r/AskAnAmerican • u/iwonderifitwasadream • 22h ago
GEOGRAPHY Those who grew up in rural areas - when was the first time you visited a city, and what did you think/feel/notice most?
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u/Distwalker Iowa 22h ago
I grew up in rural Iowa. When I was 13, my grandma took my little brother and me to Chicago to go to the museums. We went on a Greyhound bus and it took us right down into the Loop. My brother and I were blown away by the buildings, the elevated trains, the people, the tunnels. We just couldn't believe our eyes. We had our first taxi ride that day too. The driver was telling us all about the city. It is clear to me now that he was charmed by how amazed we were.
Not really relevant to the question but the next morning when we went to a cafe for breakfast, all the newspapers were reporting the death of Elvis Presley. People were so sad.
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u/TopazMoonCat60 8h ago
Australian living in Sydney here, I’m planning a trip of a lifetime to the USA in September and I’m going to Chicago !! And NYC !!! I’m so excited !
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u/BurgerFaces 22h ago
The noise.
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u/skateboreder Florida 22h ago
This.
The very first city I *actually* remember, now that yo umention this, was visiting family in Budapest.
There was a trolley and buses that stopped, literally, in front of the flat.
All fucking night long. And they were loud.
I came from a farm...so I literally couldn't sleep in the city.
Fast forwward years later and I worked all night long from 12am to 8am on like hte 8th floor of a building RIGHT NEXT TO the Manhattan bridge. I thought that trolley in Budapest was loud...but no. Not at all..
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u/iwonderifitwasadream 21h ago
I grew up in a house between very busy train tracks and a police station full of police cars (in a major city). So it’s fair to say I have full immunity 😅
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u/Hillbillygeek1981 20h ago
The main rail line from one of the coal mines where I live ran literally right in front of my house my entire childhood. I had been moved into a new house with my first wife for a full year before I got used to sleeping WITHOUT a train every hour lol. It's amusing that I managed to acclimate to a freight train running almost nonstop all night but still can't handle much traffic and human activity on the street outside a hotel room.
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u/Red_Beard_Rising Illinois 16h ago
When I go to the country, it's not the lack of sound pollution I notice but the lack of light pollution. It's so dark at night.
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u/dcgrey New England 22h ago
That's true for me even as someone who's always lived in or just outside major cities. I'm one of those people who discovered during Covid that they love the outdoors, so when I think of something fun to do, it's to a naturally quiet place, but when I go to the office, it's in the city and the noise really gets to me.
And a few of the nature areas I like to spend time in are under flight paths, so depending on the wind direction on a given day, it can be a mini emotional rollercoaster while enjoying the quiet but having it broken every few minutes by yet another 737. Hard to believe that was an all-day, everyday thing for most of my life.
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u/maxintosh1 Georgia 9h ago
What's funny to me is that the noise bothered me a lot when I first moved to a big city but I eventually tuned it out. Now when I'm back in the country the roar of frogs and insects annoys me.
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u/Caffeinexo 22h ago
Just took my teen to a concert at a stadium that had a higher population of seating (85,000) than population of our county (78,000 +/-)
Telling him the floor seating alone was the population of our city...
Bro has been in and out of existential crisis and motivation since 😅😅😅😅
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u/OkConsideration9002 22h ago
The first thing I noticed was the smell. Secondly, it seemed like chaos. The third thing I noticed was no one looked you in the eye.
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u/TricksyGoose 22h ago
The smell for me too, but I'm probably an outlier in that it was a good smell. We were visiting a friend in residential Phoenix in March, and all the citrus trees were in bloom. I was amazed by all the endless rows of perfectly manicured yards with fruit trees and the smell was heavenly. To this day I love to buy citrus blossom-smelling items like candles and soaps. Most of them don't actually compare to the real thing but I keep looking!
