Jacksonville, FL. JAX. Duuuval. The city is like West Allis on HGH. An entire city dedicated to the military, guns, crime, Good Ol Boys, pickup trucks, not wearing shirts, church, and trailer homes / real home that look like trailer homes. It's as if you took West Allis, Butler, Menomonee Falls, Slinger, Sussex, Hales Corners, West Bend, Jackson, and Muskego, then added a little Greenfield, Greendale, New Berlin, Germantown, and Pewaukee, threw in Milwaukee's poorest five zip codes, mixed it all together, and then dropped it in the South. Add a half-hearted downtown and riverwalk along a river as wide as the Mississippi. Then add the ocean, which is just a glorified Lake Michigan. Oh yeah, there's some hot weather, too.
Jacksonville has small-town values (often really stupid ones) that meet big-city problems (like violence) on a daily basis. For example, around 400 guns are stolen from (mostly unlocked) cars every year. It's an interesting place to live, and reading about it will remind people from Wisconsin of the entire southeastern part of the state in one single city. Pretty amazing, really.
If you want to read more about this Southern town with an oddly Midwestern feel, read NewJaxWitty, a blog dedicated to trying to understand Jacksonville and Florida. And here's the single best article about the city if you want to learn what it's like to live in Jax.
