Big town, Little town
Coming from the Twin Cities, Fargo-Moorhead felt like a really small town to me when I first got to Concordia. My girlfriend, on the other hand, came from Langdon, North Dakota (a town of about 1,700) so to her, Fargo-Moorhead felt like a huge city. To be honest, we were both right. Moorhead is a small enough town where you can figure out directions quickly and rarely ever hear a police siren. On the other hand, Fargo is big enough to have some well-known bands come and play shows here. Needless to say, you can also always find something to do.
In the Cities, one of my favorite pastimes was going to rock shows, and that was one thing that I thought I was going to have to forfeit when I came up here. Luckily, I was wrong. Since Fargo is the biggest city in North Dakota, tons of bands stop by and play shows. (Some of the most notable ones were MxPx, Yellowcard, Boys Like Girls, and even Bon Jovi). This past week Boys like Girls played at the Venue.
Now when I first heard about this show Marisa and I were thinking that we probably wouldn’t go to it because we went to see them in the Cities earlier this year. (See the blog “When life gives you oranges…”).
No sooner had we made up our minds that we were not going to go than did my buddies ask us to go, and I of course I had to say yes. So it was Marisa and I, my friend Matt and his girlfriend, and another buddy of mine named Leif. (Again, see “When life gives you oranges…”). We kind of expected there to be a ton of little kids running around at the concert, but I didn’t have any idea that there would be this many. As we pulled into the Venue parking lot, I was overcome by the buzzing sound of middle school drama, the smell of a few to many axe sprays by every guy waiting outside, and the sun glare bouncing off of the sea of braces.
Once we got in line, memories of the horrific days of middle school started to flash in my head. But before I drifted too far into a daydream, my attention turned to what could easily have been confused as Napoleon Dynamite budging in front of us. Right when I was about to say something to him about budging, I realized that I had like six years on most of these kids and my transformation back to a middle-schooler would have been complete if I had whined to him about his budging, so I let it go.
Not until we finally got our tickets and got into the Venue did I realize what we were really dealing with. The wall was lined with angry parents who couldn’t believe that they had to buy tickets for themselves and their kids for this concert. About three hundred six graders were intermixed in the “pit,” and it seemed like they had never been to a concert before. I’m just going to say that was a little aggravating. Another thing that was aggravating was that Boys Like Girls’ set was word for word the exact same thing that it was in the Cities, on a different tour. Even though I enjoyed the show, it was annoying that they didn’t change their set list.
I guess the moral of this blog is that no matter what prospective you look at the Fargo-Moorhead area from, it is still a great place to go to school. (I had no idea how to end that blog, because it touched a few topics, but basically the point is that if your scared of Fargo-Moorhead not being the right size you shouldn’t worry because it has the best of both worlds.)