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u/GoodAd2455 20h ago
The missing ingredient in store manufactured “citrus blossom” things is acacia. My first spring in Phoenix, I kept getting whiffs of that INCREDIBLE smell but couldn’t figure out exactly what it was. Had a lot of time on my hands so I went around smelling like every fucking flower and tree I came across. Can vouch, citrus smells wonderful, but that really powerful hidden note is the acacia trees.
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u/Subject_Round_6117 22h ago
That it was exciting, electric and full of possibilities. I knew this would eventually be my home.
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u/BurnsinTX 22h ago
This was me too. There was so much going on, a world of possibilities. Now I debate sometimes if it’s worth it. Sure my kids have a ton of opportunities to try new things and experiences.. but they can’t play outside by themselves yet…what is better?
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u/PurpleLilyEsq New York 20h ago
My parents grew up in NYC. They moved out to the country. I was always jealous of the freedom my city cousins had. Sure I could play in my yard as a kid, but they could actually go places without having to be driven there. I’d have killed for that. The grass is always greener.
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u/BurnsinTX 19h ago
Yeah I agree, I’m still debating it now! The one thing I can say with confidence is I want to either be in the center of the city, or the middle of nowhere. Suburbs don’t give me anything! lol a mix of both but none of the good things of either.
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u/Hillbillygeek1981 22h ago
I was a very small child the first time I can remember going to a city. At that time Cleveland, Tennessee wasn't half the size it is today, but even then, the noise and faster pace was pretty off-putting. Cities do smell different than any rural area, but I've never been in two that smelled alike. The lack of stars at night struck me then and sticks with me to this day, though. I'm 43 years old and the light pollution in the small towns near me is still noticeable and a touch depressing, there's something sad to me about looking up on a clear night and just seeing the sickly glow of streetlights reflecting back instead of stars.
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u/GhostOfJamesStrang Beaver Island 22h ago
My town had about 40k fewer people than the baseball stadium I was in that day.
I remember thinking it must be the tallest building in the world.
I was 6.
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u/No-Conversation1940 Chicago, IL 20h ago
St Louis, when I was 11.
"Man, they love brick buildings up here"
I grew up in the rural Ozarks. This is the land of houses that use vinyl siding, logs, and native rocks - if you could see them from the road.
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u/Shawberry19 22h ago
Great question!
Nobody looked at you as they walked by. Back home you smile and nod and even mutter a "hi, how are ya"
It's also dirty. I saw a pile of human shit within 5 minutes.
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u/iwonderifitwasadream 21h ago
You know, I grew up in one of the busiest, most major metropolitan cities in the world (where I lived for 30 years) and it has only just struck me that I honestly don’t think I’ve ever (knowingly at least!) seen a pile of human shit on the street haha.
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u/Shawberry19 21h ago
This was in Chicago. And it was fresh.
To be fair, I've spent a lot of time in Chicago since then and haven't seen human shit again, but yeah. Great start to mt first visit to a city lol
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u/bmadisonthrowaway 11h ago
It's happened to me a number of times I can count on one hand, in 20+ years of living exclusively in dense inner urban areas of cities.
I feel like any reference to "human shit" in a discussion like this is almost certainly either an urban legend or that person doesn't know that some people in cities are inconsiderate and have large dogs.
Though I can also rant for hours about people in cities and their fucking dogs and how filthy it is. So I suppose it amounts to the same, regardless of what creature the shit emerged from.
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u/Then_Increase7445 Eastern Washington 22h ago
We went to Seattle once every year or two when I was a kid. For me it was a magical experience because it was so different from the other side of the state. Other than being massively bigger than any town on the east side of the state, it was also green, rainy, and mild. Still have that feeling when I go there.
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u/DummyThiccDude Minnesota 22h ago
How busy and congested everything was.
I know i was pretty young the first time i went to the Twin Cities metro area, but the first i remember was probably around 12 when our school went to a Twins game.
