I live in one of the suburbs of Buffalo, New York, USA. A lame town with nothing worth seeing or doing.  What with the Great Lakes next to us, we have evil winters at negative thirty and evil summers at positive ninety. And hugely evil ammounts of precipitation. When I was ten, I saw something blue where the sky usually is. My mother told me that was the color of the sky in the rest of the world. Nah, the sun comes out during the summers, and we all melt. The other three seasons, we get rain and snow and clouds.

The only thing in Buffalo is food. In walking range of my house alone, we have three or four sub places, five pizza places, three Chinese restaurants, three fast food stores, two convenience stores, and a few other restaurants, not to mention two supermarkets and a deli. Buffalo, proud sponsor of Heart Attack Association USA! And the proud leader of the American Obesity Center!

Other than that, we're really boned. We got one decent arcade in driving range. Three stores there games are sold, EB Games, Media Play, and Toys R Us.

There are no jobs around, everybody's broke, the high school is over crowded (1200 students out of a capacity of 800) and people get die pretty often. 50% of the people I know smoke or drink underage, 25% of them smoke marijuana, and a couple take other drugs. A lot of them are in gangs. I know people who grind up rydalin and sell it as cocaine. I know kids my age who have been convicted for arson, theft, drug peddling, drug possession, drug use, and various other offenses. 75% of people I know are cynical and pessimistic. Everyone I know is broke and needs to borrow money from other people, who are also broke.

My mother and father are divorced, and live sepparately and earn under thirty grand a year. My dad can barely afford to pay for heating for his house, or electricity, or anything else. He can barely keep up eith the morgage. My mother's in the same situation, only in a rented apartment. My mother's boyfriend goes to college and works eighty hours a week, only getting days off every two weeks or so. My mother's apartment has literally no yard, and our downstairs neighbor is the landlord's son, so he gets that. My dad has a small yard, but it is big enough for our pet dog. My dad's house has a broken furnace, so I wake up to freezing tempuratures.

Add to this that one of my best friends is rich. His dad works for NASA on the space shuttle. He earns a good $26 an hour, and works a full work day, leaving him plenty of time to visit with his family and sleep. One of my other friends lives in a large, three story home with a decent yard.

And it isn't this bad all over. A forty minute drive from here, we have the jet set, the rich kids. The people who live in five story homes with big yards, tons of glass windows. The high school there is so big, a single wing would easily hold my entire high school. For that matter, the courtyard would preobably hold most of my school. And it has less kids than my school does.

So, that's where I live. It's better than slums. I can live with this. Still, when I see what some other people have, it makes me kind of jealous.  Ah well. (BTW, where I live, a decent yard is just big enough that you can't touch the house on either side.)

Oh..Michigan? My daughter lives there at the moment!

Top of the world for me...you know norway, where people are so good skiing... :paperbag:

yeah i know bo...you beat us this year,and I must say that we norwegians make jokes about you as well. i dont see the point, as we are neighbours right...I mean I have always like the swedish, and I dont see the point of making fun of each other so much.

Well about the olympics this year, it was a bad championship for the Norwegians, most of them was ill when they came there, they got ill while down there, or they had just been rid of illness when they came down there...no I'm not kidding, to say it nearly every single norwegian competitor had been, was or became ill when down there, soits not that strange that the performance was rather patchy...but I must say congrats with the ice-hockey gold, you deserved that one very well.

I come from a place with mountains, fjords, 'Brunost' and alot of oil...

Half of me is from the Land of Midnight sun, Mooses, Reindeers, snow....and  Vikings.....

Is she here for college or something?

Me too...
So Minque, you're half norwegian
You speak any norwegian?

Nah...au pair and college, a combination sort of.....she likes it very much i reckon because we don´t hear much from her, and she´s the person who just call mom and dad when something´s not good!

Au pair is taking care of children when living in a family..she does that besides her study..
Oh but she likes Ann Arbor (where she lives at the moment) a lot..it´s quite a difference to the town we live in here in sweden!!!

i live in a lil ol' town called kelowna in British Columbia (and for all you ignorant americans thats in Canada)

and for all you even more americans its the one that kicked your a$$ in a war.

im above you