There’s really nothing like that first cup of home made coffee, hey.
It’s early morning on Thursday. I’ve had about ten hours sleep and I’m feeling pretty good about tackling the massive ‘to do’ list ahead of me over the next 10 days. Today’s list includes picking up some groceries and making sure I have all the sheet music I need for this weekend’s concert (including, randomly enough, going through a score and recreating the missing 16 or so bars from the viola part of Zadok the Priest). We’ll see how I feel about it all in about 8 hours from now, but so far I feel like I’ve left most of my jet lag on the plane 🤞🏻
This was a different kind of trip for us. Not so much sight-seeing, though I did manage to hit several Edgar Allan Poe sites and the Motown Museum (finally 🎶). We spent 90% of the trip with friends and adopted family. So much conversation meant my accent started to slide around pretty quickly: I think it might have been day 3 when Dan started noticing my vowels reshaping, compared to day 10 of our previous US trip. Even Dan’s rusted on Adelaideian accent was not immune this time round. The changes were not enough for an American to hear my accent as anything other than Australian, but enough that Australians would notice and, more importantly, enough to make my accent easier for locals to understand.
There’s a lot of the US I haven’t experienced – I just did a quick count and I’ve physically been in 12 or 13 states, some very briefly. But here are some things I have learned.
On the whole, Americans are often much more polite than Australians, and I mean aside from the fact that they generally swear a lot less. Everywhere I have been, Americans are kind to us and each other and willing to help. I am forever adopting the phrase, ‘I appreciate you’. Many Americans I met also had a knack for speaking diplomatically in ways that avoided provoking arguments or offence. I feel like many Australians are quite blunt by comparison. (Neither approach is right or wrong, but I think I learned some new and helpful ways to communicate kindly from my American friends).
There is definitely some problematic stuff going on politically in the US, but many Americans aren’t happy with that either. I feel like there’s more of a sense generally that you need to be careful what you say unless you’re sure of the company you’re in than there is at home. On July 4, a woman we shared an elevator with in Dupont greeted us with, ‘Happy Independence Day – if we are allowed to still say that?’ (I put on my broadest Australian accent when I responded). But just like here, government sits a ways from people going about their everyday. The country we visited over the past two weeks is largely the same country we visited in 2022. Sure, we visited mostly either blue states or blue parts of red states both times. But whatever’s going on politically, there’s a lot to like about people. I say that even as someone who regularly says, ‘ugh, people‘.
If you have the chance to visit the US, I truly recommend considering visiting some places outside tourist spots and even major urban centres. If we weren’t there to visit friends, we wouldn’t have gone to local parks in Grosse Point Woods or Raleigh and seen how they are designed to foster connectedness in local communities. You can get a real sense of a community’s priorities by how they provide public spaces, don’t you think?
We wouldn’t have experienced the differences in barbecue between the neighbouring states of North Carolina and Virginia, either. For the record, both were amazing, I am remaining Switzerland on this one but I will say I do like sloshing my barbecue with vinegar, NC-style and will probably do this a bit in future.
We wouldn’t have driven long, narrow winding roads surrounded by lush green, punctuated by white farmhouses, under clear blue skies that reminded me of Brisbane in winter.
We wouldn’t have found a brewery based out of a desanctified church in Baltimore or shared delicious Italian and martinis in a 90-year-old family-owned restaurant in Exeter, PA, or even stopped in at a tiny microbrewery in Purcellville VA and laughed at the many resounding ‘fuck yeahs!’ that echoed around the taproom.
In terms of bucket list things, aside from my Poe and Motown adventures, we saw Ghostbusters HQ and soberingly, the 9/11 memorial. I feel like I have a lot to say about that memorial but I can’t find words. We hadn’t planned to visit but when we realised we were walking near it, we went over to see. The falling water pulled at me in a way that reminded me of the weight of Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial bearing down. It was a profound experience.
Foodwise, we ate alligator and fried green tomatoes, Philly cheesesteak, and I finally tried biscuits and gravy (not bad, actually). I have to say either US coffee has improved out of sight in the past three years, or we were just better at picking good venues. The best coffee we had was at a chocolate factory in Raleigh though – easily on par with Australian coffee, for the record. We were on our way to a Mediterranean restaurant in NYC when we walked past a sandwich board outside a little basement bar listing caviar tater tots. Obviously we changed plans instantly and I can report that they were absolutely delicious, as were the peach and ginger shandies we drank alongside. I also experienced the joy that is Japanese curry poutine at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, and I am definitely going to attempt to recreate that in future – absolute genius stuff.
Most of all, I want to say thank you to our generous and beloved hosts. We love you all and are so blessed to have been able to share some time with you.
#lato25usa, over and out.