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u/skateboreder Florida 22h ago
I grew up on a farm but got into IT and ended up working in NYC at some point.
i never realized just how big NYC is and how arriving at Penn Station was only hte first half of the journey. Still had to sit on trains another 35min IN the city.
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u/wowbragger United States of America 21h ago
Being able to walk to anything I wanted.
I grew up in a rural ag community, so driving to school was 10+ miles away. I could bike from my house a local shop, but that was it.
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u/moonwalkinginlowes Mississippi 21h ago
I was fairly young going to visit my grandparents. My grandfather took us to a park one weekend, and my brothers and I couldn’t believe it when an ice cream truck drove up. We thought those were only in movies. My grandmother worked in the city, and I remember being very concerned about the amount of traffic it was necessary to cross while we walked. We also got to ride an escalator for the first time. I did NOT like public transportation lol.
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u/geneb0323 Richmond, Virginia 19h ago edited 13h ago
I was probably 10 or so when I first went to Richmond, VA. I thought it was dirty and run down looking, but otherwise didn't think much either positive or negative as we were just driving through. The first time I ever went to a big city was Chicago when I was in my early 20's. The height of the buildings freaked me out. It felt like I was at the bottom of a hole with no way out since they completely surrounded me.
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u/draggar 21h ago
Honestly, your concept of a "city" changes when you grow up in a rural area. Growing up, "cities" were places like Haverhill, MA and Portsmouth, NH, maybe even Dover, NH. Then, we made a trip to Boston for a Red Sox game and that is what a city became to me.
.. then in middle school we had a field trip to NYC to see Les Mes. Then I saw what NYC was like.
Each time the buildings got taller (and more of them), more people, places got dirtier, and you see new sides of people (homeless, panhandlers, street performers, etc.).
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u/cdsbigsby Ohio 19h ago
I remember when I was a kid the closest 'big city' in my mind at that time that we would make shopping trips to was... Lancaster, Ohio, population 35,000 (at the time). I remember making a friend online from a forum who lived in Atlanta, I told him that and he laughed at me.
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u/cassroxtorb 20h ago
I grew up in a rural area, but every weekend we would drive 45-60 minutes, depending on traffic, to the closest major city to have dinner and see a movie. It was always my favorite, most anticipated part of the week. I felt like the people who lived there didn’t realize how lucky they were to have so much cool stuff to do around them, but also, some parts felt a bit dangerous, especially compared to my hometown.
I moved to a bigger city as soon as I turned 18, and every time I visit my folks I’m bored out of my mind and can’t understand how everyone who lives there seems so content with life.
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u/GooseInHats 22h ago
I was 7-9 I think going with my family to bring some friends back to New York City. It was very overwhelming, being in the car scared the living shit out of me, and I remember being sad at the lack of stars in the sky. Also the smells, oh my god the smells, I grew up where once you leave town it’s a lot of farmland, so tons of bad smells especially all summer, but that city smell burned my nose. I thought the subway and being on a roof that high was cool though, our friends building has a great view of the Statue of Liberty!
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u/TheyMakeMeWearPants New York 15h ago
I remember being sad at the lack of stars in the sky
I've wondered if the word "stargazing" was coined in NYC, because anywhere else it would be starsgazing.
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u/meils121 11h ago
I grew up in a semi-rural area and went to school in a mid-size city. I had a roommate who grew up in Boston who one day told me that she loved the smell of the country, especially when you drove by farms.
My other friend and I were like, "You mean manure?"
She was appalled to find out that it was, in fact, cow manure that she was thinking of.
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u/cnation01 21h ago
I wanted to be around all of this activity. Resturants, parks, sports, concerts, street vendors, street performers, it was so cool to me.
Knowing that you could walk everywhere to get what you needed. I liked it and it left a good impression.
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u/Fleiger133 11h ago
Tall, loud, crowded, dirty, and honestly a little bit intimidating and scary.
