Madison as a kid

I remember when I was a kid, we used to have these family friends that lived in Madison. By family friends I mean, the parents were friends, but the kids enjoyed each other’s companies and eventually two of them actually became very close best friends too.

One time, our family visited theirs in Madison. It was about a two hour drive, or at least that’s all I remember my dad saying about how long the car drive was. When in reality, thinking about it now, maybe some parts of Madison are two hours away but now that I attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison (which will be the final part that I’m getting to) and that is 1 hour and 20 minutes away, it makes me think that the two hours is just something my dad said, rounding up for kids, to prepare them for the ride. For by doing this, two hours instead of 1 hour/1 hour 20 minutes, you prepare the kids for the worst. And the ride will just be that much smoother from there.

What I remember from Madison, perhaps the first impression, is how clean it was, how green the grass was, and how good it smelt. The green grass makes me think that it must’ve been late spring or summer, since this is Wisconsin and the grass doesn’t get that green until late late spring.

My childhood memories from this trip were mixed outside with the city, and the apartment we were staying at. I imagine the apartment memories won’t be that interesting to recall on for anyone but me. On one hand, this is my blog, but on the other hand, it is actually pretty off topic and unrelated to the topic of this blog post anyway.

The apartment memories are mostly about how it smelled good, was clean, a little dark, but overall cozy and I enjoyed the smells of cooking as well.

The outside- I’ve already touched on it, but I remember we either went outside of the apartment. I don’t remember if it was right outside of the apartment, or we had to drive somewhere to get there. But it was a park or some outside area.

But I can’t emphasize how cool Madison seemed to me as a kid, and I don’t think it’s just because of the overall fun experience- how fun thing seem- as a kid. A trip, a road trip, new sights, new experiences. The actual city itself seemed cool- so green, so clean, so nice. A place I would always want to be.

And then, fast forward to high school: First, I had to decide on a major. Then, go on a website, filter for my major, and find schools. Weigh in things like ranking, etc all that crap. I thought a lot lot about location.

Wisconsin was the last place I wanted to be. I didn’t want to be at Madison, and I never imagined in my wildest dreams me attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Haha 😆well guess where I’m sitting right now? The university itself!

So it’s weird and interesting to see how my view of Madison has changed. It went from some romantic cool place, a place I never imagined attending, in the sense of I just didn’t think about but at the time my view was romantical, to a place I never imagined attending, but in a totally different, non-romantical way.

And then, even coming here, my expectations vs. reality. The second year around is pretty weird, because the stress of knowing everything, where to go, where everything is, to being lonely and making new friends, is completely taken off (I guess, assuming you’re not…you know…that you actually made friends). So my view of Madison seemed to take its rosy colored glasses and inspection off, and then again, it always changing.