Steve -- please e-mail me your new address and phone so we can catch up on everything that has transpired since you moved away from Atlanta!
Oldhouseman -- Culture differences. Hmmm... Well, St. Louis has a lot of Germans, Italians, Irish people and Catholics, and more recently, a lot of Vietnamese, Thai, and Bosnian immigrants, which makes for a great restaurant scene. Cleveland seems to have big Hungarian and Italian communities. Oh, I dunno. People seem more reserved in Cleveland than in St. Louis. St. Louis seems more Southern to me. Which is interesting because St. Louis is commonly criticized for being clique-ish and not particularly friendly to non-natives.
I guess another difference is that St. Louis has a lot of people with old money, if you will, since it was originally settled as a French fur trading post in Spanish territory, and it was originally a larger city than Chicago. Anyway, when native St. Louisans meet you, they always ask you where you went to high school, which seems odd to those of us not from St. Louis, but that's their polite way of trying to find out how much money you have, and how old your money is. I don't get the sense that Cleveland has a large community of people with old money, or old money preoccupations. Or maybe it doesn't seem that way because I have spent most of my time on the West side.
There seems to be a big difference in the way people drive. Clevelanders are very good drivers. They rarely do anything aggressive, they all follow the rules, and on the interstate they all fall into lockstep and drive uniformly at the same speed with the same amount of space in between themselves. Everyone in the fast lane stays there and drives the same speed, everyone in the middle lane stays there and drives the same speed but slightly slower, etc. St. Louis is totally different. Even though the light has turned green, you're risking your life if you don't look both ways before you hit the gas. One or more people sneak through the red light every time. Everyone does their own thing. There are always people in the fast lane driving too slow for even the slow lane, people trying to go fast in the slow lane, etc. Everyone is going a different speed, and everyone everywhere is switching aggressively between two and three lanes of traffic, and passing on the right, so they can all keep doing their own thing. Recently when I was home visiting in St. Louis, I was kind of overwhelmed by it -- so many people going the wrong speed in the wrong lane, and all the activity and unnecessary darting around between lanes. I didn't realize I used to be accustomed to it. Hopefully that answers your question.
