Posted on 09/19/2011 9:38:22 AM PDT by Senator Goldwater
Watching This show is like watching a horrible trainwreck. I couldn't tear my eyes away. Oh, my...
Beat me by THIIS much! “Eye-opening and jaw-dropping” is putting it mildly...
btw, 'tis a tad pearl now.
Ha! I see myself in that description, thanks!
Roma gypsies are ‘real’ gypsies, and well respected by the British people, even romanticised. They have been here for 500 years, and have their roots in Middle Europe.
These people are travellers who use gypsy as a cover, they are about as ‘real’ gypsy as eating a Chinese takeaway makes you and I Oriental.
Thnaks very much.
LOL! Yes, indeed. One of the few things that twit ever said that was correct.
My husband kept asking my why I was watching the program. “Because I’m waiting to see what they’ll put on next!” was my excuse. I thought it was very interesting. I wish that they’d do one about the US Travellers who seem to be cetered in South Carolina. A lot of the are named Murphy, I think.
We had a group stop at my door the other day offering to repave my driveway (which sorely needs it) for $2 a square foot because the contractor had “too much asphalt on his truck right now.” He vanished when my husband asked for a bid in writing. I told my husband to ask his name, and if it was anything like Murphy to call the police.
Yes I’ve seen that show - I referenced it in an earlier post but didn’t post a link - thanks for that link
Point taken. I do recall from the tv series they do not have bathroom facilities inside their small trailers either - so all those families are using (or most of them) some kind of communal bathroom.
Great story!
There are colonies of travellers in South Carolina and North Carolina. As a previous poster said, their homes are quite lavish, generally owned outright, and built of the finest materials gleaned by over buying for the contracting jobs they do around the US. They skim the best for themselves and substitute cheap materials for the job they are doing for someone else.
They live in the South for the winter, but they earn their livings travelling the US and picking up odd jobs (usually on a rush basis after a disaster).
You may remember the case about 5 years ago of the lady in the mall shopping with her little girl in Indianapolis. Other shoppers notice that the mom was treating her daughter rough and beating the bejabbers out of her in the car. apparently they were professional shoplifters and the little girl wasn’t doing it properly. While all attention was focussed on the little girl getting the day lights knocked out of her, the mom’s friends moved in and did further damage to the store’s inventory.
How can you spot the difference between a tinker and just a typical American lowlife? This is all news to me! Fascinating.
Wasn’t Brad Pitt excellent in that movie?
Man he made me laugh. With that unintelligible accent, the constantly scheming look about him and of course the strength of ten mules.
You couldn’t tell if he was too fabulously strong to suffer a beating or just to flat-a$$ dumb!
I don’t know how to tell the difference, unless you know their names and their backgrounds as buusinessmen. I don’t suppose they are on Angie’s list because they don’t seem to do business in the same area twice. They often follow natural disasters and try to pick up work.
Their enclaves (in the US) are interesting to me because outsiders are definitely not welcome there. I’m told that there are no street signs, or house numbers — further to confuse outsiders. I’ll have to ask my son. He lives in SC and knows a little about them. He says they have their own priests. (Most of them are Catholic. I guess they don’t take that “Thou shalt not steal” part very seriously.)
Someone else on this board mentioned the shoplifting scam with the little girl and reported that they pulled that same caper several places in Indiana. It’s hard to remember, but I think the child was eventually returned to her mother.
pikey
From the English “turnpike”, the place where itinerent travellers and thieves would camp near a settlement.
Pikey is not a racial group, the term is used to describe anyone who lives in a caravan or shares the same values and “culture” of “the travelling community”, and whose main sources of income are as follows:
Stealing cars, flogging roses in pubs for “childrens’ charities”, nicking lead off roofs, burgling garden sheds, blagging entry to old peoples house to rob them, doing dodgy tarmac jobs (”we've got some black stuff left over from a job up the road”), sometimes with mint imperials used as a substitute for white chippings, or, reportedly, using snow to lay slabs on when the sand ran out, stealing your bollocks if they weren't in a bag and anything else that's not nailed down and anything that is nailed down but will fit in the back of an untaxed Transit when nobody’s looking.
Truly fascinating - if awful. Thanks for the update. I’ll google around.
This delightful house has a double garage at each end.
The many gables and window style are typical of the architecture chosen by these Travellers.
To tell the truth, these houses don't look much different from the houses being built in my town in Wisconsin. I suppose the difference is that they are generally built for cash and carry no mortgages and the streets have no names, making it difficult for outsiders to locate people. Outsiders are not welcome, anyway.
Thanks so much for posting these pics! This has been a really interesting lesson for me - people who live in McMansions without addresses or streets names. Only in America! Or, maybe I should say: only in South Carolina, lol.
Cheers!
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