people look at me weird when i say sorry for bumping into them here in hong kong ;-; when i was walking with a local he was like 'yo you don't have to apologize no one expects it' and i'm like. i can't help it, it's ingrained.
I grew up in the upper midwest, on the boundary of the great plains and the northwoods. I guess northwoods technically, but welcome to modern america, it hasn't been the northwoods for a century. The north part is still true. Something you don't realize if you live in what I call the Deep Continental Zone--a place where driving to an ocean in one, even two, days is inconceivable, like in the upper Midwest or in the middle of rural Russia or shit like that--is that your experience is rare for humans, and it is weird. Because there is no large body of water to buffer your weather, the summers are too hot for normal life and the winters too cold. The following is in Fahrenheit, but I would spend several months of every winter solidly below zero, never reaching above, with days as low as -30 and -40 (yes, you're still going to school) and several months of the summer above 80, reaching up to 100 or 110 (yes, you're still going to school, if school is in session. But it probably isn't). This is not a normal habitat, but we have magic boxes that change the air temperature. I knew this was... abnormal, but what I didn't fully realize is that I grew up in one of the sunniest damn spots on earth. There's no ocean, my dudes. There are no mountains. The water is kept in small lakes and the land in plains and small hills. Rain is unusual. A 'rainy season' would constitute a few weeks where it rained more than once, sometimes with a storm lasting more than one day, which was something to only happen a few times a year. But more importantly, if it wasn't raining, it was probably sunny. Sunny days were more common than overcast and rainy days combined. I went to Germany for some schooling, and I was okay with the weather, but it was a little depressing. Overcast days were more common than anything else. Rain would happen often enough, but drizzlingly, not there and gone. And sunny days seemed so rare. A professorin asked the class of foreign students how we were adjusting to the climate at some point, and most people said '???it's cold???' which, for me, it wasn't. Bitch we were ABOVE FREEZING most days. But I admitted that it was very gloomy to me, and that I like to have a lot more sun. Dead silence. It was carefully revealed to me that the Bonn/Koln basin is potentially the sunniest place in Germany, and that many of the students had been ADJUSTING TO the sun. Not the lack of it. I'll see myself out. And to a sunny day on the plains, with the dry grass rustling.
I grew up in Iowa/Missouri/Midwest. - SO MUCH FUCKING CORN. when travelling now and I don't see fields of beans or corn, I still feel a bit disoriented. Because what??? where are the fields??? - riverboats. - fish frys. families don't do this??? in most places??? you don't all hang out around a giant deep fryer and throw catfish into it???? - casseroles. what the fuck. how do people make easy meals??? just throw weird shit into the pan and into the oven it goes - amish. i forget that the amish do not live in the desert or west coast much. i miss seeing them ride around in their buggies. - EVERYTHING CLOSES AT LIKE 7PM, I REALLY LOVED LAS VEGAS CUZ EVERYTHING WAS OPEN ALL NIGHT LIKE FUCK YES. THAT WAS THE BEST CULTURE SHOCK. - My freshman year of high school, there was like less than 1000 people??? there was like no gates or fences for that school so me and my friend just. left. skipping class was super easy lmao. - holy shit there are people??? who don't like. hit you??? if you say positive things about lgbt people??? - WHERE THE FUCK IS THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER??? I HAVE TO ORIENT MYSELF GOD DAMN IT. - cows. god damn it where are the fucking cows. - hunting. not very popular with the people i hang with in the west coast. - PEOPLE DOn"T KNOW WHAT A PORK TENDERLOIN SANDWICH IS AND IT IS THE WORST FEELING GODD AMN I JUST WANT SHITTY DEEP FRIED PORK SANDWICHES DANG IT - no ocean. no mountains. remembering i live near the ocean is really fucking weird. seeing mountains is less weird as i lived in las vegas for like seven years. - things are not sprawled out all over the fucking place??? you don't have to travel seven hours to get to the nearest airport???
IT"S THE GREATEST THING THO??? Fresh fried fish is so incredible also hushpuppies, fries, pasta salads... mmmm.....
It was super easy to skip class in my high school too. You were technically supposed to check in with the receptionist if you weren't a student or faculty, but I don't think they locked the doors during class time. I definitely walked out on at least one pep rally and just went home. My graduating class had 80 students. The whole high school was around 300 people. We were in a small town in Iowa, like 2/3 of the kids lived out in the country and went hunting and drove snowmobiles along the country roads in the winter. The kind of homophobia I experienced wasn't so much antipathy as total apathy. While I was trying to get the Gay-Straight Alliance off the ground, sometimes people tore down my posters but my biggest problem was getting people to care enough to show up to meetings at all. Nobody gave a damn.
yeah i lived in a slightly bigger town in iowa for a while. (i was also born there lmao) but they were a little more "you support this then i'm going to shove you down the fucking stairs" kinda homophobes i moved to las vegas after my freshman year, so i don't know how many were in my graduating class high school in vegas was an Experience. someone ask me about the pepper spray incident at some point
I was from the most south easterly corner you can get. right up on the missouri border and right up against the mississippi river
Whoa, whaaaat? I'm also in the southeast quadrant of the state. I'm in Cedar Rapids! I wasn't out as trans in high school (didn't know I was, just knew I had an unexplained penchant for wearing boxer shorts), but I was out as bisexual. The worst I had to deal with was people asking me stupid and invasive questions and the occasional rumor. I might have been socially ostracized if I weren't already pretty isolated due to sperg and other stuff. The one out gay dude in our school got stuff thrown at him during lunch, though. He'd come from a larger, more progressive city high school, so it was rough for him. This was in 2008 or '09.
