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Comment by IvyMike | Hacker News Reader

I haven't travelled overseas for a half a decade, but I used to get ahead of some questions by introducing myself with "I'm from California" rather than "I'm from America".

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I suppose people know California. But I wouldn't expect people to know many other states and suspect it might be interpreted as self-centered ("everyone must know where Missouri is").

When I tell people in the UK that I live in New Mexico, they ask me how life in Mexico is these days, what with the cartels and so forth.

The Salamancas and Hermanos are regrouping.

Better call Saul.

… Well, how is life in Mexico these days, what with the cartels and so forth?

I would say "I live in New Mexico, which is in the southwest US between Texas and Arizona."

It helped that I lived in Santa Fe which, (unlike where your bio implies you live), is a pretty-well recognized US place name in Europe.

One Swedish taxi driver was a fan of Louis L'Amour, and many others know about it through other westerns. An English hotel clerk, base on its reputation, guessed the population was 200K-300K (it was 65K then, 90K now).

https://www.newmexicomagazine.org/culture/one-of-our-50-is-m...

Unfortunately that just makes you more stereotypically American. Other people usually don't expect everybody to know all of their federated states.

I wouldn't try it for most other states, but in my experience they usually know California, and if they do know it, they tend to have positive feelings towards it.

In Vietnam, they just called me Mr. Dollar.

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