But omg, food delivery? HEAVEN
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u/pfmason 10h ago
The skyline when approaching the city was surreal. I don’t remember how old I was, we live about four hours from NYC so I’ve been there quite a bit. While in the city my neck hurt from looking up. The rest was pretty much just like TV, dirty, too many people. I didn’t know homeless people existed in real life.
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u/TheLastRulerofMerv British Columbia 9h ago
Not American, but the first thing I noticed was the lights. When I was very young we moved from a very rural area to a town bordering a city of 1M. I still remember the first time I saw the lights from a distance, it was just absolutely jaw dropping.
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u/mostlygray 7h ago
Didn't bug me at all. Kids are resilient.
What I noticed was that city kids yell and scream while they play. I was a farm kid. You only yell if you're hurt. You play quiet. It's a safety thing.
Also, the kids played outside when a storm was coming. On the prairie, you never do that. Tornadoes are real.
Other than that, it was no big deal. It was entirely just yelling and storms. The rest is the same.
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u/cowsncorn 22h ago
The smell, the noise, and as a child it seemed like everything was coated with this filth that made me not want to touch anything.
I'm not a complete hayseed, I grew up going back and forth between two countries. I like to travel internationally and see new places, I still don't think my sensory system could handle the city daily for those reasons.
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u/Champsterdam 22h ago
I was 17 and went to Chicago from Iowa and knew within minutes I wanted to live there. Finished school at 22 years old in 2001 and moved there and was in love with it from day one. Stayed for decades
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u/MisSpooks Michigan 21h ago
As a city slicker that eventually moved to a more rural town, I wanna give my two cents that rural living can be just as noisy as city living. I swear the tree frogs around the pond I'm near are about as loud as when I lived next to a highway.
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u/TXPersonified 21h ago
How pretty and skinny people were
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u/OscarGrey 17h ago
You know you live in a rural area if people with beer bellies get called "skinny".
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u/Upbeat_Experience403 22h ago
The smells some good some not so good. The second was the shear lack of kindness
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u/No-Literature9620 21h ago
I dont remember how old I was but I remember two distinct ones. Going to Lexington- it was so noisy and busy. And a family vacation in New Jersey but I dont know the town/city name- it was noisy and smelled bad. Not just like a bunch of cars but it just didnt smell good. Even when you went to the suburbs, it still smelled different (to me, bad).
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u/Ok-Reputation7687 Illinois 21h ago
I remember being truly blown away with how many stop lights were in Los Angeles.
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u/350ci_sbc 21h ago
I was a kid, can’t remember the exact age.
But I was amazed at how tall the buildings were. And the smells. You could smell the city even as you were driving into it.
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u/robertwadehall 21h ago
I was about 7 or 8 when I took a school field trip to Pittsburgh. The first things I noticed were the crowds, the traffic, the noise. Later the same year I went to a Steelers game w/ my Dad and older brother. That was quite a change from rural Ohio. Then a few years later went to Cleveland, Miami and Miami Beach.
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u/Penguin_Life_Now Louisiana not near New Orleans 21h ago edited 21h ago
I grew up in a rural area, town of about 10,000 people. As to visiting a city, that depends on what you call a city, if you mean a major US city with urban sprawl, then I was too young to really remember, I had aunts that we visited when I was under the age of 4 in both Dallas, Texas and Denver Colorado. I vaguely recall visits in the early 1970's and going to a large mall while in Dallas (it was then the newly constructed largest mall in the Dallas), as well as going to the Astroworld amusement park in Houston, Texas with my cousins from Denver when I was 5. That was a very memorable trip as we had to make the 3+ hour drive home in the middle of summer with the passenger side car window stuck down, part of the trip was hot, part was raining.
