Confusion

While in England, I was having a few pints with some of the UK Navy guys. There was five of sitting together, swapping stories about where we had been, the action we had been in, what our favorite ports to visit were, how proud we were to serve our Nations Navy, the normal banter of warriors in their early 20's. After we had tossed a few down, the conversation turned to where we had come from. I told the group about upstate New York, how the whole state was not one big NYC. I talked of the ADK and growing up on the shores of one of the Great Lakes. I then listened to the others tell me that they were from Scotland, North Ireland, Wales, and England. Talking about the same things, the city and countryside. Although each one of them was from inside the UK, they all had pride in what country they came from. Strong pride that almost resulted in a fisticuffs. They explained it as while they were all British, only one was an Englishman, one Scot, one Welsh, one Irish (who was not seen as such by those not from the North). Sara Ceraso's post about confusion got me thinking about the problem of location and how it pertains to the questions of our class. North-Easterners, such as ourselves probably have mindsets as to how Southern people are, or the West Coast dwellers compared to the Plains. So even differences of geography could have a large impact on how we look at Race and Ethnic backgrounds. I'm intrested to see if anyone else has had thoughts along this line or if we are more focused on the country as a whole, and should we look at it by geography, and maybe even on a Rural-Urban comparison?