What do you like best about America?

[Voodoo]

Originally Posted by wwax

I am staying in the good old Mid West of the US at the moment and I find it surprisingly different to the coasts. Having assumed for years what everyone said about the midwest was said in humour. I find the midwestern manners and friendliness to be a pleasant surprise and one I could get used too. And that is coming from Australia where people are pretty friendly to start with. Around here people just seem less brash and in your face. Which if people had told me I'd say that about yanks when I moved here I'd have laughed but it has turned out to be true and I rather like it.

But I dislike the whole fixation people have around here on always wanting bigger better and shiner things or job tiring or just the way people around here just buy things for something to do.

I can't convince my friends or US family that I have a job I like and no I am not working for a promotion or overtime or the next payrise but just to pay my bills, but they are so damn sweet and polite and confused about it I can't get mad.

You need to get outta the urban(ish) areas more and into the small, dying, towns around where you live.

Ours has a town square, the corner of which is covered right now in a pile of pumpkins with a big sign stuck in the middle saying:

'Help Yourself - Pay What You Can'

And nobody steals anything from it because everyone knows if you wait until just before Halloween, they'll give away all the ones that don't sell.

And the pumpkins aside, it's not uncommon to have 'Honor Boxes' around here, especially at the orchards.

People don't work, for the most part, for anything other than a paycheck around here either.

On Friday afternoons when school's in session, they pull out giant BBQ pits, the size of four-door cars, onto the square. A local farmer donates a cow or a pig and they have a fund raising cookout for the town school's sport's teams. You can smell the scent of barbecue on a good day, a dozen or so blocks away.

But thankfully the reputation of the US is that everyone here is loud and obnoxious as it tends to keep other loud and obnoxious types from moving in.

So quite telling people otherwise else before you know it, we'll be up to our necks in Kiwis, Aussies, and the few remaining reasonable Brits...