as opposed to things you might expect:

People, on average, are pretty polite here. I would say almost always people (both men & women) hold the door open for you and people often say thank you if you do the same. Okay well almost all of my "research" is confined to the population of ISU students but in general, people seem pretty mannerly. I don't know how this would compare to other cities/towns/regions. Would the average level of politeness be higher or lower?
People also play cornhole a lot. Like it is everywhere. And in general, eat pork.
Seriously. I would say pork is way bigger than corn.

Someday I will have something more profound to say. Today is not that day however.

things you might not expect...

On Sunday I walked downtown to go to the library and remembered it was the day for the art festival. So I decided to check that out and was pleasantly surprised to see it actually was a
"real" festival with a very respectable sized crowd. We've been to a few things downtown, including the alleged art walk, which were just kind of lackluster and not very well attended and just seemed sort of depressing in general. But this was a nice art festival, the usual kind of arts and vendors, you know, ceramics and jewelry and photos. There were a lot of people and 2 different
groups of musicians and lots of food booths too. After I had walked around and looked at everything, I was going to walk back home. But approximately one block from downtown are the train tracks and I could see there was a train, or really multiple trains (freight) barreling down the line, so it would probably take a while til that was finished. I was standing at the corner, debating for a few minutes, whether I should just mill about there while waiting for the train, or go look at the art some more. I must have looked more lost than I'd thought, because after a couple minutes I saw a woman approaching me, with a sort of determined, purposeful look on her face. She was handing me something, at first I assumed it would be some sort of coupon or advertisement for one of the local stores, but instead she hands me a card, and says something like this "I want to give you this chant that will help you release your greatest inner potential". The card has a flower on the front, and it says "The Key to Unlocking Your Highest Potential" It also says Nam Myoho Renge Kyo.
Okay well the internets tell me this is called the Lotus Sutra, and is a Buddhist meditation.
I think the woman said a few more things to me, although none of it was about Buddhism or anything specific. The back of the card says Buddhism for Modern Living and gives a website.
I have to say that was unexpected... i wouldn't expect too many Buddhists in Ames but who knows... I wasn't sure what to say to her, since I don't know that much about them but it didn't actually seem like she was interested in having a conversation, just telling me about meditation, I think.

the rut of all problems..

the teaching assistant for my class says the word root as rut. As in, now we are going to find the
square rut of the variance. It's odd, because it's the only word I've noticed that is pronounced differently. I wonder where he's from. Actually I think he might be from Iowa, maybe northeast. I don't know if that is some regionalism though. I have noticed there are some differences in pronunciations here, especially with vowels. But that might be more of a Minnesota/Wisconsin factor, as many people I've met here are actually from those places. Two regional words here:
pop (not too surprising) and occasionally sack (instead of bag). Like at some store, do you want a sack for that?
I can't remember any other new words right now. Dialects and accents are pretty interesting though.

Man vs. speed gun

Observed today:
Periodically law enforcement here put up one of those speed gun type devices- you know it has a big screen and tells you how fast you were going as you approach. I take it they do this in areas where people commonly drive too fast, hoping if you see how much you are violating the speed limit, you'll mend your ways.
A few times I have seen this on one side of the main street here, I'm guessing because people tend to drive too quickly and come speeding through the curve in the road. There are often buses, both school buses for kids and Cyride, the public bus, stopping on this road; and there was a Boys and Girls Club, before it got flooded.

Today the radar speed gun was on the OTHER side of the road, just up from the bus stop. As I was walking over to the stop to wait for the bus, I saw 2 guys: one was running down the street & the other watching (yes, Dumb and Dumber here) to see if the radar gun would pick up his running speed! Um aside from the fact that they are now RUNNING in the road, into oncoming traffic, which seems a little bit of a bad idea, I kind of don't think that these speed guns actually measure PEOPLE speed.
I'm not entirely sure of this but I get that feeling. Plus this explanation on How Stuff works website tells me, " A laser speed gun shoots a very short burst of infrared laser light and then waits for it to reflect off the vehicle. "
I could be wrong on this. But anyway... running in the middle of a busy road to try to see if it will measure your running speed, just doesn't seem like the safest or sanest idea.

