I am continually surprised by how completely different life is for people who don’t live in my part of the country. I was shocked-- shocked!-- that nobody knows what a buttered (hard) roll was or what ordering a Jamaican beef patty with cheese at a pizzeria will get you. Or that you can order a Jamaican beef patty with cheese at a pizzeria. Or what a Jamaican beef patty is. Or what a real pizzeria is.
But all that is food related and food is personal and regional. Today, however, a co-worker, newly arrived from Detroit, looked out of his window into the Roosevelt Field (a very large mall) parking lot and exclaimed, 'Is that a HORSE!? Look! A HORSE!!!"
We all went running to see expecting, oh, I don’t know, a horse being drawn and quartered. Or maybe being hung or driving a car. What we saw? A mounted policeman. Surely all big cities have mounted police? How do they control rioters without them?
Have you been surprised by what out-of-towners find extrodinary where you are?
I don’t think it’s necessarily specific cities but peoples patterns.
I love horses but it’s probably been a year or so since I’ve seen one in the flesh. I work too far north of the regular patrol zone of our mounted police for them to be regular visitors and I live in an urban neighborhood where even the old houses with huge yards are less than .25 acre. I don’t think I’d be quite as excited as your coworker but it might depend on how silly I was feeling that day or how in need of a break
When I was a child of perhaps six my teenaged cousins from Philadelphia came down here and we took them to the family reunion. I will never forget how every goddamned five minutes they’d be all “LOOK, ZSOFIA! COWS!” Like, are they six legged cows? Are they talking cows? No, they’re JUST COWS.
Huh. While Minneapolis or St. Paul may have mounted police, they’re certainly not a regular sight. I may have seen one, a good while ago. It’s just not really practical for the city to maintain horses around here - they could only be used maybe 8 months out of the year. And we’re not really known for our riots, either, so it’s possible there’s just no need.
Did he live and work in downtown Detroit where he might occasionally encounter a mounted officer? Or was he from a Detroit suburb, where those things just aren’t seen?
They can have some. And there are some parts where squirrels are considered food, which may squick others.
At the start of the Afghanistan War, many were bemused that the US was sending at least one honest cavalry unit.
Likewise, we had a houseguest from Spain who was (mildly) surprised to notice that we would sometimes get rabbits in our backyard. His comment: “In Spain, that would be lunch in about five minutes.”
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Huh. While Minneapolis or St. Paul may have mounted police, they’re certainly not a regular sight. I may have seen one, a good while ago. It’s just not really practical for the city to maintain horses around here…
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IIRC, most people downtown are in the Skyway, which probably isn’t too amenable to mounted patrols.
I spent most of my life in Chicago or the close in suburbs. I was a little freaked out when my parents took us to Colorado to visit some friends of theirs on a farm and we actually got to pick corn.
My sister and her family came to visit years ago during the last week of August. My nieces were amazed that students in our area start school before Labor Day. They thought it was very amusing until I pointed out that kids from our area could visit where they lived and be amazed that they were still in school a week after the this-area kids had gotten out.
