In the late 70s, I moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to Boise, Idaho.
So… yeah.
I’ll just say the experience caused me to promise myself to never again choose to live in an intolerant place. I made a life for myself there for a couple of years, and again in a couple other intolerant places, but when I got to choose where to live, I headed straight back to the West Coast.
I moved from Bristol, TN, where I grew up, to Brooklyn NY at 29. I dated more the first couple of years there than I had in 13 years of being “dating age” before. I met Ms. P right at the two year point, and we were married less than a year later.
I didn’t find Brooklynites unfriendly at all; I loved being recognized by bodega, bagel store, and pizzeria employees. I never had anyone in the South tell me I could pay later when I only had a twenty and they were short on change. This happened multiple times in Brooklyn.
The two summers that I worked in Quebec City as a student presented a stark contrast to Toronto. I obviously expected that everyone would speak French. But it went further than that. No Canadian flags flying anywhere (but a fair number of provincial flags). Little if any “multiculturalism” anywhere. I met a local nationalist who ran across the main street in the old town when he saw a young man or woman putting up a poster with some English writing on it yelling at them and threatening to report them to the language commission, and who once told me that he hated the Queen and would kill her if he were not Catholic. On an, err…different note, there were more people sitting outside on the streets by cafes, etc. And there seemed to be far fewer fast food restaurants, mainly a local chain called Chez Ashton. Even the food court at the main shopping mall in the suburb of Sainte-Foy had relatively few pickings (on the other hand there was an enormous supermarket with a giant selection of goods). In short, it felt like I was in another country.
A cousin of mine moved to Sandpoint, Idaho for a teaching job. My brother and I went to visit him and do some fishing last month. I have never seen a place like that area. Open racism, homophobia, and hate for the Democratic Party. Combine that with a very low vaccination rate in a place where no one wears masks, I don’t think I could live there.
Yeah, and this isn’t new. My parents retired to AZ in the early 70s, and I was taken aback b y the people sitting in places like Outback Steakhouse with a gun on their hip when I visited. I found it really off-putting.
You have to say “Democrat Party” if you want to fit in.
It is generally better to know who has a gun on them, by seeing an open carry. Many of the others will be carrying where you can’t tell.
Alaska to Oregon. Completely different cultures for the most part, especially politically.
I moved from an English speaking province to a French speaking province. I had studied French for ten years with high grades. Subsequent testing in the French province rated my initial abilities as “intermediate to advanced”. To my surprise, it was a major challenge and took a lot of work, several French friends and roommates and additional courses to understand it well. The French taught in Ontario at that time did not hint at the existence of slang, phrases unique to Quebec (or Acadie, Louisiana, many countries), how spoken French can greatly differ from written French or other things they should have really touched on in some detail. I hope things have improved - but I doubt it. There was and is resistance to the idea of teaching popular French due to the idea it is perceived as less prestigious, classy or educated - which is silly if you need to understand it.
Graduate school in Bloomington, IN was quite a culture shock after undergrad at NYU. At NYU, what was then called the Gay and Lesbian Union was the largest campus organization (I know it’s a stereotype, but they did throw the BEST parties!). When I arrived on campus at IU Bloomington, there was a giant to-do because the university allocated like $50k for an organization to support gay and lesbian students, basically enough for one staff position and a phone line. The state legislature, in retaliation, cut off $500k in funding to the university, and there were straight kiss-ins in front of the Registrar’s Office.
I grew up as a native English speaker in the Chicago area, but I basically felt like a Martian on that campus. I can’t imagine how the international students dealt with it.
‘Smoke-o’. Builders don’t take coffee breaks.
I worked for a beer company a long time ago. Before the factory went dry, it was beer break (in the local nomenclature, ‘beer-o’) at about 10:15 every day.
My Australian-American relative lived in Seattle for a while. He said that Seattle was relatively familiar, but that the South was a foreign country of foreigners.
I also have a friendliness of people in a new place story. I was born and raised in New Jersey and then I moved to Atlanta for law school. People were so strangely friendly here that I decided to stay and have been here ever since.
My own state. I live in Northern Virginia, in a close-in suburb of Washington, D.C. We are a world away from the southern and southwestern parts of the state, where you are knocking on the door of the Deep South. You won’t see confederate battle flags up here.
The politics are also much different. This causes consternation for the conservative minority because they take up so much real estate but the population density is very high in the northern counties, which tend to be more liberal.
