After spending two weeks in Wyoming, I had noticed some cultural differences from Pennsylvania, my home state, but I didn’t think I would ever be shocked by anything that went on. It was, after all, still the U.S., and it was a state I had been in before. I felt prepared and excited to learn about Wyoming, but I was definitely not ready to be shocked.

My first big “wow” moment was at the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo, otherwise known as “The Daddy of ‘em All.” When I was told we were going to the rodeo by my program lead, Heather, I was picturing a small dirt oval where people would stand by the fence line and watch a cowboy wrangle a calf. Spoiler alert, this is not what happened at all. The rodeo is not just an event, but a production. As soon as we got there, all I could see were fairgrounds with what seemed like miles and miles of every fried food imaginable. They had carnival rides, skee-ball, shops selling authentic Wyoming merchandise, and even an Army official with a pull-up bar waiting for a strong young man to come around the corner.

Once we found our seats in the football sized arena, the announcer introduced the first event, which was bareback bronc riding. As I watched the first rider burst out of the chute and get whipped back like one of those inflatable tube men in the wind outside a car shop, I realized that this was a whole new world of sporting events that I was not accustomed to. After the shock of watching a rider get thrown to the ground wore off, I realized that while I was still in my own country, I was in a culture that was not. Where this type of activity might be alarming to the people in my own community, in Wyoming, bronc riding and rodeo sports are a tradition of masculinity and grit.

Looking back, this moment was also a huge learning opportunity for me. I walked into the rodeo assuming it meant something small and down to earth, similar to a county fair rather than a production. The experience reminded me that even though I had been to the state before and live in the country, I did not know the culture and shouldn’t have made judgments based on surface level information. I’d been using the assumption that shared nationality meant shared culture, but that is not true. Wyoming and Pennsylvania are both in the U.S., but they’re far from the same place. Treating “American” culture as one category almost made me miss how different this experience was from my typical community, and I learned not to underestimate how much regional culture can vary.