Urban/Suburban/Rural Life

I lived in the suburbs between Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, for the majority of my life, from the time I was 2 until I moved out of my parents' house and went to college. The suburbs that I lived in were very typical in the way that the book describes the suburbs. Most of our neighbors were also white and middle class.

When I went to college at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, I was exposed to different types of people, though many were still from areas similar to where I was from. There were also people from very small towns and a few people from bigger cities. College Station is mainly a college town, as one would assume from the name, and though it is expanding quickly, it still has a very small-town feel. There are bigger cities within driving distance, such as Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Dallas/Fort Worth, but many of the permanent residents of College Station enjoy living in a smaller community.

After college, I lived in Okinawa, Japan, on a U.S. military base for four years, where I was able to travel quite a bit to different parts of Asia. I got to see many different living situations in other countries, and it was interesting to compare these countries to what I was familiar with. I traveled to some of the bigger cities in mainland Japan, including Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, Nagasaki, etc, and comparing these cities with big cities in other countries like China, the Philippines, Thailand, and even Europe and the U.S. was interesting in that Japanese big cities seem very different from other countries' big cities. In Japan, most people dress professionally in public and things are much more organized and clean than in other countries that I've been to. I found South Korean cities to be similar to Japan in this way.

Now that I am back in the states, I definitely miss some things about Japan, especially when I go to the big cities here in the U.S. The courtesy and customer service in Japan could not be matched, and this is seen even in simple exchanges on the streets and on the subway systems, which I think go against what is usually assumed about large cities.