pot (I think this term is no longer politically correct) of many various cultures, and I believe one of the main reasons for their success is the fact that they are, as a nation, capable of accepting good parts of other cultures, commercializing them, and then selling them around the globe.

Most people of course do not really care about it, a lot are even happy that this cultural globalization is occuring. There is, though, a vocal minority, who bases their identity on the items commercialized and spread through globalization, screaming bloody murder, because they feel that with this streamlining and simplifying of the sources of their identity, they are robbed of something precious and unique.

In the end I think that cultural melting pots are a good thing, and things die and new ones are born, and as long as we have historians who write them down and keep them safe, we should not be overly worried about how other people choose to feed, clothe and amuse themselves.