indentity Web Sites

www.menshealth.com

This first web site was one I visited which is the website for the popular magazine of the same name. Both the magazine, and the website appeal to a particular gender identity being men. It explains helpful tips to getting healthy, relationship building, and information that is more vital to the man than it is to the women.

www.ebony.com

Now this site specifically for race classification of black. The slogan for the site was "Premiere reading for African American men and and women. This web site really caught my attention as it had all the makings of any newspaper or informative magazine such as sections of sports, fashion, family and news but all information was based on African-Americans. It was interesting to see a magazine for African-American people only but I would think that a magazine written for just White people would be considered racist? It would be interesting to know how people felt on that matter.

Identity!

The first site I visited was, www.thesource.com, it's a hip-hop magazine. It is obviously geered towards people who like hip-hop. I think there is something interesting to bring up here, I would think there is a stereotype of this being identified with young black males, being that because most of the hip-hop artists are young black males, but honestly, i beg to differ. I know for a fact many of both white and black males and females who listen to rap and actually purchase the magazine as well, which is what The Source is, a magazine for hip-hop. Another one I looked up was the VHPA, Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association. www.vhpa.org this is near and dear to my heart to be honest with you. My father is a Vietnam Veteran, he flew UH-1 (Hueys) in Vietnam. He is always talking about this site. The pilots from the war chat with each other, tell their stories, find out interesting facts about Vietnam and or the war. It is very interesting, and they all share a common identity of being part of the elite group of men who served as helicopter pilots in Vietnam.

Ford in Germany

I thought it would be interesting to explore an American made car on a foreign site. I chose the Ford company in Germany.
http://www.ford.de/ie/home/-/rt_home/-/-/-/-

It was interesting to see the site written in German but the Ford slogan of "Feel the difference" remained English. This is probably so that it would not translate wrong into the German language.

http://www.fordvehicles.com/ The United States Ford site was real different in what cars they advertised on the front page and more stuff about being "America's Number 1". This is all stuff that wouldn't matter to a German owner of the car.

BMW, English vs. German

www.bmw.com, I looked up the English (USA) version compared to the German version. At first I did not think there would be any differences, honestly. Quite obviously right from the start it is for sure different. The German web site has moving graphics, a BMW actually driving. The English version is fairly simple. Another thing I noticed was that on the German version it was really easy to navigate through, even though I don't know the language I could still figure it out because of the name of the cars. On the English version, it is a bit more work to navigate through to get to more information about the different cars. Pretty interesting overall, I was suprised to see the difference, I guess maybe because it is a German car and all, but still it was pretty interesting to see the overall difference.

The Apple Store Portugal

So I found the Apple store in, you guessed it, Portugal, interesting though for comparisons sake here's the U.S. link
http://store.apple.com/

And the Portuguese link.


http://www.apple.com.pt/por/

Basically the same site, although there are some core differences with the Portugal version. some of the ads for some of the Portuguese products are in English? Didn't really comprehend that, but the majority of the site is in Portuguese, the Portuguese site has a huge advertisement for a Macbook and a side add for the Iphone, The U.S. has a huge add for the Iphone on the front page, probably thanks to all the media hype surrounding it. I wonder if there's hype for the IPhone in portugal too, or if they're still on the Macbook craze?

Portuguese Culture

http://www.portcult.com/

i too have a favorite culture, portugal, becaause my family comes from there and i have been surrounded by there culture my whole life. but this site is interesting, it offers insight into the modern day Portugal, with statistics, comparing Portugal to 2 other European countries Greece, and Hungary, because they have similar populations. Interestingly, Portugal has 0 crude oil reserves, and the most tV sets out of the 3 countries and also, of the 3 countries, Portugal has the highest mobile phone per person rate, this shows me that Portugal is quite modern, but apparently the internet hasn't quite caught on over there, not sure why though, perhaps that's the next phase of modernization for Portugal.

The site goes further into the culture, showing the gruesome statistic that Portugal has the highest pedestrian death rate, yet government officials have contemplated raising the speed limit. The last thing I noticed was a look ino the most popular music forms in Portugal, with the Fado, a popular form of music where there is a female vocalist hitting a lot of high notes with a guy playing a ukulele in the background, lol. however, since 1970 and 80 there has been a dsurge of mdern American style rock bands in Portugal

Vietnamese Culture

Well here we have it again, my favorite culture, Vietnamese. I am so fascinated with their culture, I have visited their country twice and will probably visit it many, many more times. A lot of the information I am going to provide actually comes from people I work with, I will enclose here in my blog one web site to help give some information as well. But, the people I work with and are friends with are from Vietnam.
First off, Vietnamese people are extremely superstitious people. Especially during Tet, which is the Chinese New Year. If you eat certain foods, or dress certain ways, it is either lucky, or unlucky or will help give you a long healthy life. Their eating habbits are very different than ours. Not to mention their different tastes, but for example if you are having a bowl of soup, they believe that it is more sophisticated if you sip instead of putting the spoon in your mouth, same goes for slurrping up noodles. When you are served food from a hostess or family, it is considered rude to decline only until after the second or third serving. If you can't use chopsticks, it is considered ok to ask for a fork, but not a knife-but you should definately take a stab at trying to use chopsticks. I have traveled to a lot of countries, and Vietnamese culture definately is the most unique. If you ever have the chance to visit, make sure you do because it's an experience of a life time. Web site http://www.thingsasian.com/stories-photos/1140

chilean culture

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/dchappell/chile/basics.htm

This site was very helpful in explaining culture and other aspects of Chile. Some things I found out about Chile is that it is considered "The jaguar of Latin American economy". The country is very successful with trade with Asian countries and like the United States has strong farming culture in rural areas and businesses in the highly populated areas. Since Chile has a lot of coastal area, fish is one of the foods found consistent at dinner along with breads and cheeses. One thing i found extremely interesting is that Chileans speak a form of spanish that is very difficult for other spanish cultures to understand since there is a lot of dropping the end of words off and losing "S" sounds. It is extremely hard for other Spanish cultures to come to Chile and adapt to what they think is a broken form of the language. The religion is Chile is mainly Christian from its European influences.

Portuguese Parliment TV

That's right, I know we all love international government discussions! there havng some sort of economic summit, not too many people there looks like about 15-20 people tops as far as I can see on the screen but mostly it's just two guys arguing about how to handle portugal's money problems. cool concept of watching international TV though.

English news channel!

I was able to find a video from the UK for BBC news. Not too original, but it was the only video that would work on my computer after trying many different countries. My computer has been acting rather slow lately. Anyways, again being a traveler that I am I know what to expect from BBC. It's pretty much the world news, a lot on Iraq and when it comes to sports, it covers a lot of soccer. I actually like BBC, it is more graphic in my opinion than most news here in the U.S. I think the news should be able to be graphic and show more than what they show here in the U.S.