Milwaukee, WI

I arrived in Milwaukee around 4pm. Hoping to see Stone Temple Pilots perform at the Marcus Amphitheater during the city's annual Summerfest. The event is equivalent to San Diego's Street Scene with a number of stages and bands performing from hip-hop to country to rock.

I got a hold of Mike and Nichole, two couchsurfers willing to host me and show me around the area. I planned on meeting them at the event.

In comparison to Madison, Milwaukee is entirely different. In Madison, the state Capital building absorbs the landscape and seems to be the central architectural piece. In Milwaukee, there is no such architecture that captures the eye, unless you consider Miller Park (where the Brewer's play) to be an aesthetic piece of art.

Milwaukee is clearly a blue collar town. It's home to the Miller Brewing Company, and used to be home to Pabst, Schlitz, and Blatz brewing companies. There's several manufacturing plants and people's attitudes tend to resonate the tough hard working mentality. The maintenance and aesthetics of the streets don't seem to be of top priority to the city. All the roads seemed to be under construction, and were in poor shape.

I sat at a local coffee house downtown when a drunkard came in feeling a pressing need to let the clerks know he was a good person, and that he wasn't drunk. The clerks appeased him for quite a while, and he spent a good portion of his time trying to re-convince everyone that he just came in to use the bathroom. As he walked out the door he intruded on people's conversations so he could apologize for intruding. He made some people so uncomfortable that they had to leave.

I would have thought that my experience at the coffee shop wasn't an accurate indication of what the rest of Milwaukee was like, but as the night went on there was little that I experienced that made me change my mind.

Milwaukee n's don't like people who ride bikes. In fact, bike riders are rare in this city, and i learned this fairly quickly through humiliation. I was riding on Wisconsin Ave. when an angry driver threw his food at me because I was sharing his lane. I walked my bike from that point on. But that didn't make it seem any better, because later that night a girl approached me asking for a light for her cigarette. I told her I didn't smoke, and she sarcasticly replied, "of course you don't, you ride a bike!" And as I was leaving Summerfest there was a man on his cell phone gesturing to me with discontent, telling his friend that he was "tired of this shit," referring to my bike.

Overall, Summerfest didn't resonate with me. The atmosphere seemed angry and filled with tension. The police enforcement was scarce, and big crowds, angry music, and large amounts of alcohol didn't seem like a good combination on the 4th of July.

From my experience, I can tell you that Milwaukee is definitely not a friendly place to live. You would be best to save your curiosities about the city, because there's little to discover. I didn't need to stay in Milwaukee any longer than a few hours. I left Milwaukee around midnight, passing up my couch surfers, and headed toward Chicago. I'm hoping that my experience in Chi-town will be wholly better.