1. Central PA has better plumbing. Seriously, the water pressure is phenomenal. I don’t know why this is.
2. Central PA has no wireless Internet access anywhere that I’m aware of.
3. Drivers in Central PA do not know how to merge. They just come to the end of the ramp and stop until all the traffic goes by. (To date, I have avoided rear-ending anyone, but I’ve had some close calls, as it catches me off-guard every time.)
4. Central PA has Tastykakes, Middleswarth potato chips, pickled eggs, and shoo fly pie. Yum.
5. When it snows in Central PA on a Saturday, no one leaves the house, and all of the church services are cancelled on Sunday. (Many people, like my mom, just stay home and watch Dr. Schuller/the Crystal Cathedral on TV.)
6. In Central PA, you have to go to a state store to buy wine or liquor and a beer distributor to buy beer. You can only buy beer by the case or by the barrel or 1/2 barrel (which you might think would discourage people from drinking beer, but you’d be wrong.)
7. This is more of a western PA thing I guess, but I am not exaggerating when I say that every male at the Somerset rest stop on the PA turnpike was wearing a Steelers jersey yesterday morning.
8. Central PA is way prettier than Chicagoland. Snow-covered mountains and ice-covered trees.
9. In Central PA, the two most popular topics at the supermarket are: 1) the weather, and 2) how crowded the supermarket is.
10. The people in Central PA were way more excited about the football play-offs yesterday than the people of Chicago.
I am very glad to be home in Chicagoland with my kids and my husband and my Internet access (and I also have this thing about liking to be where all my stuff is, which is why I don’t really like to travel that much.) I love Chicago. But I will always be a Pennsylvanian in my heart.
