Looking to move to Kansas from Connecticut. (Wichita, Kansas City: rent, employment)

[cp1969]

Originally Posted by bgandl2

It would seem strange anywhere else if someone called me "a gypsy" for having lived in a place for "only" five years...but not in suburban Kansas. Your profile picture has Charlton Heston declaring "Speak English." Speaks volumes. Conformity rules in suburban Kansas.

Thanks for being so tolerant of...a picture.

Took her to the daddy daughter dance in Leawood--I was the only man at the table (average age 40) who grew up with indoor plumbing.

This, dear friends, is a total, complete fabrication. You really need to invent something better than that. Maybe you can get east coast people to believe it, but not here. Modcut- no name calling

Yes, urban KC is pretty cool...but the schools aren't. The suburbs have safe schools but numbing conformity rules there. And then Charlton Heston wants you to speak English.

Why don't you post in some other language if you object to English??

[smellykat]

[quote=bgandl2;8527119].

Took her to the daddy daughter dance in Leawood--I was the only man at the table (average age 40) who grew up with indoor plumbing.

OMG! That is so funny! You get an A in creative writing! I can't resist - were you "smoking funny things" (Kidd Rock) that night?

[bgandl]

Five of them--not one grew up with indoor plumbing. This is the truth. What is even stranger is that this was in Leawood--probably the most wealthy town in the state. To which one could say "good on you for making it." But the conversation never got past farm life.

I couldn't have illustrated my point better than you folks just did.

[thriftylefty]

Originally Posted by bgandl

Five of them--not one grew up with indoor plumbing. This is the truth. What is even stranger is that this was in Leawood--probably the most wealthy town in the state. To which one could say "good on you for making it." But the conversation never got past farm life.

I couldn't have illustrated my point better than you folks just did.

I think "Boot Strap" type millionaires are pretty common in Kansas. The few millionaires that I know personally in Kansas grew up dirt poor. There aren't a lot of second generation millions in Kansas yet out side of the obvious; gas, oil and farming families

[city_data_poster]

bgandl says: "But the conversation never got past farm life."

Well, my friend.....this is, after all, Kansas we're talking about here....what did you expect?

I've traveled thru many parts of Nebraska and Wyoming and it's the same thing in those places.
People tend to look, sound, and dress like their surroundings.....it's not really all that uncommon.

If I travel out to a place like western Kansas I know what to expect....and it's up to me to either accept it or not.....but I can't expect others to change the way they live and/or talk...or expect them to change their interests in life simply because I'm not like they are.

Hey!, if a guy from western Kansas moves to a place like New York City he's in for a big culture shock too...and he needs to learn how to adapt....or move back to Kansas.....plain and simple.

[bgandl]

Originally Posted by city_data_poster

bgandl says: "But the conversation never got past farm life."

Well, my friend.....this is, after all, Kansas we're talking about here....what did you expect?

I've traveled thru many parts of Nebraska and Wyoming and it's the same thing in those places.
People tend to look, sound, and dress like their surroundings.....it's not really all that uncommon.

If I travel out to a place like western Kansas I know what to expect....and it's up to me to either accept it or not.....but I can't expect others to change the way they live and/or talk...or expect them to change their interests in life simply because I'm not like they are.

Hey!, if a guy from western Kansas moves to a place like New York City he's in for a big culture shock too...and he needs to learn how to adapt....or move back to Kansas.....plain and simple.

The thread here is about moving for the first time from CT to KS, for a person who may be in for a surprise--though if she reads the posts, she'll get a good picture of what to expect, both in terms of what is described and how the local folks express it.

Don't get me wrong--I think the Flint Hills are as beautiful as the Grand Canyon, the small towns are amazing, and I could vacation in Kansas for months and never get bored. The problem is when you live and work, day in and day out, in an affluent suburb with educated folks who just cannot tolerate opinions, appearances, races, experiences, ethicities, languages, ideas, politics, food--that aren't EXACTLY familiar to them. Some of these posts illustrate this beautifully.

[cp1969]

Took her to the daddy daughter dance in Leawood--I was the only man at the table (average age 40) who grew up with indoor plumbing.

OK...average age of 40 puts them being born in 1969...if they grew up without indoor plumbing (let's say up to age 12; that's marryin' age round these parts)...that puts houses in Leawood or surrounding areas without indoor plumbing in 1981.

Can any of you hillbilly Leawooders chime in and tell us about your no-indoor-plumbing adventures from the early 1980's? Did y'all have a two-holer out back by the moonshine still? How 'bout in the winter? Them chamber pots probably sold fer BIG money back then! Did ya hafta carry water from the crick or ya'll have a well? Did ya hafta use corn cobs or was ya uptown and used them Monkey Wards catalog pages?

C'mon, let's hear them tales of log-cabin livin', on the edge of civilization, Leawood Kansas, circa 1981!

[thriftylefty]

I always thought of Leawood as a corporate transfers population . I don't think you would find many Kansans in that part of the city. Maybe a few old timers who owned farms south of there and sold their land by the square foot to developers. 103rd used to be the edge of the World for Johnson. Some one told me that the big office building on blue valley Park way that has a pond out front sits at what used to be a farm pond.

[kcmo]

Originally Posted by bgandl

Don't get me wrong--I think the Flint Hills are as beautiful as the Grand Canyon, the small towns are amazing, and I could vacation in Kansas for months and never get bored.

That is some funny ****. . I like the Flint Hills and much of the eastern half of Kansas is much more scenic than most midwestern and great plains states.

It's makes a 300 mille road trip a little better. Driving across Nebraska, Iowa, Indiana, Texas, Illinois etc is much worse than Kansas.

Having said that. I'm "bored" as soon as I get to about Lackman on I-435...

Vacation in Kansas? Really? Most Kansas "tourists" are in the KC area and we all know that 99% of what there is to do in KC and really Kansas, is in KCMO. But for the most part, tourists in KS are people stopped at the gas stations along I-70 asking what the chances of being struck by a tornado are.

OK, now that I got that off my chest.

This idea that Kansas is so different from Connecticut is really sort of silly.

Part of Kansas is dominated by a large metropolitan area (KC). Wichita is a decent sized city and really not a bad city. Kansas has large college towns etc. The state also has a large agricultural culture.

This is not all the different than most other states. KC makes Hartford look very small. Connecticut has many very rural areas and I'm sure they didn't have indoor plumbing at one time either. The people are the same everywhere. Take a person out of small town KS and one out of small town CT and take a person out of suburban Hartford and one out of suburban Johnson County, KS and can you really tell the difference?

If you move from Queens, NY to Topeka, KS, then yea, big time difference. Does anybody do that?

If you move from the Hartford area to the KS suburbs of KC, is it really that big of a difference? Why would it be any different than moving to suburban Boston? If you moved from rural CT to rural KS, is there going to be culture shock? Doubt it.

[bgandl]

As for the men who grew up with no indoor plumbing--of course they didn't grow up in Leawood, but in small farm towns throughout the state.

I've lived all over the country, due to my career (not my Gypsy heritage). There is a huge difference in the level of sophistication and openmindedness. My wife moved from Des Moines and was shocked at the narrow provincialism of suburban Kansans in comparison. The culture is all about the known, the familiar, the comfortable, the norm, the average, and the not-different. If she could see the yawning gap between Iowans and Kansans, imagine what a west coaster like me experinced.

Connecticut? Big difference.

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