I'm from Western Washington and I took a trip over to Eastern Washington one time and it was Weird to not see trees everywhere. It was all grass and hills and wind turbines and Way Too Much Sky. I was only there for a like a day and a half but it was mildly unsettling.
My dad worked in Cedar Rapids for a while! I was born in Keokuk, which is... super small and out of the way and also dying because it's mostly just old people now. Pretty cool to know someone from the same area though!
I just dropped by one of the threads in general advice, and apparently theres places youre not required to get driving lessons in a driving school to be allowed to drive? did i understand that right? what (here in germany you have mandatory driving practice and mandatory theoretical schooling, and exams on both to get your drivers license and only then youre allowed to drive, and if you get caught without a license youre in p big trouble)
The United States is one! You have to pass a written exam and a driving test, but formal lessons are optional in some (most?) states. I can't remember all the ins and outs of learner's permits and such, but Wikipedia has a lot of information if you want to boggle. (A thing that sometimes boggles Europeans - depending on state and circumstance, drivers can be as young as 14.) (Disclaimer: I never learned to drive and haven't lived in the US for 11 years, so some things may have changed in the interim.)
Same thing in Canada - most kids will go through driver's education in high school, but it isn't mandatory. There are small schools, but I think they're most used by immigrants - you can get classes in different languages and such. But you DO have to pass a provincially administered written and road test before you can get the various levels of your licence - and that's only for the 'standard' passenger vehicle licence. Anything different - semi truck, cargo van, bus, motorcycle - you need a specialized licence for, and those I think you almost certainly have to take classes for. I could be wrong on that though, I don't have any other licence than my basic one.
Ah yeah, I'm p. sure that's the case in the States, too - it's definitely the case for semis, at least.
My school had an alleged "Driver's Ed" class which consisted of nothing but sitting in a classroom in the basement wanting to die while the worst teacher in the school showed us road safety videos which mostly appeared to have been made in the 80s, and in which we never so much as touched a car. But that horrified everyone I told it to, so I think it's more on my school than my local culture.
At least when I was in California, you technically had to have a a "driver's school" degree of training before you could get your licence. You had to prove you'd signed up before you could even get your permit. Our school provided the service, but the other two high schools in the area didn't so they had to actually sign up with one of the Actual Drivers Schools in the area. (Incidentally, my step-brother's half sister failed her drivers test the first two times because of other people t-boning her when she had right of way. I failed mine the first time because someone literally ran me off the road. People driving in my area were dicks.)
In Tennessee, you only have to take the written exam to get a learner's permit, which lets you drive around as long as you have a parent or other licensed driver over the age of 21 with you. You have to hold a learner's permit for a minimum of 6 months before you're eligible for an actual license, and a parent/guardian has to sign off saying that you have at least 50 hours of driving and 10 hours of driving at night. Then you take the road test and they tell you if you passed and take your picture and make ypu a paper copy of a license until the plastic copy gets printed and mailed to you in a week or so. Even then, the license is a "restricted" license, which means that you can only have 1 passenger in the car under the age of 18 until you're 17 years old. Then it starts being a regular license.
I'm not sure if it was required by the state, but I had to take three 1 hour assisted driving lessons in between getting my permit and license-- We also had drivers ed class, which you could take either on top of a normal courseload during the school year, or in the first month of summer as special extra class. It wasn't the most boring; we had tests that were basic fact regurgitation and a lot of basic fact lecture and old 80s driving videos, but we did have little simulation cars that we 'drove' for half an hour each day; it was basically a fake drivers seat that had all the car controls, and we were all watching a standard instuctional video framed like looking out of a front car window, and little things that would tell us the speed of our driving. So you didn't have much actual control at all, since it was just a video, but if you did actually follow along properly you started getting the muscle memory of driving. The second to last class of drivers ed we had an hour of driving in a parking lot; we drove alone, but weren't allowed to go above 5 mph and had to stay in little stations of practicing different parking and steering techniques until a bell rang telling us to go to the next station, with loooots of volunteers around watching us. Then the last class we had to take the written permit test; which i'm pretty sure is the only thing actually required to get a permit. The assisted driving was with some dude, I assume government-y, and it was half an hour driving and half an hour another random student driving. My instructor was super nice, he stopped us at a candy shop the second day of driving, and the third stopped at a malt place and treated us to malts! It was sorta scary though, because like. Usually I think these assisted driving lessons were spaced out throughout your six months of permit-ness? Mine all happened within one week, a week after I got my permit. The first we just drove through my home neighborhood; but the second we went on a country highway to get to another town... and then the last one we went on the highway and into downtown st paul to get city driving experience. I had also been to see the midnight release of Harry Potter 7-2 the night before, and the assisted driving started at 9, I was running on like 5 hours of sleep. I nearly rear-ended a car trying to park because i hit gas instead of break.
