[Strange Meat]

Originally Posted by VelvetElvis

I'm 3 months late to this party but wanted to add a little perspective from someone who grew up in the "west" and only later, after living in Boston, Tampa and Milwaukee came to understand the geographical and cultural significance of it all. A westerner is very different than a midwesterner. We don't have an intuitive sense for the power and amazing brevity of a summer storm front. We don't grow up amid fields of corn. Humidity is something other people talk about. Our rivers are your streams or canals. On the other hand, we spend a significant portion of our lives above 4000'. Your mountains aren't even our hills. 12" of water a year is a good year. 90 degrees feels OK here. Most of our lakes are reservoirs. We can ski and mountain climb by middle school. The soft sputtering of nighttime sprinklers is second nature. I wouldn't necessarily call it western pride, because our issues and problems are just as prevelant as any other region, but if you grew up in the west and have later lived for a significant amount of time in a different region of the US, you know you are a "westerner." In my mind, the midwest ends at Roosevelt Nat'l Park, Black Hills, the Rocky Mountain front range and then who knows what happens in Texas... I'm all about complexity and ambiguity, but with this issue there is little debate. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you need to spend a little time in Idaho, Montana, Utah, Arizona or Nevada. You'll figure it out. It's different here.

Yeah.

Denver isn't midwest. At all.

Sure it sits on the plains, but the culture seems to be western.



According to this, I've lived in 8 of those regions!