Today I will be flying out of Greenville en route to Des Moines, Iowa to begin a month of living on a farm. To study away during May at Furman University – this course is known as a “May Experience” – is fairly common among students, but usually students choose a program that will allow them to spend the month on a beach in Bermuda or do a pub crawl in Ireland. This is where I am different from my classmates,  I wanted to experience a different lifestyle instead of being a tourist who is only able to see a shade of the environment in which they are living. By living and working on a farm for the next 21 days I will hopefully will be able to encompass what it truly means to be an Iowan.

I keep visualizing a setting similar to the one in “Smallville,” – a show that reveals the upbringing of a local farm boy named Clark Kent who would later become Superman – where there is only open land and friendly town-goers who wave as you walk by. While I know working on the farm won’t be as easy as depicted in the show, in part because I do not have Clark’s “superpowers”, I am rather looking forward to doing some “good ole fashion hard work.” Through this hard work I can hopefully gain an accurate perspective on a different lifestyle and become more aware of life in a different region in our country. By living in a suburb for the entirety of my life I know little of a place as rural as Iowa and the culture that goes along with it.

While the barn itself was just as I had imagined, the inside of the house took me by surprise. Instead of walking into what I had imagined as an old outdated house, I was pleasantly surprised to see Iowans were as modernized as the east coast. However the rushed feeling of the northeast was countered by the calm and relaxing pace of the Midwest. Dinner – or supper as they call it in Iowa – was not being rushed to be thrown onto the table, instead everyone in the house congregated to have simple “how was your day” type of conversations. I feel as though my life has already begun slowing and I am interested to see if it will pick up during the duration of the course.