In 1983, when I went off to college, going from Green Bay, Wisconsin to Madison, Wisconsin.
It was only a move of about 140 miles, and in the same state, but worlds apart. Green Bay, at that time, had very few people of color (some Native Americans, and some Hmong refugees who had settled in the area a few years earlier), but that was about it. It was (and, really, still is) a conservative, blue-collar town, that revolves around the Packers, hunting, and fishing.
Madison, on the other hand, was ultra-liberal, and more diverse. It was the first time I’d ever really met openly gay people, the first time I really interacted with African Americans, and the first time I saw open drug use. It all blew my small-town mind.
I moved from Illinois to SW Louisiana, after having grown up in NY and going to school in Cambridge. My new wife moved the next year. Big culture shock. I was protected by being in grad school with a bunch of other Northerners, but she worked in a vegetable cannery where all the women who worked for her spoke French and the first plant meeting she went to had a long agenda item about where she would go to the bathroom, since she was the first female executive they ever had.
Cajuns are a lot more easy-going than most, though older buildings had two water fountains and two sets of bathrooms. Still, when I graduated and we moved to NJ, seeing Black people in restaurants made me realize that this was not a thing in Louisiana.
Plus, when my wife tried to get a check cashing card at the grocery she found she needed my permission though she made most of the money. They still had a “head and master” law, where the man was head and master of the household.
“Where the laws are medieval.”
This happened to my older brother and sister sometime before I was born, probably late 1950’s. They were living somewhere in Kansas. My dad had a black coworker who had kids about the same age as my sibs and they all played together. When they moved to Tennessee they were told they shouldn’t play with black kids anymore.
One of the first times I saw Roseann Barr on TV – long before her movies or her TV show – she was doing standup, and I listened to her telling a joke about a family that had defected to the United States from the Soviet Union, where they had no freedom of thought, freedom or religion, or freedom of expression “so they placed them in Salt Lake City, so they wouldn’t suffer culture shock.”
The audience didn’t quite get it, and was pretty quiet, but in my Salt Lake City apartment I was laughing very heartily.
Roseanne was born and raised in Salt Lake, and she had worked at the Golden Corral restaurant only a couple of blocks from where I sat. She used to make snide remarks about the food to the customers, who didn’t always get it.
I don’t mean to put down Salt Lake – a city I loved – but I clould see where she was coming from. SLC is the center of the LDS faith (Mormons), and they do have a conformist and conservative and moralist streak that moves them shut down stripper bars and to censor movies and TV shows even on PBS affiliates. There was a company in Provo that took movies and edited them to cut out the objectionable parts and re-sold them, until the studios made them stop. Utah tried to pass a law forbidding the showing of R-rated movies on pay cable channels (for which you had to purchase the privilege of watching them).
It did take a little getting used to. On top of all that, there was a sort of time warp vibe. Teenagers still cruised Main Street on weekend nights. There was a very 1960s Head Shop next to the Art Movie house. There was a hug billboard for Muzak. And, of course, there’s the pervasive LDS culture of green punch, Snelgrove’s Ice Cream, and no Coke machines on campus. The lone coffee shop downtown stood out like a sore thumb. There was nothing stronger than 3.2 beer in the bars. For anything stronger, you had to join a “private club” and get served out of splits and mini-bottles. There were only two liquor stores in town.
I got only a mild case of culture shop. The othrer aspects more than made up for the minor weirdness. But the differences were made particularly manifest one day when I took a trip to New Orleans, going not only from cold Utah winter to hot sultry Bid Easy, from 3.2 beer and strippers who couldn’t peel down to less than a two-piece to hurricane drinks that you could take out onto the street (!) and strippers who peeled all the way – and went after you if you didn’t tip enough. From the Eagle Gate on Main Street to the sex shops on Bourbon Street.
I made the opposite sort of trip, leaving Madison for Rome, Georgia. Oh, my. Someone upthread said Georgia was friendly. Not my experience. I was a yankee and suspected of being lib-url. Rome was a very small town. It was a long 2 years. Have to admit, one good thing: it didn’t snow in Georgia.
About 15 years ago my conference was thinking of going to SLC, and we got the full treatment at the Convention Center. The CVB film had more drinking in it than any CVB film I ever saw. You still had to join a club to drink, but the martini bar we went to had the membership at about $1 for 10 guests.
We didn’t choose to go there but I went to another show there where they served Jello for dessert.
Convention & Visitors Bureau