Col-uh-RAH-do

I have been living in Fort Collins for about nine months now.  It's a college town, so it obviously has all the things any respectable college town does:  excessive amounts of fast food, dirty Mexican burrito joints and grungy discount liquor stores.  Unlike Provo, however, the town's existence isn't entirely dependent on students.  This allows for a slightly more mature community feeling.  It turns out people who make real money have standards for things like food and activities.  Once you get outside of the immediate mile-or-so-radius of campus, things get classier.  Well, classier, but with more cows, if that makes any sense.

It doesn't.

Welcome to Colorado (which I now have to pronounce Col-uh-RAH-do, not the correct way of Col-o-raw-do, or I am mocked). Initially, I thought moving here would be pretty similar to Provo.  There are giant mountains on one side (although they're on the wrong side... it took me four years to internalize the "mountains mean east" mantra and now it's all backwards.  I do still find a small comfort knowing I can see the other side of what I used to look at every day from campus, but my near-nonexistant internal compass is so confused).  It's dry, and flat, up until the base of the mountain range.  It's in the west, and compared to the forests of Connecticut pretty barren.  However, there is a key difference between here and "Happy Valley"... I don't live in a small, crowded, valley anymore.  To the east, instead of another range of mountains, there is................ (get it?  Nothing.  It's flat.)  Endless open space.  Which obviously (in the west) means endless farms and ranches.  So, the composition of the population is not quite the same as college-student-packed Provo.  You have the (mostly) young students, and scattered in that age group are those of us living the dream of working full-time and reminiscing about the "good old days."  Then there are the regular suburban homeowners, the 9-to-5 dads and power-walking-stroller-pushing moms.  Then, there are the ranchers and the shirtless-pickup-drivers and the cowboys.  And don't forget the sign dancers.

Funny thing is, everyone, no matter their job or life status or hair color or state of dress or undress, goes to the bank.  I've met a wide variety of people merely by being the person that is in charge of the money.  Just yesterday I helped someone, and as I watched him walk out, I noticed he wasn't wearing any shoes.  I'm not the person to diss the awesomeness off being free to wiggle your toes as you please, but what happened to the "no shirt, no shoes, no service" policy?  More on this later.  Anyway, many people that come into the bank are the exact opposite of me: they love to chat with strangers.  I'm a get-in-do-business-get-out kind of person.  I'm polite, but never go out of my way to make conversation with someone I'll probably never see again.  On the other side of the teller line, however, I have no choice in the matter.  More often than not, I am pushed out of my comfort zone as I find myself in the middle of a conversation with a complete stranger, and often by the end of the exchange am glad I learned something about that person. 

Moral of the story:  moving here has been more of a shock than I imagined it would be.  There are two LDS singles wards for the entire town, and although I grew up in a ward that encompassed five towns and the most Mormon kids to ever go to my high school at one time was 5... my last four years in Provo made me forget how the real world really is.  But, I have been blessed with the opportunity to try myself in new ways, strengthen my beliefs and essentially build a new life from the ground up.            

I take it one day at a time.

So far, so good.