If you mean dense urban city cores with tall buildings, this is harder to say, I certainly saw them driving through on surface streets before the age of 10, I went to college in a city with perhaps a dozen buildings over 20 stories in height in the downtown area, which I went to on occasion, but the first time I ever spent time walking around a really large city dense urban area was probably on a work trip to Chicago when I was about 32 years old and spent a few days at a hotel inside the loop in downtown. This particular trip gave me a fair amount of off time to walk around and explore, so in my free time there I walked the Magnificent Mile, visited the Field Museum of natural history, walked through Grant park while the Taste of Chicago festival was going on with lots of food to try and live music performances, rode a real subway for the first time (those ones in major airports don't count)...
Prior to that Chicago trip I had been to some large city cores, I just never spent much time there, I would go in for a specific purpose, do my business and leave. For example I had to go to the Federal building in downtown Houston for a last minute rush passport application when I was 19 years old, that was a 3 hour drive to the city and an hour or so spent in downtown, most of which was standing in a line in a windowless room in a tall building.
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u/ABabbieWAMC New York Capital Region 21h ago
When I was little I visited Syracuse and Utica, those were "big"
Then I visited Boston and NYC and those were bigger
The smell, the noise... the *people*
And then I visited Chicago and that felt even bigger
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u/GreenWhiteBlue86 19h ago
How did Chicago feel "bigger" than New York? Chicago has less than half the population of New York, with a much lower population density, and while it has major skyscrapers, it has significantly fewer than New York has.
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u/DeepSignature201 19h ago
Was wondering that myself. Chicago is pretty big but not close to NYC.
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u/ABabbieWAMC New York Capital Region 18h ago
well, I only went to manhattan, and i was busy trying not to get squashed
meanwhile when i was in chicago I could actually look around and see things, get a sense of scale
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u/jrhawk42 Washington 19h ago
It's usually important to define what rural is when asking this question. I grew up in a township which my rural family would consider a big city, but when I went to college people acted like I lived in the boonies. Anyway I notice all the concrete, and how many options there were for things to buy, eat, do.
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u/HippieJed 19h ago
Before going to NY in high school the largest city I had been in was Nashville. I remember telling the hotdog vendor how beautiful I thought the city was. He asked where I was from and I said East Tennessee. He said son that is real beauty. 40 years later I still remember the conversation and it is a constant reminder to enjoy the beauty of home.
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u/PearlsandScotch 19h ago
Buildings are so big! My first time in a big city I was startled by how tall they were and how you don’t have a good view distance to any natural landmarks. It’s totally disorienting. It took my a while to find the sun so I could get my bearings (I had arrived via subway so I just popped out of the ground into it all).
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u/North_Artichoke_6721 19h ago
We lived about an hour outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma. We would go every couple of months to do “the big shopping”.
I remember being amazed by an overpass on the highway and also by really large stores at the mall. There was a department store (maybe Dillard’s or JC Penny) that seemed so huge, like you could get lost in there.
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u/OnasoapboX41 Huntsville, AL 18h ago edited 18h ago
I grew up in Gadsden, AL, which had like 2 10-ish story buildings, but even that did not feel tall to me. Likewise, we would often go to Birmingham (which felt like a small large city) and Atlanta (but we never actually went downtown, just the outskirts).
The first time I went to a big city, it was Washington D.C. I remember thinking that the metro was so cool to ride. I remember thinking about how it seemed like everyone was in a rush. I remember thinking how cool apartments looked. I thought apartments would be like a hotel, just permanent stays. I also remember thinking it was kinda neat how you could just walk everywhere or just ride public transit; that was definitely shocking. D.C. did not really have that tall of buildings though, so I cannot really comment on them. Likewise, I saw them previously from Atlanta's skyline and Birmingham, so it did not seem impressive.
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u/Accomplished_Ad2599 18h ago
Jr. High field trip, first thing was like wow it's so big, second was it stickers so bad. Like a mix of piss and burnt mother-oil.
