Foldmuves Culture
 

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The people of Foldmuves are at once more traditional and yet more relaxed than their cousins to the south in Szerelo. They approve of old ways of doing things -- families stick together, old songs are sung, heritage vegetables are grown from seed handed down across generations. Old trees are kept alongside city streets -- those streets remain paved with brick and are lined with hundred, two hundred, three hundred year old buildings.

New things become accepted only after a period of skepticism and avoidance. Electricity here is a tool, rather than the toy and obsession it is in Szerelo. Cars are fine -- Dad's steam-powered one still serves for transport. Buses would be nice in cities - if the cablecars, horsecarts, and electric trams didn't already move people around adequately. Oil-fired freighters? All right -- if the coal boiler needs replacing. Big airliners? Sure - ours are filled with helium. Foldmuves has current authors, but they're nearly universally destitute -- one says here that a new book is a heritage for one's offspring , not a way to make a living. Church services are in today's tongues, but scripture tends to be trusted best in Old Morzhat - the vernacular of perhaps six hundred years ago.

For all that tradition is respected, it hasn't created a hide-bound society. The reasonably relaxed pace of change carries over into all parts of life. Farming is generally hard work, but one doesn't work late to get ahead -- no matter how you stress yourself, spring will come on the same day. When you're planning to harvest pine trees, you'd best be looking to raise up sons to carry on the work.

Foldmuvesan cuisine uses the ample and varied supplies to blend a dizzying array of regional dishes. Folks tend to pick what they like rather than what someone says goes together. This has made acceptable one growing facet of truly modern living -- carry-out food from restaurants. If one is to assemble a meal from Plains, om Felibori River, immigrant Dutxi, and South Bay dairy selections, then selecting from the menus of a half-dozen restaurants is the way to go. And if you'd like that particular set of dishes at home, then maybe there'll be five or six cooks in the kitchen to fix dinner. Kitchens tend to be large and well-appointed in Foldmuves.

Medicine in Foldmuves tends more towards home-grown and home-prepared than factory-devised preparations. Doctors study modern methods, but must also know "Granny Zenta" methods too.

Beware -- old jokes are just as acceptable here as new ones. They get passed down in families like the old china and the old tools do.

Education is valued in Foldmuves, it just isn't revered. Practical skils are as important to us as academic ones. No farmer ever grew his first crop of peanuts or peaches after getting a Master's Degree in Agriculture -- he has to know the soil first, then he can perhaps grow *better* potatoes. Since all the heavy outdoor work is good for young muscles, often higher education (beyonmd 8th or 10th grade) waits for later in life. No one is looked down upon for lacking an education, even if he also lacks smarts. We can't all be Per Randat (Foldmuvesan inventor from 110 years ago).

Because our livelihood as a nation comes from the soil, Foldmuves is more attentive than some nations to taking care of the soil, water, trees, and air. We have two competing ideas at work -- neither yet preeminent -- one, that what God put in the soil is all one needs to raise proper crops, the other that whatever God put in the minds of men to devise is the right agriculture - the fertilizers, poisions, machines and such. Notably, insect infestations drive people toward the latter view, and industrial-farming accidents like the nitrates (fertilizer) ship that blew up in Hutasi harbor in 2078 drive people toward the former view. If nothing else, the ongoing debate always gives us a topic for conversation.

Foldmuves is a fairly settled society, in that our people like to stick to familiar surroundings. City dwellers exhibit less of this mindset, and some think nothing of picking up the whole family and moving across the country to get a better job. Our Nyugati Islanders are naturally more roving, and make up a disproportionate part of our merchant shipping crews, air pilots, and railwaymen. Some more provincially-minded citizens label them vagabonds, and wouldn't have their daughter marry one, but even they sing the songs the Nugati sailors craft; of billowing sails, and of lonesome railway whistles.

Foldmuves is a nation in the game of Aurora . 

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