1) How much people drank. Now, I have attended and worked at some top party schools, so I am not unfamiliar with drinking. But what I forgot was that Cheeseheads drink all the time. They don't always drink to get drunk... because they drink all the time. It is a huge part of the everyday culture (in Milwaukee, that's a lot of German, Irish, and Polish). But seriously, they drink. A LOT.
2) The accents. Yes, I had a Wisconsin accent. Sometimes it still comes out. Some people would probably say I still have it. But I forgot just how thick the accent can be. All my southern friends who knew me when I first moved south: Remember how thick you thought my accent was? It wasn't. Really.
I met up with an old friend while in Green Bay and a few times I had to control myself from giggling because she and LJ would fall into these Green Bay OH-Yaaaah moments when they were talking about things from back in the day. LJ is a Green Bay native, my other friend, LW, grew up west of GB.
3) I had more problems being vegan in Wisconsin than anywhere else. If I had been in Madison it wouldn't have been an issue because it is the People's Republic of Madison, which means hippies (and socialists and Nazis if you listen to right wing radio folk). But when I went veggie while living in central Wisconsin I ran into people who thought chicken wasn't meat. So trying to explain vegan could be difficult. People were helpful, but I never felt comfortable. And this was the first time in the last year that I felt this way.
I never considered Wisconsin to be incredibly flat. Parts of it, like southwest Wisconsin, have bluffs and valleys and is not flat. Other parts have some nice rolling hills. But after a year in the Pacific Northwest? Wisconsin is flat.
3 comments:
Haha, this cracked me up.
1. That startled me when I moved back from MT, too. It seems like people are casually sipping beers all the time (that makes me picture the opening credits of "King of the Hill," haha)--like you said, not necessarily drinking to get drunk or binging, but it's like a daily/nightly ritual. Like if you go out for supper and don't order a beer, people think you're in AA or something.
2. It wasn't until I moved away that I stopped feeling indignant about the movie "Fargo" and said to myself, "Yeah, we really do sound like that." haha
3. The flatness factor was so hard for me to concede when I lived in Helena--I'd be all, "Oh, no, it's not that flat there, there's hills and ravines!" And yeah, there are, but by comparison...it's flat.
I saw Fargo in between my times in Wisconsin. I was living in NW Illinois after two years in SW Wisconsin. I loved Fargo when I saw it, but the first time I saw it after I moved to central Wisconsin? I almost peed my pants I laughed so hard.
My mom's family are all from Green Bay and as children in Virginia we used to go into fits of hysterical laughter every time one of them would call. Whether it was asking to speak to our mom ("Hiya, this is your Ahnt Sooooo. Can I speak to Snooky?") or inquiring into whether our new "parkas" made us "toasty" we thought they were deliberately sounding funny. Of course, considering we were little Virginians, they must of thought we were a "real hoot" to listen to, too.
Post a Comment