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Culture
■A San Francisco cable car
San Francisco, California is a major and diverse international center of culture in terms of arts, music, festivals, museums, architecture and much more. San Francisco’s diversity of cultures along with its eccentricities are so great that they have greatly influenced the country and the world at large over the years. This was parodied in the South Park episode “Smug Alert”, which criticised various aspects of San Francisco culture, such as the environmentalist movement reaching a quasi-religion status, the perception of the South Park creators that the inhabitants have a disdain for anyone not as progressive as them, the tendency to aspire to a European lifestyle (as evidenced by the high use of public transport, the relatively large proportion of houses to apartments in comparison to other American cities, the café culture, the prominence of wine and cheese stores) etc.