14 Years in a Cultural Desert

Better late than never!

Hello! I’m the “Sylv” in “Sylv’s Side Quests”, better known online as Sylvias Serpentine.

For those who are new to this blog without having seen my journey to Seattle and ongoing process of moving overseas, this is basically a spin off series to detail all the side questing I am doing along the way! Primarily, indulging my foodie interests! 

I wish I had started this blog when I first moved to Seattle because I was hitting the city hard in the first month or two when I was in vacation mode and have since slowed down a lot while I work on building up a steady income. 

Before the great cross country drive with cats, I was subjected to a 14 year sentence in the blistering asshole of this nation. Fucking Oklahoma. I moved there for college and then, like so many unfortunate souls, I got stuck. It was, to put it nicely, a bit of a cultural desert. Yes, there is some amount of tribal interest there and like 10 flavors of cowboy, but it’s all quite homogeneously mixed together in a way that doesn’t really preserve the unique attributes of any one of them. Honestly, I have exactly one good thing to say about that place and it has to do with birds; not culture, environment, people or food. But I am not going to focus on the horrors of my time there (honestly, that probably deserves an entire blog in itself), the context of where I came from is only relevant to help understand how I am so easily dazzled by basically everything I have encountered in Seattle and western Washington. 

Although I am not some sheltered country girl, quite to the contrary, I had a fairly diverse upbringing with a father in the military that meant we moved a bit when I was younger. I had lived in England and visited countries in Europe as well as multiple states all before I left home and have been fortunate enough to visit more places since then. It’s not like most of the people I had met in Oklahoma who had been there for their entire lives and never even traveled out of the state, let alone lived anywhere else. As it is, the amazing opportunities I had growing up likely contributed to my foodie nature and my love of adventure and novelty. 

Carnivore, a restaurant in Johannesburg, South Africa that serves all types of game meat.Zebra?? Fucking DELICIOUS!

All that said, most of my life’s adventures are fond memories of a better time and, unfortunately, the majority of my adult life was spent in Fucking Oklahoma. I did my time! Fourteen years of it!! In Azka- nope… can’t give that franchise anymore attention. I feel like we should be able to claim that story for the good of the people and remove ownership from the psychoterf so they don’t get anymore money for it -.- 

But I digress. The point is that I finally escaped Fucking Oklahoma and, as of May 2025, I am free of that particular circle of Hell! Seattle has been an amazing experience and I have been making the most of as much of it as I can while I am here. 

I will need to do a bit of backtracking to get caught up with food places I have tried, and I can’t go as frequently now as when I first got here, but I am excited to continue finding new things and sharing them with the world!