Comment on When a place is called " Heights", what does "heights" mean/refer to?
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Here’s a fun one. I live in a city called Terre Haute. It means “high ground.” It’s in a river valley.
Comment on When a place is called " Heights", what does "heights" mean/refer to?
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Here’s a fun one. I live in a city called Terre Haute. It means “high ground.” It’s in a river valley.
reattach@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Terre Haute has federal death row, Rose-Hulman, and Square Donuts. Am I missing anything?
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Indiana State University and St. Mary-of-the-Woods University are also here. There’s also a fun pet store which is basically a zoo because of all the animals they have that are for looking at, not buying, called Atlantis. There’s also a video arcade bar and an all-ages pinball arcade which offers $10 all-play on Friday and Saturday nights.
Overall, I don’t like Terre Haute, but it has its pluses.
On the other hand, they’re building a casino. Thankfully not on the side of town where I live.
There’s also a new concert arena. They recently hosted Ted Nugent. So I won’t be paying to go to concerts there.
reattach@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Fair enough - I spent a few weeks there for work. People were friendly.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 11 months ago
There are definitely friendly people here, but there are also a lot of major assholes. It’s a very mixed town. It used to be a bellwether when it came to who won the presidential election every election year, but we got it wrong with Biden. There are a lot of union halls here and a lot of houses have ‘union strong’ signs in front of them, but it’s Indiana, so there are also a lot of Trump supporters. There are also major meth and homeless problems here. My wife is an administrator at the public library. She sees some really weird and often very unfortunate things. A couple of years ago, we went to a store to buy a tent for a high school girl who was sharing a tent with her alcoholic father in the woods and walking to high school every day and then to the library to do her homework while her father sat outside and got drunk. That was all we could do for her, but she’s not the only child living in that sort of level of poverty here.
The school system is also awful. We pulled my daughter out of it a couple of weeks ago due to excessive bullying that the administration did basically nothing about despite our pleas. A couple of years ago, in fifth grade, she had a substitute teacher- for the entire year. She was awful too, and told kids shit like the election was stolen rather than actually teach them things. In fourth grade, the school system offered online school due to COVID but didn’t prepare anything, so it was just up to the online teachers to come up with a curriculum and it didn’t work. Her education has suffered so badly. Thankfully, there’s a state-based online school which is being done by Pierson, the textbook company, so we’re relatively assured that she’ll finally get a decent education.