I'm more reminded of this personally:

https://www.google.at/search?site=&...mexican+villa&*

@Orphalesion
You know Tuscany is in Italy, right?

Yes, where did I indicate otherwise?

I just thought that, personally the Monty house reminded me more of a Mexican Villa, so I linked a goodle search for "Mexcian Villa"

The only thing I used chopsticks for was crafting, using them to push stuffing into small small fingers, toes and other areas that were tough to get enough stuffing into them. Smart phone? Never bothered with it, I just keep using my stupid phone. The days of cooking bacon are gone . . so is the bacon, now that I think of it. I remember when bacon was strips of meat with bits of fat, now it's fat with tiny bits of meat. Cooking utensils used to be wooden spoons, now they're plastic. I have two plastics ones with very long handles, one makes a great shoe horn, the other is useful as a back scratcher, the shorter ones are used to stir food in pots. My mailbox is a home for the occasional spider and web, the flag is put in the upright position when I have outgoing mail needing to be picked up. I would rather watch a good horror movie than listen to the news caster, it's less scary. (:

It is Hugh Jackman. That was an April Fools joke.

Oh, this was what I saw when I clicked your link:

Tuscany, not Mexico!

Weird, when I click it produces Mexican Villas.

Must have been because I used the link RoxEllens' link and just typed "Mexican Villa" before simply putting it into.

Anyway, here have the proper link:

https://www.google.at/search?q=Mexi...iw=1920&bih=946

A simple click could have told you that there was an accident and for some reason both my and RocEllens' links led to identical pages.

Ah, a 'simple click' told me that Rox's led to 'rural italy' and yours to 'Tuscany' which was why I thought you were mistaken. But I see what you mean about the similarities- some of those images do remind me of the Veronaville villas.

That makes a little more sense. Still I think you can't even get into University here without declaring a major. We also do not have to take extra classes but we also have a different school system which already differentiates who is allowed to go to University and who is not (as far as I know - and I may be wrong - High School is for everyone in the States, isn't it?). I heard about your college fees. Holy shit they are very high in comparison. I pay 420€ per semester (and my university is already really expensive) which includes also a ticket for the train for the whole federal state and for busses and tram in the city where I study. Furthermore I pay for additional book maybe like up to 50-100€ in total. Most stuff is online by default.


Joint honours...that sounds better than "Fächerübergreifender Bachelor" to be honest And the bachelor and master thing is kind of twisted for me. I'm actually going to write my bachelor thesis this semester BUT I had to apply for the undergraduate course since this was what I was studying when I applied...yeah very flexible system I know. So I have to see if and which undergraduate courses I can take for my master degree or if the whole semester is for nothing but the certificate that I spend more than three months in an English speaking country. I also hope that I can study history at the same time because I would love to learn more about British History since most classes are very focussed on Germany here. I think I had only one class that was about another country and that was Italy under Mussolini's rule.

Wait...there are places where it isn't? /Canadian here

No, in Germany we have a three school system but it has become rather of two school system in the last years. The first four years all children are together and learn the basic skills of reading, writing, math and other stuff then depending on your grades you get a recommondation whether to go to Hauptschule (basic 9 year education, very bad connotation to it and low chances of finding a good job in recent years), Realschule (basic 10 year education, has seen better years but you can still get quite good jobs with it) and Gymnasium [no it does not mean the same as the English word] which is equal to Highschool since you get 12 or 13 years (depends on the federal state and when you got into school. I had the bad luck of having to do only 12 years. This was reversed after only 6 oder 7 years by my federal state) of education.
If you finish the Gymnasium, you have the Abitur or Matura (Austria) which is basically your highschool diploma. With that you are allowed to study at universities all over the world. If you had not the luck, the support or were just not that bright, there are still ways to get into university and earning a higher degree.
1. You can make your Abitur later. This is mostly only possible if you had a good diploma but I myself would have to look it up.
2. You can make a specific Abitur diploma. This enables you to study subjects with the same specification but not all subjects. If you have done a social Abitur, you can not study law with it.
3. This is rare but possible. You are trained in your job and want to study something related to it. If you have enough experience and have worked for some years, most universities give you the chance to study.

