First published in The Emporia Gazette July 25, 2006

SIMON SAYS 'EXOTIC'

by Cheryl Unruh

“Kansas is pleasingly exotic,” Simon wrote.

Kansas? Exotic?

Of all the descriptive words I’ve heard used about Kansas, exotic has never been one of them.

A few weeks ago I received a message from a guy named Simon who lives in Leamington Spa, England. He found Flyover People on the Internet and sent a friendly e-mail in appreciation of our Web site.

“Came across your site because I’ve never been to Kansas, love the idea of being slap bang in the middle of the U.S.A. and decided to find out about it,” he wrote.

What on earth could make our state seem exotic?

For me, the word exotic creates images of snake charmers at the Marrakesh Market in Morocco, where at night, huge lanterns cast shadows on open-air tables that offer crackling hot bowls of snail soup -- or so I’ve read.

Exotic would be the keel-billed toucan, a jungle bird in Belize. It would be a 30-foot-long anaconda that squeezes the life from its prey in the Amazon.

“Where do I start?” Simon said, responding to my inquiry. “Dave’s pics of the stormy sky over Emporia would have 99% of Brits shrieking with terror (at the skies, not the pics.)”

“I hear Kansas has a ‘bit’ of wind - another reason why your ‘normality’ is so utterly bizarre to me,” he said.

“We get the odd windy day here,” Simon wrote, “Even a hurricane once in a blue moon, which makes the top of the national news when some slates get blown off someone’s roof—but in general we have a pretty maritime, gentle climate. In fact, the government here issued an official weather warning yesterday because ‘temperatures could reach into the 90s in the south.’ My newspaper is full of heat stroke advice.”

And he was fascinated by our “huge landscapes.”

“England is, generally speaking, small-scale,” Simon wrote. “There are a lot of different things to see in any view. Drive out of a small town in Kansas and there might be the straight road ahead, wire fence, fields on each side and the sky. That must be weird. And hardly any cars!”

For us, Kansas is as ordinary as a nickel. Could our barbed-wire fences and straight roads actually be cause for amazement?

Exotic is a matter of perspective. It is something foreign, strange or different.

Strange or different. Well, perhaps that’s England, not Kansas. Recently, when a friend returned from a trip to Great Britain, she mentioned that for breakfast, restaurants offered baked beans.

Now I hardly ever (OK, never) eat baked beans from my breakfast bowl, so I asked Simon about that.

He described them as canned white beans in a tomato sauce.

“(It’s) a staple Brit food thing. But great with breakfast if you’re doing something active like, er, climbing mountains or working in a factory or something… stealing a car? You’d need a baked bean breakfast for something like that.”

I mentioned that I once ate Welsh rarebit: toast with a cheesy beer mixture on top. I guess I had the bitter Americanized version. It was awful.

“Remember, our cheese is often really tasty and our beer, ditto,” he said.

Simon has even heard of Rev. Fred Phelps who is not a native Kansan, but our burden nonetheless.  

“PHELPS!!! Yes! Google Kansas and he’s one of the first people who comes up -- and you wonder why we think you’re odd. He’s just great – enormously weird – and we Brits love you guys to be that way,” he wrote.

So, for good or ill, Kansas has an international and exotic reputation.

And we’re just pups on this side of the Atlantic. Simon hinted that Kansas is still in its youth.

 “…My house is older than your state,” he said.

Copyright 2006 by Cheryl Unruh

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