> Coming to New England, the only real impressions I had of the region were based upon stereotypes and Saturday Night Live skits. Realizing that everything must be the complete truth, I entered New Hampshire looking for undeniable proof so that I can write my thesis.
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> Theory number one: Old people are funny*. One of our first stops was at a grocery store to get food for the car ride. After trying to decipher the names of the foreign stores of the region, we found a cryptically titled, "Shop and Save." After gathering up most of what we needed, Shannon and I rendevoused in the milk section where she was quickly accosted by an elderly shopper. She wanted to know where the nonfat milk was. Shannon was about to help her when the lady turned to another person and asked the same thing. As people scrambled to find not only the right type of milk but also the right brand, another shopper commented that this lady was a regular shopper and that this was her normal routine. Finally, the nonfat milk in the size and brand that she wanted was found. Unfortunately, the milk was labeled as "Skim Milk" and another exchange ensued about skim milk being the same as nonfat. As we walked away from the milk section, we heard the lady exclaim, "Wait, this is nonfat, I need the one and a half or two percent!" We ran. Last we saw, she was making her way to the checkout counter for more hilarity.
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> *I have bias towards old people. All ages can be funny. Back off.

New Englanders aren't crazy, merely quaint. Hang around with them a while, and you will learn to understand them a little. I like to call their language "New English," but there really isn't anything new about it. Did they tell you where to pock the cah?
It's easy to find your way around in New England. You just have to think small. The distance between towns is about 1/4 as far as it is in the rest of the East and about 1/10 as far as between towns in the West. In some cases your front bumper is in one town while the back bumper is in the other. Many of the roads have been in the same place for centuries and their width, and curves reflect this. Narrow crooked roads are no problem for horse-drawn vehicles.
If New Englanders seem rude, don't be offended. They don't intend to sound that way. It's just their speech patterns that can be short and clipped. In some parts, they put a little inflection on the end of a sentence that makes them sound argumentative, but again, they don't mean it that way.
Some of the really old houses* have very small doors. They used to build them that way to keep heat from escaping in winter. Just another example of "think small."
Another thing I like about New England is that you can easily visit several states in one day.
Howard
*An old house in New England can easily be 300 years old.