Perks of small towns ( or Day 16 of the challenge)

Banu Ibragim
Aug 28, 2017 · 2 min read
a random picture taken from google images

I signed a contract to work in a small town starting this fall. Everyone is confused why I have decided to move back to the place where I come from. There are monetary rewards for this relocation of course, but most importantly there are these perks that most people tend to ignore in living in small towns.

We used to live in a town like city (administratively this is a city, but everyone call it town :) )in the South Western part of the country. We used to shop in the same places and go out to the same places. We used to have a butcher who later became like a relative to us. We used to go to the same boutique to buy shoes. We used to go to the same person to buy honey. We used to have our own favorites for each single item we used to buy. The benefits were huge from discounts to recommendations of whether to make a purchase or not. Then we moved to the big city.

Generally, we were happy to locate to a new place. We made new neighbors and friends. We started shopping in big places. We didn’t have to approach different people to buy different items. We could finish our weekly shopping in two hours most. However, despite these conveniences, our food tasted differently. To be honest it didn’t have any taste. We were not happy and more than that we were confused why that was happening.

Then one week ago, we went to the small shop in the area we live now. I wanted to buy a packet of chicory. The shop assistant looked at the expiration date and refused to sell it to us. Why the expired chicory was still on the shelves is for another discussion. She was just dutiful. However, that act reminded me of all our favorite shopping places and people in our hometown. Our food tastes differently now because most probably we are not sold the best products as we were used to there although we are paying the price.

On the other hand, we have lost the source of communication with various people on a daily basis. Shopping was more a like ritual out there, and we enjoyed doing it as it involved sharing respects and exchanging information, and sometimes gossips. We had a sense of belonging to the community we lived in. As a family we knew a lot of people and a lot of people knew us. During festivals and other gatherings, we looked like a big family and we had a lot of fun together. That was the big perk of all about living in the small town which we lost by moving to the big city.

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