Geekrant vs The Case of The Cultural Capital Clique

 Greetings, Geekranters! Thank you for flattering my humble blog with your patronage (note to self: feigned humility is excessively annoying) and coming on this journey with me. Seriously, all joking aside, it means a lot to me that people read my words and take some enjoyment from them. It also brings a degree of catharsis to the experience of living so far from all I once knew. I am an exile, after all, albeit a willing one and an individual who exiled himself for love, but I am still disconnected from whence I came.

Many would be surprised the difficulties that occur between two cultures externally similar but internally separated by many things. So much of our identity, no matter how much we feel that we chose to be the way that we are, is defined by our culture. We are products of our environment, our upbringing, our education, our relationships (romantic, filial, platonic or otherwise), the world around us. As a man who lived in the same town for most of his first 32 years of life, I have never been separated from my cultural comfort zone, until I moved here.

Now that isn't to say that I am unhappy here, I regret nothing about my path to this place. As I have said, this is an exile but one of my own choice and an exceedingly happy one at that. Still, I have to accept that despite my happiness, I am still far removed from acting or thinking like a native Wisconsinite and Madisonian, and I am definitely a great distance from thinking like an American.

Sometimes cultural differences and the slight disorientation that they can bring are front and centre, easy for me to spot and come to terms with, other times they are unseen, hovering outside of sight, humming, like the mosquitoes that define the hour of summer dusk here.

I am not complaining, but explaining why I write this blog and extending a thank you to everyone who reads it. It helps to know that people are interested in my petty internal conflicts of the day. I salute you! To all Madisonians and Wisconsinites, thank you for accepting me into your city and state, for this is my home now, even if it is not the place of my birth.

As it happens, Madison is full of culture, so that makes more to adjust to but let's face it, that's not really a bad thing. For many people in the rest of the world, who encounter America primarily through television, music and film, it can seem like only two Americas exist, one is urban, fast paced, full of action and adventure, it is the locale of cop shows, superhero movies and hip hop music; the other is rural, slow paced, full of old fashioned morals and ideas, so called “rednecks” and survivalists, it is the locale of feel-good heart warming tv shows, the Waltons and country music and bluegrass. These are of course, stereotypes and exaggerations but maybe we still view America in these terms.

We are, of course, missing out. America, I am learning is so many different countries in one. One of its traditional mottoes, appearing on “The Great Seal of the United States”, is “E Pluribus Unum” (literally translated “out of many-one”)which shows that the United States considers itself the sum of its people. So while it is definitely “one nation, under God, indivisible...” it is also a melting pot of civilisation and culture.

Each city is unique and although America has more than its fair share of bland suburban settlements, it is in love, for the most part with its myriad of cultural cliques. Madison is definitely a fantastic example of this. Simply from looking at the place names within the city and its surrounding communities, one can see the influence different sets of immigrants have had on the place. There are Native American (Waunakee, Monona,), English, (Middleton, Cambridge), Italian (Verona), New Glarus (named by Swiss immigrants after their home town). There are also French place names throughout the rest of Wisconsin.

Madison is an enigma, combining a bustling college town (complete with leafy academic streets and fraternity houses), a working class blue collar area (Oscar Meyer, one of the largest manufacturers of processed meats in America used to have its main factory here), hi-tech green community (Epic Systems, a computer software company specialising in healthcare software has its HQ in Verona, a Madison suburb, not to mention the parks and bike trails) and state capital. politicans, labourers, construction workers, students, young professionals all find their homes here.

Madison somehow seems to live to kickback, even at its busiest times, people find something to do to relax and enrich their lives. Somewhere down on the University's Memorial Union Terrace, where many a day can be whiled away in the summer simply watching boats on the water, you will see someone wearing a Wisconsin Badgers shirt, which is hardly surprising because the whole city wears them. Sports are an important part of the culture here, be they the more traditional summer type or the more unusual, to us British at least, winter sports.

The lakes are never truly empty, whether it is in the form of some variety of boat tacking its way across the aquamarine surfaces or a man ice fishing in the dead of winter, there is always movement on the water. There are kayakers and canoeists, runners jogging along John Nolan Drive past the summer breeze blown white caps of Lake Monona, triathletes braving those same whitecaps and swimming for glory.

It is a dizzying plethora of different hobbies and interests. Semi professional and amateur teams are all around. The summer has its baseball in the form of the Madison Mallards, who play on the North Side of Madison in the Northwoods League, the winter, its ice hockey, in the shape of the Madison Capitals. The town has a soccer club, the Madison 56ers, an Ultimate Frisbee club, the Madison Radicals, even a rugby union club.

Of course that doesn't even begin to match the status that the University sports teams enjoy here. The football team's stadium Camp Randall, built on the site of a Union army training camp from the U.S. Civil War, easily seats over 80,000 people and is often full on game days. That is equal to over a third of Madison's total population contained in a stadium that up until 2013 seated more people than the state's NFL stadium. The student section is famously raucous.

Speaking of raucous students, no true analysis of Madison's cultural backdrop would be complete without mentioning State Street, a thoroughfare that begins at the University Campus and ends on Capitol Square. Home to bars, theatres, unique shops and stores filled with oddities, all leading up to the Capitol building.

State Street Brats is a perfect example of the eclectic mix of building styles and uses along the street, it is essentially a hot dog restaurant (although here in Wisconsin, the subtle difference between the humble hot dog and the meatier Bratwurst is accentuated, another cultural difference that blows my mind) with its own condiment bar (for stacking the Brat up just as you want) and wooden badger statue, housed in a Germanic style building, this is a favourite with students and visitors alike.

The cultural influences here come in a hodgepodge, a mishmash, if you will of different architectural styles and unique hostelries which at one moment threatens to overwhelm you and yet somehow works. The neo-classical feel of the Capitol, the red brick of the Red Gym, Bascom Hall's feeling of 1800s academia, the marble broadside of the Monona Terrace, Frank Lloyd Wright's posthumous masterpiece standing like a medieval ceremonial landing for distinguished guests and royalty.

Busy and at the same time, strangely peaceful, Madison manages to go about the business of a regional urban centre and state capitol while never feeling like it is. It never feels crowded, something that is strange to me coming from an island country with limited space especially within its urban areas. Madison has an incredible feeling of space and openness even within its narrower streets and maybe that has something to do with the proximity of farmland and wilderness to the city.

One day on a trip outside the borders of the city, not twenty minutes from where I sit right now, my wife and I had our car overflown by a bald eagle, something that I would never would have imagined I would see in my lifetime outside of a zoo. I have also had my driving practice interrupted by the presence of a flock of turkey vultures in the middle of the road. This feeling of wildness only being a matter of miles away suffuses the city and adds to its character.

This is the land of my exile, this new world where I find myself with my wife (of three years as of yesterday) and our new life together. Madison is a beautiful city, an enigma of different influences and cultures, it is at the beginning of my adaptation to this new life, this is where I live and the unique place that I must understand. Maybe that is the experience of every person who comes to this new world, right back to the first settlers at Jamestown in Virginia, a world to be understood and mastered until you feel at home. I intend to do just that.

This post started out with the intention of talking about culture and cultural differences but as I wrote it, I realised that I am still trying to wrap my head around the city that I live in. It fascinates me, because it is so different from anything where I am from. I am an explorer, a wide-eyed debutante in “The City of Four Lakes” and I am happy to be such.

So, thanks for bearing with me on this journey through my Madisonian feelings and I promise I will talk about hilarious differences that I've found between the nations in due course. Until next time. Goodbye Geekranters!