During the years of education it is always possible to go up or down if your grades are good enough or you are so bad that even a repetition of this certain year will most likely not help you get along. But it happens not that often which is kind of sad. Furthermore most federal states allow the parents to decide to which school their child will go.
Due to this there are now mostly Oberschulen, as fusion between Realschulen and Hauptschulen, since parents want their children to go to the Gymnasium, even if they are not up up to it. If you are not a fan of this system there is still the possibility to send your child to a Gesamtschule which is basically close to the system nearly every other country has. Everyone learns together from 1st to 10th grad but with classes differentiating between weak and strong pupils. After 10th grade you can leave school with the Realschule diploma or you can continue to do your Abitur.

I hope my explanation were not too weird to understand. I guess you have to have run through the system to fully grasp it Thank god wikipedia also has an article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Germany

Here in Australia we have primary school grades, prep to 6 then highschool is grades 7 to 12. Use to be grade 8 up was highschool but some 'bright spark' decided it would be great to toss those little kids in, maybe they didn't think they got bullied enough? In the US 'high school' means the last couple of years.

Our primary schools tend to be small buildings, plenty of open space, open eating or eating areas under tress. Most places don't have one large building or tons of concrete like I see in the US.

In New Zealand kids start school at age 5 then go to primary school until about the age of 10 or 12. Some places have intermediate schools for 10-12 year olds. Don't ask me why they're separated - perhaps to prepare them for high school which is from age of 13 to about 17.

Oh forgot to add, us Southern hemisphere people have school years running from late January to early December, never understood why the UK and US start in September.

Long summer break. Terms start after summer.

Yeah I know, but it still seems strange to be saying 'the start of the year' when it's really 3/4 through the year.

Yeah I know.

I think it's to do with where harvest time falls in the year - don't quote me though. The long summer holiday we have (July-August) is definitely to do with that - when poorer families couldn't afford to have a family member away from the fields getting the crops in. Irrelvent these days, of course, but the pattern has stuck. My diaries are always academic diaries and run from September to August,

It all depends on the area. In the southern U.S., summer vacation often runs from May to August. Which gives families the opportunity to travel and kids to spend the days playing outside when it's nice out.

IME, each town has the opportunity to split up their grades differently. In my town, it's kindergarten (five years old) to fourth grade, in elementary school, then fifth-eighth grade in middle school, then ninth - twelfth in high school. But the next town over is very small, and so all the kids go to one large K-12 school.

At least in the U.S., it appears that the harvest explanation for summer vacation is largely mythical.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates...ummer-vacation/

A new term starts here between late July and beginning of September. Not only our school system is crazy but also the ones for the holiday since education is the responsibility of the federal states. Except for Bavaria and another federal state of which I do not know the English name the states rotate every two years who starts early into the 6 week summer holiday and who starts late.
As far as I know this has to do - as others have explained for their countries - with the harvesting season in the past decades. We also have two weeks of holidays in the fall which result from these old traditions. I actually never really questioned that my school years began in August/September and ended in June/July.
But I think every country also has different times/months for their university semesters.

In the US, there is a program in many places called Headstart, most often for poorer kids, disabled or younger kids from large families and usually cost free, this is for kids 3-4 and sometimes they include kindergarten which is usually 5 years old. There are also Nursery schools, usually paid by parents, which are the same ages as Headstart, sometimes with kindergarten. Primary can include kindergarten to 6th. Depending on where you live, Junior high can be grades 6-8, 6-9, 7-8 or 7-9, while High school is usually grades 10-12 or 9-12. Where I grew up, we actually had 2 extra schools, one was for 5th grade, the other for 6th. These were in small, old schools with about 6 or 8 classrooms in each and helped to alleviate over crowding in the other schools. School usually started in September, ended in June. This also depending on which state you lived in. (:

I wonder if you inherited it from us then - probably. British summer time is also a thing for the same reason for us.

In the US there is also a thing called "Child Find" (this of course could be just in Florida) but children that are 3 years of age, with learning disabilities and physical disabilities are referred by Doctors and/or nurses to Child Find. Child Find places them in the Public School that teaches them for their special needs. I had 2 children out of 3 referred this way. My youngest daughter just had a learning disability and started school when she was 3 and by the time she was in the second grade (5 years later) worked her way out of these classes. She started going to the local school with her older sister. My son, however, had physical disabilities and Learning disabilities. Child Find placed him in a Public School for his special needs. He went to this school until he was 21 years old (average student graduates at 18) and Graduated.

