Puppet Head

When I first moved from my hometown of Latin America, FL to the Horse Capital of the world 5 years ago, I experienced some extreme culture shock.

The insects are twenty times larger here. In the city I was born and raised in, we had a small, scarce population of wasps. Here, there is an overpopulation of these monstrous wasps the size of sparrows, and if one of those stings you, its time to call 911! In fact, one did sting me in the back of the neck one time, and I thought someone had hit me with a baseball bat!

Not only do they have giant wasps here, but they also have an entire host of prehistoric insects that can put a serious hurtin’ on you!

They have this type of exotic ant that has a fur that looks more beautiful than almost any insect I’ve ever seen before, but if it bites you, I’m told you will be screaming in torture for days.

Another example: where I grew up, you might see a horsefly every 15 or 20 years. Here, I’ve seen some sort of freak, nightmarish, mutated super-gargantuan horsefly that must be at least 50 times the size of any horsefly I’ve ever seen in my life! If that thing were to bite anyone, they would be in dire need of a blood transfusion! If it bit a horse, that horse would probably die from blood loss! One time I tried spraying one with wasp and hornet killer, but it only flew happily away, slightly annoyed that I had gotten it wet!

I was also used to having small mosquitoes where I grew up. Here, however, the mosquitoes are so large that the hospitals use them whenever they run out of needles!

In my hometown, most of the spiders only get as large as your thumbnail. Here in Redneck land, they get larger than your hand! Not only that, but you have deadly ones here as well. Walking into spider webs that stick to your face, arms, hands and clothes has become a daily nuisance. I have sprayed some of those monster spiders with bug spray, and they don’t even seem to notice. One time when I sprayed one, he jumped 3 feet from the wall at me! I think he was attempting to grab the spray can from my hand and spray me with it!

Several weeks ago, my friend and his family came to visit. My friend still lives in the city where I grew up—none of his escape attempts from drug-infested Fascist Land have been successful yet. After eating dinner at my house, his entire family and I went for a walk. His daughter suddenly put her hand over her ears, with a look of shocked terror, and cried out, “What’s that weird noise? It’s so loud!” Living in the city, she had never heard the sound of crickets before.

Another thing that I had to get used to was the weather here. I was raised in a very tropical climate. I moved up here during the coldest winter so far, and I thought I was in Alaska. My sister bought me some type of coat that you unzip and it becomes two coats, which is something I had never heard of before. Where I grew up, we hardly ever needed to wear a sweater, let alone a coat.

It was also hard to get used to people actually waving at you. Where I grew up, if someone was waving at you, it was usually with one finger, and it was usually because you had done something in traffic to tick him or her off. Also, people up here use guns for hunting, which is a completely new concept for me. Back home, people use guns only for robbing other people, or to shoot people that wave at them.

The hardest thing to get used to, upon first moving here, was when I began hearing this strange language that I was not used to hearing. It was very odd, because I could actually understand what they were saying. To my utter shock, I soon realized that the language that almost everyone spoke here was English. I had gotten so used to everyone speaking Spanish that hearing everyone speak English sounded very strange.