I moved from non-rural Louisiana to Boston and it involved a radical reimagining of my behavior:

- Understanding how people spoke. There are more, and more different, languages spoken and cultures in Cambridge than even the most diverse parts of Louisiana. I met in Boston for the first time people from, and not just culturally descended from, India, Pakistan, Spain, Israel, Peru, Ethiopia, just off the top of my head. Even if English dominates, it's a very different English, where the same words mean different things, and new words are used that didn't exist in Louisiana.

The kind of English coming out of my mouth, my vocabulary and accent, marked me as a very different kind of person and set first impressions that I didn't want or intend — and it wasn't a "cosmopolitan"/"hick" binary, it was more of a matrix of rich/poor, smart/dumb, educated/not, straight/gay, English first/second, Black/not, local/not ("Worcester"). I confused the hell out of people, both on those dimensions and also with what I was literally saying, if I didn't modulate my speech to be more like theirs. Meanwhile I had some interesting times as a French speaker overhearing conversations about me that were not meant for me, because I didn't look like a French speaker, because most French speakers there were non-white Haitians or from Francophone African nations.

- The places I shopped. Back then Boston had the kinds of stores and markets that I had never actually seen in real life while living in Louisiana. Other than Market Basket, the one true constant in life (except apparently anywhere else in the country).

- The different cultural touchstones. Y'all. "Milkshakes" being liquid, and "frappes" being milkshakes, except at Starbucks. "Regulah" coffee. St. Patrick's Day being a less fun but equally drunk Mardi Gras (and no Mardi Gras despite all the Catholics? Then what's the point of being Catholic?). Baseball — like, we have it, but it's kind of a joke sport people only care about if LSU is good or the Astros were especially bad. Everything that comes from moving from a red state to a blue state — less homophobia, less xenophobia, more classism, more weird and weirdly enforced rules. Candlepin. The whole concept of state-run liquor. Vastly different types and intensities of racism. People in Boston go to live music shows and don't dance. Almost nobody white in Boston knows how to hold a cookout, like a real proper whole-neighborhood meal, and the word "cookout" just means BBQ there.

- How I got around. Public transit! Everyone else is complaining constantly about the MBTA and I'm like, I get to ride a train? Every day??? And if I miss it I can also take one or two buses???? And it might catch on fire??????? Before that I was putting 120 miles a day on my car to commute, almost all of it straight-line highways. I'd never in my life set foot on non-school-bus public transit. It took me a solid month just to understand that I really could get almost anywhere with just walking and transit.

- Conversely, owning a truck is by far the easiest way to make friends in Boston.

- How close everything was. The nearest anything for me in Louisiana was typically 5 to 10 miles away. People in Boston had no concept of distance; transit abstracted it away into minutes. Neighborhoods were walkable; I'd regularly used maybe two or three notable paved sidewalks in my life before I wound up in Boston. Driving the length of my old college commute, which had been almost all highway with little to nothing to even stop for, would send me through a dozen small cities in the NE.

- Snow! Holy shit. Snow!!! My god!!!!! The snow!!!!!!!! Seven feet of snow that doesn't go away! Parking sweeps for snow plows! SNOW PLOWS! Lines out the door to get ice cream when it's a balmy 33 degrees out! Yak Trax! MITTENS

- And in the summer, as the man in the show said, I had to learn to accept that air conditioning was a privilege and not a right.

Lived there three years and it was life-changing. Got married to someone who had travelled far, far more than I had, domestically and abroad, but never to the southeast. Brought them to Louisiana a couple of times and the inverse of all of the above was wild to watch them experience.