Post 8: Living in Wisconsin

Weeks ago, when I found out I was going to Horicon for the summer I went google crazy.  I sifted through the internet for hours figuring out what Waupun, WI was.  But all of the Google Street View and Wikipedia articles coudn't prepare me for what life is like in rural Wisconsin.

I learned that if you weren't a farmer, you probably worked at one of the local prisons.  Waupun, a city of ten thousand, has 3 of them and it turns out that its known as the "prison city."  If you didn't work there you might be working at one of the various quarries hidden between the hills.  Either way you probably did most of your grocery shopping at the local Piggly Wiggly or Market Fresh Foods, the only two grocery stores in town.  There is a single McDonald's in town, a brand new Taco Bell and Subway along with a Walgreens.  Otherwise the stores in this town are unrecognizable to someone from South Florida.


Wisconsin is awesome, every morning I wake up at around 6am and get ready to drive no more than 15 minutes to the wildlife refuge.  The road that takes me there is surrounded on both sides by the marsh for a decent part of the trip which adds to the scenic value.  The better part, perhaps the best part is driving directly towards this range of hills just a few miles into the distance.  I get to see an early sunrise against these hills and this marsh, almost every morning.

On top of all this, I've made god friends with Dan at the Family Video and Kevin at Chang Jiangs the local chinese restaurant.  I have enjoyed living in small town America, where numerously the vast majority of cars on the road are in fact American brands and everybody seems to now almost everyone.