Asians. Lots of them. I had honestly forgotten there were minorities other than Mexicans (and I'm not sure that Mexicans WERE a minority in Tucson).
New York License Plates. Even though our own car has one now. I keep seeing them around town and thinking, "cool, a car from New York! How exci--oh wait, yeah."
Mosquitoes. All that cool, damp greenery comes with a price.
Yards Without Fences. Heck, how about just yards? I love the no-fence thing - it is so easy on the eyes. Just wide expanses of impeccably mowed grass stretching from one house to another. Mmmmm, summery.
Gardens. The land here is able to sustain life.
Twisty-Turney Streets. We've been here almost a month and I am still all turned around any time I go out. In Tucson, the streets are laid out in a rough square-based grid, though the street names tend to change every few miles. Here, the roads wind around the hills, cross one-lane bridges and I don't know what else. I wonder how long it will take me to be able to get around town without Nigel the GPS.
Weird Grocery Stores. It's never taken me this long to determine my grocery store loyalty before. We've got a Wegman's, an Aldi, a Topps, and a P&C. Wegman's is brilliant and classy and has the most reliably cheap prices on things like milk and bananas. But other items tend to be pricey. Aldi is a mystery to me and I have yet to go inside, but its external appearance somehow brings to mind both Atari and also Soviet Russia (and "Aldi" means "s/he bought" in Turkish. WEIRD). Topps disgusts me on many levels but they have a discount gas station. I went to the P&C for the first time yesterday and it's like they want to be Macey's but they don't care enough to do the job right.
Something in common with all the grocery stores out here is that they don't get as excited about sales as the stores out west do. And that makes me sad. I know sales can be a gimmick to get us to buy things that are still not necessarily a good price, but I always appreciated a juicy loss leader. In Ithaca, it seems to me that each store has just shrugged its shoulders and said, "meh, you won't find it more than ten cents cheaper anywhere else, so just give up already." I hope to solve this mystery soon. Maybe sales just work differently here.
I think that's about all the things that are shocking me at this point in time. I'll keep you posted on any further developments.
