6 Major Culture Shocks I Experienced in the US Midwest

hello i'm laurence and i'm on a quest to uncover all of the memos that britain and america lost in the pond and one of those memos pertains to culture sharks specifically culture shocks that i as a british man experienced after moving to the midwest of the united states and i know what you're thinking ooh lawrence he just gonna talk about how terrible the snow is again or how the temperatures are unfit for humans no i've done all that the winter is over it's time to get mad about something else in other words this is a fresh look at the things that i found weird after moving to indiana and then later chicago having moved to the midwest 14 years ago from britain here are culture shocks i experienced in the midwest so it's quite possible you've heard me talk about mosquitoes before and how in my first year of living in the united states they almost took my face off but the midwest is known for other flying things that get in your face and one of those things is gnats and there's a very timely reason that i should talk about nat because about 2.7859 million of them ended up on my front porch yesterday and for those of you asking yes i did initially think they were mosquitoes and no i didn't go out to greet them but this is something that can just happen in the midwest right swarms of insects with wings just turn up out of nowhere and you can barely move or see now thankfully unlike mosquitoes i am told that gnats don't bite or even sting which is weird because nats backward is stang right which sounds like sting there's one there's a nat right there on my light got in one of them got in one of them a lone ranger is in my studio right my even feature in the video i don't know that would be really meta and also it'd be nice to have a guest do a collab i've actually got my phone look at that i can't believe it we do we have what appears to be a gnat on my lighting equipment in the studio as we speak okay well he or she is just going to hang on my lighting equipment in the meantime those same gnats presumably including this one quickly got out of dodge amid the following as an englishman i know my fair bit about rain after all when we're born british people are given a complimentary umbrella but here's the thing on the whole we only face light rain but one of the shocking things i discovered about the midwest is it doesn't just rain it pours and the really weird thing about this type of rain is that it was sunny just five minutes ago and it will be sunny again in five minutes time it just pops out of nowhere i mean in the south i think they call it a sun shower and for the most part i actually really love this and do you know why that is because i don't ever go outside watching it from my apartment window is actually quite a cathartic experience i've just realized i probably shouldn't talk about the torrential rain with my colleague just up there fixing the lights because it might still have ptsd and actually it hasn't been all roses for me either because i do remember there was this one time that i was standing waiting for a boss and as i recall i was dressed much the same as i am right now right down to the pajama bottoms when all of a sudden the clouds that weren't even there a moment ago decided to whip out their super soaker 5000. and this was in indiana so the problem was further exacerbated by this brits like me like to moan about the rain but the truth is if we're standing at the bus stop and light rainfall happens to fall upon us and we're carrying our complimentary umbrella we honestly don't know how good we've got it but in the us your umbrella is practically useless and on top of that so are the bosses sometimes you see in america people love their cars but back home i never required one because so long as you lived in a relatively large town the bus systems no matter how much british people might moan are relatively comprehensive when i say comprehensive i mean that you can usually get a bus to the other side of town every 10 to 20 minutes here in the united states i'm particularly thinking indianapolis i often have to wait between half an hour and an hour in fairness i think they have somewhat fixed that problem in the last few years but you would expect that wouldn't you have a relatively large city in anderson indiana where i first lived i don't think i saw a bus in about four years even though i was told there was a bus system there and so if you're moving to the midwest from europe just know that you'll probably have to get a car or several in britain and just you know all across europe there's a certain look to how people dress it's that kind of european look i don't know how to describe it because i'm not a fashion expert but i think the clothes generally speaking are more sleek we can afford to dress more sleekly is that it better be a word because we obviously don't have temperatures that are more akin to green land so in the winter we can get away with you know a trench coat do people still wear those i do just not in the winter cause i live in chicago here in the midwest specifically in winter everybody dresses in the baggiest clothes you've ever seen so baggy jeans baggy shirts baggy hoodies baggy bags and at first i thought this was weird right but after a week of living in the united states i became a baggy clothes convert and that's because back then everything was a novelty so i wanted to be outside experiencing it all but to do that you have to dress up in about three layers of flannel and for my british audience i'm not talking about washcloths these days i have reverted more back to my european ways he says sitting in his pajama bottoms but that's because i no longer go outside or interact with anyone i can't speak for the rest of the united states but if there's something i know about midwestern cuisine it's that they put cheese in absolutely everything so you got cheese curds mac and cheese chicago style pizza cheeseburgers cheese just on its own chili topped with cheese and a food item that looks like something that indiana jones would run away from a cheese bowl and if that wasn't enough one of the midwestern states to the north of me wisconsin has sort of made cheese its entire personality wisconsin produces more cheese than any other state in the union it's got its own style of cheddar ironically named after both the village and the cheese from england and is even home to the unincorporated community of cheeseville cheese if you've been watching my channel this year you'll know that the united states is absolutely jam-packed with regionalisms grinder is boston slang it's a word that is often used to describe a sub-sandwich as it's often used to describe people who move from sort of colder climates in the us down to the south i can't remember exactly what it is because we don't really have them in chicago so i don't i don't bump into too many cougars at least not this definition of the word and the same is true of the midwest so for instance when talking about fizzy drinks midwesterners usually refer to that as pop whereas many other people in america say soda or in the south they just say coke to mean any type of fizzy drink i've talked about puppy chow before which is something that humans in theory eat and is not in fact dog food regionally though this goes by multiple different names such as monkey munch muddy buddies muddy munch reindeer chow or doggie bag and if you're ever in a situation where you're in a corridor and there's somebody coming toward you and you both do that thing where you're trying to get out of each other's way that person will probably say oop whereas i just learned to say move and how could i ever forget the word that my mother-in-law uses to describe what i refer to just broadly as a hoover which is a vacuum cleaner my mother-in-law calls it a sweeper basically there are just lots of midwestern words that i didn't encounter until i moved to the united states of america to learn more watch my recent video guessing the meaning of these midwestern words to have a padilla to take a padilla that seems sensible to me in the meantime that's it for this video let me know in the comments below if you've been to the midwest or whether you live here i'm lawrence brown you can follow me on twitter at lost in the pond us and don't forget to subscribe to my channel so that my videos don't get lost in the pond and a huge thank you to my patrons who i get to talk to about this stuff on my friday afternoon secret streams if you would like to become a patron of lost in the pond you can do so today at patreon.com lost in the pond until the next video goodbye [Music] you

Channel: Lost in the Pond

Views: 51,838

Keywords: Laurence Brown, America, Midwest, Culture Shocks

Id: JofjnoyChLI

Length: 8min 37sec (517 seconds)

Published: Tue May 10 2022