Iowa Is GREAT!
I cannot tell you how pleased I am with both Iowa and Waterloo - this is a great place to be. The pace is less hurried, the cost of living is lower, and people are very nice and friendly. You get smiles and "hellos" everywhere you go.
Some things are very different. Iowa's soil is visually startling to someone who, like me, grew up in the South, because it's incredibly rich, fertile black loam. In Georgia, the soil is a mix of red clay and sand that has to be coaxed (at great expense) to grow any landscaping worth having. There is more corn here than I have ever seen anywhere in my life! Great fields of it line the highways, and there are even some fields within a mile or two of downtown Waterloo. My understanding is that it's all feed and ethanol corn, not food corn. Soybean fields are also everywhere; that crop is rotated with corn to keep fields productive. A lot of vegetation is different, like the pine trees here - they're short-leaf pines, not the long-leaf variety I'm so wearily familiar with (If I never pick long-leaf pine needles out of my hidden windshield wipers' well again, I will be very happy, trust me!).
Waterloo is big enough to have all the major chain stores like Old Navy and Target, but small enough to have local and regionally-owned retail that still has some character. I'm already very fond of Fareway, a grocery store that looks like it's still 1972 (the cashiers even have their hair done!). Hy-Vee, the major grocery chain, is Iowa-owned, but it's pretty much like big chain grocers everywhere, very slick and up-to-date. I've also been introduced to Menard's, which isn't in the South, and it's more to my liking than either Home Depot or Lowe's, both of which are also here.
Thrifts here have good finds; I just ran across a Lane bar cabinet that will house my TV and video machine. It looks something like an old Stromberg-Carlson TV console, which is why I wanted it. Used appliances are plentiful and cheap. Cars are too, but rust is a factor, because the roads are salted in winter.
The friendliness I've run into extends even to businesses; I recently went to Veridian, the big Iowa credit union most people here use instead of a bank, to join up. I was treated with a courtesy that is long gone in many major cities. I did have some difficulty getting a driver's licence and tagging the car I bought after getting here, but that was due to my own lack of foresight. A birth certificate is now a requirement, due to today's security concerns, and I'd left mine in storage in Atlanta, thinking it would be safest there until I got settled here. Big mistake! Fortunately, I was able to order a replacement certificate online, and that took care of that.
On balance, I'm liking it very much. It's colder than Atlanta, of course. In fact, unseasonably cold - even the natives have done a little grousing about it! Cigarettes (unreconstructed smoker here, don't even try, heard it all and going to ignore it) are more expensive, due to taxes. But gasoline is cheaper, especially if you buy ethanol - you get a 10-cent price break off the cost of regular unleaded. It all evens out, I suppose.
Anyway, it's great to be here - I like it fine.