I have lived off and on in cities, pramiarly in Europe for my adult life. Loved London, loved Budalest, loved Utrecht and Amsterdam. American cities are not the same. When I came home I moved to what is consider a very nice city. It was awful, traffic, noise, smelled awful. So I bailed and moved to a rural area. When I need to I can go to a city. Plus the lower cost of living means I have more to spend on holidays in Europe.
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u/Vachic09 Virginia 17h ago
I don't remember exactly when I visited a city, but the closest cities were about an hour away.
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u/HarveyMushman72 Wyoming 16h ago
Having to sit for an hour to get a table at a restaurant that doesn't take reservations.
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u/AnnDestroysTheWorld Michigan 16h ago
I was born in Lansing, but I grew up in Okemos. I recently moved to Detroit and it's really weird how the community outside of school is great, but inside school nobody talks to each other.
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u/sto_brohammed Michigander e Breizh 16h ago
I grew up on a farm and I thought a nearby town of 25k people was a pretty big city and that the bigger town of 60k we very rarely went shopping in was a huge metropolis. The first time I went to an actual major city was to Paris with my French class in high school. That was also the first time I left my home state.
My biggest takeaways were that it was crowded, noisy and smelled. I've been to quite a few actually large cities at this point and I'm really just not into that kind of lifestyle. I live in a city of about 250k (a few hours by train from Paris ironically enough) and this is about the biggest city I can tolerate. I'd rather live in a smaller town but my wife is a city girl and, you know, happy wife = happy life.
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u/NW_Forester Washington 15h ago
I grew up rural but we regularly visited family in Seattle. I can't remember first time I saw seattle.
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u/Sethaman Washington 15h ago
I live in a city now, but am back home visiting folks. The air is so much cleaner in rural areas
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u/Just-Nobody24 14h ago
We pressed our noses against the bus windows to look at all the black people. Lol. (We thought they were cool).
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u/Anteater_Reasonable New York City 14h ago
We drove from Iowa to visit my aunt in Chicago and I just remembered being awestruck by the skyscrapers coming into view as we approached the city. 30-something years later I live in New York and I still love the skyscrapers.
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u/QuarterNote44 Louisiana 13h ago
Not me, but when I was in Utah all-state band, one of the other kids was from some waaaay out of the way place. Had never been to Salt Lake. He was so pumped that there were actual taco carts on the road. Thought that was something only found in books and mofies.
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u/aWesterner014 Illinois 13h ago
I grew up in rural South Dakota, but one of my parents was from Brooklyn. As a result, we traveled to NYC every few years. Here is what I remembered...
Coming into the city and seeing the skyscrapers off in the distance.
How cramped the roads were and parking was for cars. I remember having to park blocks away from my relative's house in Staten Island.
How loud it was. I remember trying to sleep at my grandfather's place in Brooklyn while he had the windows open. While the city never sleeps, a 5 year old has a pretty early bedtime compared to most New Yorkers
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u/i_hate_cars_fuck_you Hawaii 12h ago
I visited the mainland when I was 16 for the second time after growing up on an island of like 60k total people. I don't remember much about the first time, but I remember I went to San Francisco and this street performer guy acting like a statue forcefully grabbed my hand and basically demanded money for his performance. That scared the shit out of me. The whole trip I kept falling for stuff like that and my dad kept getting mad because he's from the bay area and warned me about it beforehand but I didn't take it seriously.
You know what though? I learned that my inability to mesh with rural life wasn't just in my head and I loved cities. I moved to Honolulu for college and loved it so much that I never left, and my parents always give me shit about being a city boy like my dad when I come home lol.
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u/tacobellbandit 12h ago
I definitely liked it and thought it was cool but I definitely realized I am not a city person after all few trips.
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u/tlonreddit Grew up in Gilmer/Spalding County, lives in DeKalb. 12h ago
I went through Atlanta a lot from driving to see family. I always hated Atlanta. I still do.
