We had some of our family from Detroit come up to Toronto this weekend for a little family get together.

Instead of just having the family dinner, we decided to have a little tour of Toronto first, with a boat cruise of the Toronto Harbour.

Anyway the tour guide is asking everyone where they are from, and sure enough the Detroit people never say Detroit. Instead they list the suburb they are from. So my cousin goes "Washington Township, Michigan" and the tour guides face was funny, because he just totally blanked out trying to figure out where in the world Washington Township is. Then my cousin says "it is a suburb of Detroit" and then the tour guide got where it was.

This seems to be a Detroit thing. I used to deal with tourists at one of my jobs, and suburban Detroiter's are one of the only ones I find that don't list the host city as where they are from when visiting another place.

It is an interesting little quirk and I was not expecting it from my cousins, as they always call everything Detroit when we talk with them or they talk about home, etc.

My urban planning friend who came along for the cruise was laughing, because even he has picked up on the Metro Detroit quirk of using your suburb name instead of Detroit to tell people where you are from.