Good things, bad things about small town life:

Good thing:
Our extremely friendly & conscientious mail carrier. He brings packages up to our apartment.
He's very pleasant. He just handed me some stuff and said he will be back, because he has a large package in his truck that he'll need to come back for. He said it's like 2 feet tall. I have no idea what this is. Could it be that robot I wished for? The bathroom scrubbing, coffee-making one?
That would be nice.

In contrast the Fed Ex person came up the stairs and didn't even knock on the door and just left some package outside the door!

Bad thing:
Excessive hyper-interest/absorption in college football. Seriously. I thought people couldn't take football MORE seriously or passionately than Pgh'ers and yet I was wrong.

bear...

I'm not sure this deserves a post without an accompanying picture but to be honest, I haven't been daring enough to snap a picture of someone's front lawn. On one of the streets on the walk to downtown- I couldn't actually say which one because I don't really pay attention to the street names. But on the corner house, a while ago, we noticed the bear. At first it was placed prominently out on the front lawn, near the edge of the lawn by the sidewalk. It's a sculpture/metal (?) or maybe ceramic black bear- maybe one foot tall, maybe a little larger. Yes a bear. And on its head it wears a pair of mens' underwear. The briefs kind (in white). I'm not making this up (why would I????) Soooooo... on the walk to town we pass bear with underwear.
Periodically the bear is moved to a different location- it was on a different spot on the lawn and then moved to the area closer to the front door.

I don't know anything else about it. Except it's a bear with a pair of underwear on its head.

toasty sandwiches and bear with underwear

One thing that only marginally has to do with Ames but it does since it was sparked by a local location of a chain store. There is a certain sub type place that has toasty sandwiches that is nearby, like within 10 minutes walking distance. It's okay as far as fast-food type places go and the sandwiches are fairly good and not greasy. I can't get past the smell associated with subway- the overpowering yeast/bread/something smell that envelops you when you walk by the outside of the store is a pretty big appetite suppressant for me. So I couldn't even tell you if their food is okay or not because I haven't eaten there is years. But quiznos is okay and doesn't have any sort of overpowering odor. So we would sometimes stop there for a quick bite to eat; plus they often had coupons and all in all, it was fine. When we would go there, we'd get the little buy 6, get one free card punched. My husband was very on top of keeping track of this, hoping to redeem it for a free sandwich. So imagine our surprise when we saw the place was closing. Too bad, we thought. Not only would we lose out on one of the few decent quick places to grab food but he wouldn't be able to get his duly-earned free sandwich.
After a couple months we saw that the store was going to re-open in the same location, under new management. When we went there and tried to redeem the free sub, the person working there told us they weren't able to honor the "free" sub cards because people had been buying up the stickers on the internet (?) and then fraudulently claiming they had bought the necessary amount to get their freebie. The manager confirmed this.
I suggested to Cory that he should write a letter to the corporate headquarters - I figured at best we'd get a coupon for a free sandwich and at worst, just waste the postage.
A week or so ago we get a package slip from the mail carrier, saying we have a piece of certified mail - from Quiznos! I go to the P.O. to pick this up- it's an envelope with $5.50 in postage!
This turns out to be a gift card.
Now does anyone want to guess how much this gift card is for, bearing in mind that the company paid $5.50 to mail it via certified mail?

Anyone...?


.... $5.00!

hahhahhahhahah

Bowling at MU

So in an effort to expand our horizons or at least try to give some support to the university, we tried to utilize the bowling alley at the student center. They do a lot of advertising for it and had promoted the fact that the lanes were completely re-done over the summer. There is a pretty good bowling alley with a lot of lanes and some video games and pool in the "newer" part of town, but figured this one was worth trying. Also the games are only $1.00 each.
Problem is well...the lanes are completely warped! I don't know what their resurfacing or renovations entailed but bowling here was quite a challenge. Also pins would get stuck in the gutters! Then if you did get a gutter ball, your ball could knock out pins from other frames. It was crazy. Also the scoring mechanism kept mis-firing or misreading- it would give you pins when you hadn't gotten any or not give you ones. At one point all the lanes shut off and had to be re-set. The young guy working there didn't seem terribly concerned or interested, he looked like all he wanted to do was close up shop and get home already. He also informed us that we could really only bowl until 9:45, even though they are open til 10, b/c it would take him 15 minutes or so to clean up everything and close up.
So needless to say, not that eager to go back, even for $1.00 bowling.