culture shock

I keep reading my friends' blogs about the amazing places they're going this summer--Stockholm, Sweden; Bangalore, India; rural Mozambique; etc. etc. etc.--and it makes me sad I'm in Richfield. Don't get me wrong--it's nice enough here: all the people we meet are really kind, the weather's nice, there's beautiful hiking and camping just a hop, skip, and a jump away...but then I remember that I was in Florence (and Milan and Venice and Zurich and London and Rome and Bern and Geneva and Salzburg and Paris) three(ish) weeks ago.

Things are a little...different here. I just looked out the living room window and saw four people driving down the street on a 4-wheeler, I kid you not. There are four stoplights in town. Everybody drives under the speed limit. People we talk to have a hard time comprehending why we're here if we don't have family in the area. You can ride a bike from one end of Richfield to the other, end-to-end the long way, in about 15 minutes. There are fewer than eight thousand people living in the city. You can't buy arugula here (it's a kind of lettuce we fell in love with in Europe; they call it "rocket" there), and a regular block of cheese costs about 10 bucks on sale (in Provo it's about $6.75). Wal-mart is your best bet for good, fresh produce (wince)...and for a lot of other things: it's about the only place you can buy a bike, the kind of deodorant I use, or fresh basil. The movie theater has one screen, and it uses a projector from 1947. We've nearly exhausted the movie rental selection of the place, too; we've seen everything good that Redbox has, and they've got more/better stuff than the local Movie Gallery. If you want to mail something, you clip it to the outside of your house-mounted mailbox using a chip clip.

I'm not complaining, or at least I don't mean to be. It's just a very, very different place from where I spent most of May. In church, Scott mentioned that he got the tie he was wearing in Rome. The guy we were talking to said he should have just gone to Caesar's Palace or the Venetian casinos in Las Vegas instead, and I'm not sure he was joking.

Europe was exhausting, but exhilarating. I think I learned that I really would like to be a big-city girl after all, in spite of the frustrations (like sparse drinking water and pricey bathrooms).

There is one thing that Europe and Richfield both have in common for me, though: nobody but Scott knows my name. I miss people.