Oregon reviews were requested, and I shall provide! I love, love, love talking about my home state, and have lived all over it =)
- City, State, Country:Corvallis, Oregon, USA
ETA: overview. Corvallis is a college town. About 20-30 min west of I-5 in the Willamette Valley. Much of life in the town revolves around the University. It is extremely well educated (second only to Cambridge for advanced degree IIRC) but also very white. Well, all of Oregon is very white, but Corvallis especially. Mind you, it is not outwardly intolerant or anything, but just know that you won't see that much diversity here, and resulting societal benefits from that.
Wow thank you for this and all the others, lots of helpful info to encourage even more of us crazy Californians to come up and ruin your state. :) Since my inquiry post, I actually got to visit Corvallis and generally liked it quite a bit (although, yes, VERY white and on the small side compared to what I'm used to in the Bay Area.) The people though? Wow, it actually kind of took some getting used to how friendly everyone was. Like, every person you pass in a park and half the people anywhere near you in a restaurant will at least smile, wave and say hi to you, and possibly stop to chat friendly. My friend who lives there now moved from NY and the culture shock for her and her husband was pretty big. ("Who the hell are you and why are you touching my baby?? Oh, you are just a nice person who wants to say hi and you think our kid is cute... hmm okay.") It seems like if you want to have an easy time as a newcomer finding pretty immediate community in a very family-friendly place, Corvallis is a good bet. We didn't end up deciding to take the plunge but it's on our possibilities list for the future, I think.
Ohhh man I bet it would be a huge culture shock! One of my friends lived in Sweden for a year, and when she came back she was weirded out by how chatty and friendly people are. When a checker asks how your day is, they usually want to know. And like you said, people legitimately just want to chat!
And to be fair, this is most of Oregon =) IME, less so Portland and Salem. But Eugene, Ashland (last I was there), Corvallis, Albany, and certainly the small towns like Dallas, Independence, Roseburg, Junction City, Alsea, La Pine, and so on are like that. Sometimes people are almost aggressively friendly haha. (Obviously not everyone is like this, there are jerks everywhere, but it's definitely more common than elsewhere. I find checkers to be weirdly standoffish when I travel to other states).
The following border-on-absurd things have happened to me:
-At a very large fair, a woman I had never seen before asked me to watch her baby and her 5 year old while she took her 3 year old to the bathroom (bad blowout+toddler meltdown). I was probably about 16-17 and there with a group of friends. She was gone like 20 minutes, maybe more. All of us just stayed and chilled with the kiddos until she got back.
-One time, husband and I were towing a boat and the bearings seized up. We were stuck by I-5 waiting on a tow. In the ~2 hours we were there, more than 10 people stopped to see if we needed food, water, cell phone, etc. We actually knew a couple of them (OR is a small state outside of Portland, I know someone about 1/2 the time I go anywhere). We even ended up sending the dog home with one of them!
-Multiple, multiple occasions I've been to a coffee shop and been told "nope, you don't owe anything, someone earlier paid toward the next 5 (or whatever) number of people getting their coffee! Have a good day."
And then I guess I do the same, because I can't *count* how many people I've parallel parked their cars when they're struggling, or jump started their cars, or seen them unloading something and stopped and helped, etc.
Oregon rocks =)
But seriously seriously we aren't joking about it being grey, and rainy, and depressing. A ton of Californians leave after their first winter. With good reason. No sun shine, zero, days on end.