{"id":1378,"date":"2010-02-05T23:15:19","date_gmt":"2010-02-05T22:15:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/barebente.com\/blog\/?p=1378"},"modified":"2014-02-09T00:16:50","modified_gmt":"2014-02-08T23:16:50","slug":"snippets-from-the-us-of-a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/barebente.com\/blog\/2010\/02\/snippets-from-the-us-of-a\/","title":{"rendered":"Snippets from the US of A"},"content":{"rendered":"

“America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.”<\/em><\/strong>
\n\u2013 A. Toynbee \u2013<\/p>\n

Scraps from a few weeks in the US of A:<\/em><\/p>\n

USA is a strange place. Very, very recognizable. We’ve seen it a million times on telly. It is mundane, large, transparent, obvious, loud, surprising, well known, scary, lovable and at times plain odd. A weird counterpoint feeling of walking in a film; I realized how Americanised my own country is.<\/p>\n

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The first thing that struck me, as we drov<\/span>from the airport in Washington D.C., was that USA is dark. Simply; not a lot of streetlights. Here, the highway from the airport and into town would be a string of lights. Additionally, people close their curtains, across the foam. Not so here, so you don’t get light spilling out<\/p>\n

from living-rooms either. The result being sharp, sudden shifts of pools of light and utter darkness; and I suddenly understood the term “edge of town”.<\/p>\n

Language connection: US is the first English-speaking country I have been to where they drive on the right \u2013 took me over a week (two?) to look the right way when crossing the streets. Snow chaos in DC did not help, as all rules for traffic was suspended, and both driving and walking in the middle of the road made sense. It was bizarre; that language should dictate this. Odd connections in the brain. Wonder what will happen when I go back to Ireland or Australia…<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Christian nuts on planes. Why do I always end up next to one? I make a point of avoiding chatting to people on flights, absolutely not before they have proven an ability to entertain themselves. Books, magazines, music, x-words. anything. So I end up next to The Religious Ones, on three out of six flights. Protestants ministers as far as I could figure, they read their magazines and books, yellow highlight pens in hand. And I feel only anger. Why? I don’t really know. These old old men with their cheaply printed religious magazines an pamphlets, body language spelling out “I want to talk to you”. I feel like screaming at them, without knowing why. Being trapped in a plane might have something to do with it.<\/p>\n

Looking at the pics from DC, I strangely & strongly re-live the feeling of arriving at the hotel. The photo of Lars<\/a> at the hotel with the Capitol shimmering in the distance, contains the whole three weeks. The relief, the tired joy. Smelly feet, sweaty, airplane-stuffed sinuses. All tense annoyances behind. The quiet expectation and excitement; the prospect of a comfy bed. No need to be extraordinarily polite to immigration (always. be. veery. nice.). The coolness of the hotel room. Relief. A sense of it is all good.<\/em> <\/em>That sweet, sweet feeling of the start of a new, little adventure. This is the best part of travelling. Setting out. Transportation over; enter adventure.<\/p>\n

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things \u2013 air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky \u2013 all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2013 Cesare Pavese \u2013<\/p>\n

D.C. felt like a bubble. It is a strange city; an administrative centre. You see it in the shops, architecture, caf\u00e9s, cars, peoples clothes; the things they carry. Yet, it has an abundance of wonderful museums, an endlessness of interesting things to look at. Unfortunately, we didn’t get the chance to explore them, as the snow closed the entire city. A lot of knowledgeable people work in these places, and I wonder what this means for the demographics. Who hangs out with whom, in this odd, smallish city of national administrators, lobbyists, museum people and researchers. And sheer power.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Music \u2013 most of the random music I heard was things I have, like and appreciate. To hear The Doors blasting out of a shop would not happen very often in this part of the world. It felt good and odd in equal measure. Hardly any hip-hop, plastic pop or electronica.<\/p>\n

Chicago is a city full of strange people. It is a hard, angled, cold city, but still feels oddly familiar and comfortable. Maybe it was the mid-west-thing. Maybe it was the cold. Maybe it was because I have two good people in Chicago. They will happily tell you about the atrocious number of crime and murder, with a similar smirk as the Northern Irish used to chat about the gory bits of the troubles. I was comfortable. It felt good. Chicago treated me well.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>There is a vibrant loony-scene, and it spills into the streets, dancing in the middle of the zebra crossing. People talking to thin air. And no, they do not all have hands-free. A good deal of drugs around, clearly. Chicago was the end of the trip, I had a lot of impressions to digest, my head spinning with sorting it all out; getting used to the idea of heading home. Building a buffer for that; knowing it will always be awful, I mumbled to myself.
\nStanding on a cold street corner in Chicago smoking a cigarette, talking to myself, I blended in.<\/p>\n

“I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine.”<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2013 Caskie Stinnett \u2013<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Going back \u2013 The little things that trips you up when you come home. The exquisite pain & pleasure of travelling and coming back.\u00a0 There is no life without travelling, yet it balances on a knife’s edge. The sweet excitement of adventure, the depression of coming home. I get better at dealing with it as I get older, but there is a protective buffer I am not sure is a good thing.<\/p>\n

We are heading back to D.C. soon. It starts over again.<\/p>\n

I can’t wait.<\/p>\n

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