You're right! That sounds like an amazing experience, going to a different part of your country and finding a deeply different culture. Where accent and vocabul

You're right! That sounds like an amazing experience, going to a different part of your country and finding a deeply different culture. Where accent and vocabulary and daily life are all different. Where there's a sense of place, and a distinct local identity and history. It's perhaps possible that you and I are so wonderfully blessed as to already live in such a place! I've had the experience of struggling to understand the local dialect. To work to absorb the local diction and vocabulary, to come to grips with local history and understand the local identity. It's easy to see a Taco Bell, a Starbucks, and a cookie-cutter diner and decide every place is the same. To be sure, those very much are. Yet, it's perhaps possible that this is just a patina. What you and I and others seek and love is there, today, still. It lives and breathes and thrives. It just requires a token effort to look for.