DBWI: Favorite Part of the UK?

JJohnson

Banned
It's a series of islands, but the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland is a land full of rich history. My question to you all is, which part is your favorite that you have visited, want to visit, or just plain like best?

Lots to choose from:

Ireland: five provinces (Connacht, Leinster, Munster, Meath, and Ulster), 32 counties, capital of Dublin; a Gaeltacht of most of Munster and Connacht (about 35-40%, helped a lot by the very early Protestant Irish Bible in the early 16th century, the Plantations, and the late 19th century devolved Parliament)

Scotland: 32 shires, capital of Edinburgh, where the Parliament sits; (Scots Gaelic 980K, Scots 1.54 million)

England: 39 counties, capital at London

Wales: 3 counties, capital of Cardiff (Welsh about 32%)

Azores: 9 shires; capital of Saint George (OTL Ponta Delgada)

Guiana: 10 shires; capital of Georgetown; launch area for the British Space Program

Territories: Providence Islands (Saint Andrew); Turks and Caicos Islands; Anguilla; Cayman Islands; British Indian Ocean Territory; Saint Helena, Ascension, and Tristan da Cunha; Calais (regained after WW2); Barbados; Antigua and Barbuda; Dominica; Saint Christopher-Nevis; Grenada; Saint Lucia; Saint Vincent and the Grenadines; Falkland Islands; Gibraltar; Montserrat; Phoenix Islands; Cook Islands; Fiji; Guilbert and Ellice Islands; Tonga; Union Islands (Tokelau); Niue; New Hebrides; Pitcairn Islands; Papua

(You can see why the Pacific is often called 'the British lake')

And there are a few former parts of the UK, I'll throw in former colonies that are part of the Commonwealth of Nations:

Australia
New Zealand
New Caledonia
South Africa
Kenya
Northern and Southern Rhodesia
Sierra Leone (in the 19th century, a freedmen colony)
India
Bangladesh
Belize (which has a large jungle called the Peten Rainforest)
Brunei
Canada (with its capital in Bonnaire)
Fiji
Ghana
Jamaica, Lesotho, Kiribati, Malawi, Malaysia, Malta, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Rwanda, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Tonga, Tuvalu, Uganda.

And we can't forget the USA, not a member of the Commonwealth of Nations or anything, but heck, it has 76 states, so it deserves a mention.
 
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All those states are the lasting imperialist legacy of the twin tyrants, Jack Space and Eustace Filling - the two most evil men ever to hold the US presidency and the UK prime ministership respectively. (I'm from Hochelaga in Canada - not the US, it's Canada, damn you - but I've lived in Calais, so it's probably the best if you can overlook the imperialism.)

Of course now my favourite place is Kerguelen, the only neutral place left in the western world after the hack job the Space-Filling era did on freedom and national sovereignty. There may be only ten thousand of us, but damned if we aren't free.
 
All those states are the lasting imperialist legacy of the twin tyrants, Jack Space and Eustace Filling - the two most evil men ever to hold the US presidency and the UK prime ministership respectively. (I'm from Hochelaga in Canada - not the US, it's Canada, damn you - but I've lived in Calais, so it's probably the best if you can overlook the imperialism.)

Of course now my favourite place is Kerguelen, the only neutral place left in the western world after the hack job the Space-Filling era did on freedom and national sovereignty. There may be only ten thousand of us, but damned if we aren't free.

OOC: Lulz, bro.

IC: Ah, the old "Space & Filling" joke from Saturday Night Laughs, but with a twist. That one never gets old. :p
 

JJohnson

Banned
Calais? I've never been, except going from Paris to London through the Chunnel. Though that took a lot for the Brits to get over France's role in WW2 to build that. The press was horrible. I don't remember too much, since I was still in middle/high school when it was debated and built.
 
Calais? I've never been, except going from Paris to London through the Chunnel. Though that took a lot for the Brits to get over France's role in WW2 to build that. The press was horrible. I don't remember too much, since I was still in middle/high school when it was debated and built.

Yeah, but considering what the Toulon Pact did in WW2-I mean, they weren't quite as gobsmackingly awful as, say, the Nazis from Robert Turtledove's 50 Stars classic ATL, but still, though, France's mass expulsions of Ashkenazi Jews & ethnic Germans? Italy's treatment of the Serbs and Bosnians? And what Spain did to Egypt? All completely awful, and I can understand why some older Brits in particular felt so angry about it, as they received a rather large number of refugees from those countries and heard more of the horror stories, earlier.
 

JJohnson

Banned
Indeed. The French seems to have turned around for the most part, after the de-degaul-ization after WW2. My girlfriend was in London in February last year, and she was kind of surprised there were so many iPhones there. Maybe 1 in 5 had them. I thought Zune Phones / Windows Phones were really big, now that they integrated with the XBox 4K MS just released last year with the 4K HD-DVD integrated into it. Maybe Apple's decline is reversing over there. Blackberry and Palm still have some followers, but man, Android just can't catch a break...it still looks like a cheap Chinese knock-off OS of iOS.

How's Acorn doing over there? I hear they're trying to give Commodore a run for their money, and ZX is still the best in the UK when it comes to gaming. They're all running Windows 9, true, but they're all pretty unique I heard.
 
Calais (regained after WW2).

Just a technical note: Calais/Callis is now a fully-fledged part of England, not a territory. It's been that way ever since the completion of the Channel Causeway five years ago.

Here's a current map of the provinces in southern England. (Provinces are subdivisions similar to counties but with slightly different administrative roles)

UnitedKingdom.png


As you can see, Callis is now part of the province of Kent (not to be confused with the smaller county of the same name). If you visit Callis or Dunkirk, they just feel like any other English town, and you'd never guess that they used to be French just eighty years ago!

Going back to the Channel Causeway, incidentally it's a very impressive piece of engineering that is definitely worth visiting. Supplies an enormous amount of hydroelectric electricity to the UK, although it's hugely controversial of course.
 
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