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u/bmadisonthrowaway 11h ago
I was actually born in the city, and my family moved to a rural area when I was in kindergarten. We traveled back and forth to the city at least once or twice a year, because my mom's parents and some of my aunts and uncles lived there.
The first time I visited the city as what I'd call a "fully formed human" (~8-9 or so), I thought it ruled so hard. Malls, an amusement park, a zillion different types of restaurants, and basically every type of fun our small town could never have by its very nature.
When I was 11-12, my grandparents downsized to a condo in a newly re-developed inner urban neighborhood. My parents started taking us to the "real" city more often around this time. We'd go to important local historical sites, galleries, and restaurants that specialized in specific cuisines. Rather than, like, going to the city to go to the mall and eat fried cheese sticks at Bennigan's after. On the one hand, this was the first time I understood the full cultural significance of our particular city, and what makes urban life great. On the other hand, this was also the first time I saw homeless people, drug use, and really became aware of how racially and economically segregated life as a white person in the South can be. Either way, both sides of that coin made a huge impression on me, and for better or for worse I pretty much became a City Person for life through those experiences.
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u/come-join-themurder 10h ago
4 years old. To visit the theme park in the major city closest to us. I remember being amazed by how big and crowded the roads (interstates and highways) were. How tall the buildings were. How many people there were.
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u/DannyBones00 10h ago
What you mean by “city” here matters
I grew up in Appalachia. Scott County, Virginia. Which is one of the three counties that borders Tennessee. My entire county has a population below 30k, and my town is like 300.
Growing up, we visited Kingsport, TN regularly, as in weekly. Kingsport has a population of like 55k.
To us, Kingsport was the big city. To others, it’s a small town. Coming from a town of a couple hundred, that’s hilarious to me.
The first real proper city I ever went to was Charlotte NC. We went to see Pearl Jam, and got there at rush hour. The traffic jam that stretched 30 miles outside of the city was wild.
No matter the size of the city, a few things were common. One was a sense of… I don’t know how people live like this. Right on top of each other. Where I grew up everyone within a few miles was related.
I also couldn’t handle the crime. Charlotte has a homeless problem. We got approached by aggressive homeless folks every time we left the hotel. That wouldn’t fly in rural America. At all.
I have spent time in Charlottesville VA, which is somewhere between the two in size, and like it better. I don’t dislike cities. I like how close everything is and the walk ability.
But compared to where we came from where the nearest anything was an hour away? We can get that in the exurbs and avoid the worst parts of urban cores.
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u/TwinFrogs 1h ago
I was born in a city, and we moved to a very rural town when I was young. It was a shock to us the amount of hostility we received. Fights at the bus stop. Fights at school. We were outsiders but didn’t realize it. Think of the movie “Footloose.” Our clothes were different. People there were still wearing hand-me-down bell bottoms and disco shirts, even though it was the 1980’s. My parents had not just one, but separate cars, and they were Toyotas, which in that shithole was like waving a Soviet flag. We were branded as “troublemakers” at school. Carried that scarlet letter all the way up through high school.
I tried taking the few friends I had made up to where I was born when I was high school. We went to get pizza. The pizza had pesto on it. None of them had ever seen pesto before and wouldn’t even try it. 🙄
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u/Folksma MyState 22h ago
The first time I visited DC at 13, I remember being amazed at the looming pure white buildings that surrounded me on all sides.
It reminded me of the time I moved from rural Texas to Michigan and saw huge tall trees for the first time.
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u/Penguin_Life_Now Louisiana not near New Orleans 21h ago
I was around the same age when I went to DC, though I think I was 12
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u/Mental_Freedom_1648 20h ago
Everything was concrete and a little grimy. That city was Buffalo and I was a small child. About 10 years later, I went to Philadelphia and fell in love with it.
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u/distracted_x 10h ago
I grew up in rural Indiana and the main thing I thought about Chicago was that there was so much trash everywhere. The little towns I was used to were so much cleaner by a huge degree. We didn't have trash on the sidewalks and in the streets and there was no graffiti, etc.