As for why school starts in the US in September, it is actually due to the Harvest time and children were needed at home instead of school. There are a lot of sites that verify this here https://www.google.com/webhp?source...+in+september&*

But that is for most harvest time. I do know my family moved to New York to my Great Uncle's grape vineyard when I was in the 6th and 7th grade. I do remember picking grapes when it was cold and I had a coat and gloves on. I googled and harvest time for grapes in New York is around September. Students here in Florida start school at the same time as their counterparts up north but get out of school 2 weeks earlier. The reason being students are required to be in school so many hours or days in school and the north has what is called "Snow Days" (where it snows and is unsafe for vehicles to travel on roads) and since it don't snow in Florida, we don't get those days. So Florida students' summer starts 2 weeks earlier.

As for the topic: Just like everyone else my hoods are based on what my town is like. And since I live in the US, we have a lot of different cultures. But just like my city, my sims assimilate to the culture that they move to. Just like my city, I have different hoods for different cultures. The houses are built pretty much the American style but I do have loads of cc so the different cultures decorate their homes different.

One thing to remember about Sims University is that it's not based on the current high-stress, high-cost environment, but is an idealized version of the way it used to be. College tuition fees have gone up at an unbelievable rate over the last twenty years or so, while scholarships and grant money has dried up and student loans have become the basis of the school economy. This at the same time that school accreditation got laxer - places that aren't even good trade schools can call themselves universities now.

Costs were starting to go up when I was in college, and the student loan scam hadn't really started rolling. I had some loans, but my mom and I between us paid them off in under five years, none of this nonsense about starting life with a 30-year mortgage on it already. College was a relaxed place, where you got used to your adult freedom, experimented a lot, found your intellectual peers, and were not under high pressure all the time unless you were preparing for the hardest career tracks or attending one of the more competitive schools; law and medical degrees at Ivy League schools were the worst for external stress. Even work-study programs, where you offset your tuition by doing clerical work for the school, were low-stress, because everybody was taking classes that changed every semester - even most of the regular salaried employees were working on some level of degree or other - and as long as you go the work done everybody was flexible about how and when. I didn't have anything like as easy a time in college as my sims do, but like them I don't remember classes so much as I remember learning constantly, playing D&D, learning that I didn't like to drink, Roommate Drama, unlimited library time (I still use those university libraries when I'm in research mode), and something going on any time you wanted to get out of the dorm - film screenings (everything from Le Chien Andalou to Star Trek), live music, drama club presentations, open guest lectures, sports if you're into that sort of thing, art showings, frisbee competitions, whatever. The swimming pool was always open (okay, technically not quite true; but there was no security. I knew a professor who openly climbed the fence to swim before it was open every morning). Anyone could run on the stadium track or use the tennis courts if no actual competition was going on. And yeah, you didn't have much money; but you didn't need much, either. When you enrolled you chose a food plan and paid dorm fees, or rent if you lived off campus, up front. Most campus venues were free or dirt cheap or you knew somebody who worked there and could get you in. That's the kind of atmosphere the Sims university system evokes well.

As for majors - you could declare a major, or change it, at any point in the process. Every school has different basic requirements. If you've already mastered the material covered in one of the basic courses you could "test out" of it - basically you take the final for a class before the school year starts and if you pass, bingo, no Freshman Comp for you. I don't know anybody who was able to test out of everything in every category. I was stuck taking a math course, and couldn't test out of the science requirement - but that was okay, as I was able to take some Psych and Anthropology courses to make up for my poor grounding in Chemistry and Bio. Most colleges also have "elective requirements" where you're required to take something that isn't required for anything. (It's broadening, y'know.) Most people with undeclared majors spend a semester or two taking the basic courses they couldn't test out of and using electives to help them figure out what they really want, or just to take a flier at something they're curious about.

And you can change your major as often as you like, and take as long about graduating as you need to, so back in my day we still had "perpetual students," people who managed to keep going to school indefinitely by either changing majors and having to go back and meet new requirements, or by undertaking prolonged graduate work. I don't think anybody but the super-rich can do this any more, but as long as you could pay your fees you could keep taking courses - it was nobody's business to stop you. If you kept this sort of thing up into your thirties without developing a core profession (every department has graduate students in their late twenties or early thirties who are essentially interns, know their particular department inside out, and are living on grant money, which is perfectly respectable) you'd become a bit of a joke, but if learning's what you're good at and you can keep the scholarships coming, why not milk it for as long as you can, right? That should be a custom career, good for Knowledge sims looking to max all skills.

According to the link, for the U.S. it's because:

This is all so far afield of the original topic, but it's really interesting.