Denver Geographic

People look different here. There's a little person at the girls' school -- boy? girl? I couldn't tell you -- who looks so French, with bushy curly black hair and striking blue eyes. He/she always wears black turtlenecks. He/she could be a male/female model one day.
I guess that says something, too. In my former Mom-and-apple-pie town, girls wore pink and boys had clothes with trucks on them. No ambiguity there, no beguiling androgyny at school. It stands to reason that people here WOULD look different -- there's more of a cosmopolitan mix here than the relative Scotch-Irish homogeneity of NC -- but still, it never fails to surprise me. Also, it's because people here dress differently and have different attitudes. For example, in Smithfield it never really bothered me that December holiday discussions were Christmas-centric. After all, it was a small Southern town in the largest tobacco-growing county in the nation. If you were to bet that nobody in the class was celebrating Hanukkah or Ramadan or Diwali, you would win that bet. The teachers talked about Christmas around the world, and there would be a brief state-mandated bone thrown to Hanukkah, but that was about it. Here, you just can't get away with that. This must be one of Bill O'Reilly's least favorite cities in the world.

We have a large international community too. There's a large Ethiopian community, and every once in a while you see beautiful people who have recently arrived in the country, still in traditional African dress. They are usually tall and thin with round saucer eyes and flat cheekbones and small mouths, who speak mellifluous and (to me) inscrutable Amharic to each other. Usually they're in Target with a relative, being shown how to Americanize themselves. I wish I could speak Amharic so I could tell them we have enough Americans already, and not nearly enough Ethiopians.
We also have a high Bosnian refugee population here; and I find that I can frequently pick the Bosnians out. They have distinctive, narrow-set eyes with long noses and, frequently, wide-set chins. (Or: They have large, wide eyes, and everything else is the same.) They are usually big-boned; and they are all, in my experience, extraordinarily pleasant. I have made friends with a Bosnian woman, and I would love to ask her about her homeland and the war, but I'm afraid to. How do you broach that in conversation?
Apparently, there are Hungarians too. I live a block away from Hungarian Freedom Park, in which a large statue commemorates the Hungarian Uprising of 1969. Candles are frequently lit at its base.

*I can't believe I am extolling the cosmopolitan virtues of Denver, which is a wee burg next to Brooklyn. Kathleen, please don't be insulted.