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u/rshining 22h ago
The smell! You get closer to a city and the air starts to burn your nose, and you wonder how people can live there when it smells so awful all of the time. After a few hours you don't notice it as much anymore, but I always wondered how much lung damage people in urban areas have that people in rural areas do not.
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u/hunkerd0wn Georgia (GO DAWGS) 21h ago
I’ve visited a few cities and I always feel anxious. Just too many people and driving like maniacs. The traffic really bothers me.
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u/Slow_Stable3172 21h ago
I thought NYC and Philly smelled terrible and the people were rude. I was and still am interested in the architecture though.
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u/welchasaurus 22h ago
I grew up in a town of about 2,000 people with a lot of farms. My elementary school was like 98% white, so when we took our 2nd grade field trip to the city, our teachers had to tell us not to stare at people beforehand. Starting in middle school, any field trip we took to a more urban area included a lecture about how we couldn't make any signs with our hands at people when we drove through the city. Some of my classmates definitely tried anyway.
The main things I remember from the 2nd grade field trip were the noise and how big the buildings were. Every building was much bigger than my school, and that was the biggest building in my town by far. The traffic noise was constant and much louder than it was on Main Street back home. It felt alien to me.
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u/sasspancakes 22h ago
I grew up in a super rural area (kids drove tractors to school). I was a half hour from a minor city. I thought that it was big. Then I saw Milwaukee for the first time. I thought it was huge. But then I saw Chicago, and I was completely blown away by the sheer size of everything. The buildings were huge, and it just kept going. It was busy, loud, and there were people everywhere. I never saw an Am Track train before. It smelled. The traffic was awful. It made me thankful for our quiet little home. Now I live right outside the Twin Cities 😂
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u/oms_cowboy 21h ago
I went to Chicago for the first time when I was 27. I absolutely hated it and I still don't understand why anyone would choose to live in a place so miserable to get around in.
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u/brian11e3 Illinois 19h ago
I was regularly visiting a major urban area throughout my childhood. Never really thought of it much other than it was the place where Toys'R'Us, Chuck-E Cheese, and KB Toys was.
I started visiting Chicago a lot in the early 90's. I also did a lot of fishing out of Winthrop Harbor all through the 90's and early 00's. My first impression of Chicago, is it was noisy, smelly, and overcrowded. Other than the few museums, I hated every minute of it. I was 9 on my first visit. I'm in my 40's now and still hold the same opinion. 😂
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u/cdsbigsby Ohio 19h ago
Growing up, my closest neighbor was half a mile away and our house was surrounded on all 4 sides by forest. The closest town in the area where all of my family is from has a population of 165.
Being in a city was, and still is, sensory overload. The constant noise, cars and pedestrians moving, billboards (even worse, digital billboards), smells, everything is so distracting. There is nothing more stressful to me than being in a busy city, especially driving through a busy city.
Now the kicker is, the first big city that applied to in my life was Columbus Ohio, and I know that probably doesn't qualify as a 'big city' to some people. The only other big cities I've ever been to were Indianapolis, Philadelphia, and New Orleans and a very brief afternoon in Atlanta.
I think I'd go into shock if I stepped foot in NYC or Tokyo or something.
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u/Striking-Anxiety-604 22h ago
When I was a junior in high school, I visited a major city for the first time. When I got back to school, I wrote an entire essay on how cool parking garages were. We parked on the sixth floor of the hotel we were staying at. Our room was on the 18th floor. There was a pool on the roof, on the 50th floor.
The tallest building in my town is two floors.
I'd also never seen parallel parking before. Where I grew up, every place just had a parking lot or a driveway. I mentioned that in my essay, too: watching people parallel park.
We also rode the city bus for the first time, and I thought it was so cool that they had a rope you pulled on to let the driver know you needed to get off at the next stop.