Thursday, August 30, 2012

Changes for the Better

I was switching channels, trying to find something beside the GOP convention, a Packer game, and reality shows that aren't in the slightest real when I came to Channel 32, another station with a Packer game, but this time the commentary was in Spanish.

Now this is interesting.  This is not the lily white northeast Wisconsin I grew up in. Times have changed and in this regard, for the better.

Until I was eight or nine, I don't think I ate anything but good Germanic food, heavy on meat and potatoes. Then my mother tried packaged Chef Boyardee pizza and after that canned La Choy chop suey.  Wow, we felt sophisticated eating such exotic food.

I left home when I was eighteen and from then on I lived in places with diverse populations. I came to love the different languages I heard on the street in places like Los Angeles and Chicago.- It was wonderful to try restaurants that served ethnic foods, so different from the blue plate specials of the Midwest.

I moved back to Seymour to raise my son in a small town with a good school system. That was thirty years ago.  I could get Chinese food in Appleton or Green Bay and after a while there were Taco Bells.   It wasn't the same thing.

But five years or so, Kary's Restaurant opened up downtown with authentic Mexican food.  Last year, we got our first Chinese restaurant.   We have pizza parlors, too.  

These days, we can buy a much wider variety of food at the supermarket.  There's an entire section devoted to Mexican food.  The Hmong community is a big part of our Tuesday farmers market.  We can get produce there that I didn't know existed when I was a child.  Bok choy anyone?

And as of today, we can watch our own Green Bay Packers play with Spanish play by plays.

Who would have thought?   

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