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June 06, 2005

Love, baby, that's where it's at

We're back from Athens, and I have a place to live! I'm going to move in with Jenny [insert link to Jenny's blog here, just as soon as I can find it], who's a friend of Carrieoke's (thanks, Carrie, for hooking me up). It's a little farther from campus than I'd like, but the place is very cute and the rent is cheap, and I won't need to buy a lot of furniture, and I'll have a knitting roommate, which I'm quite excited about.

We had an amazingly fun time with Sandy and Bob, who were kind enough to give us a place to crash on Thursday even though they were leaving for their vacation in the wee hours the next night. They are very cool people, and we found out we have some interests in common besides knitting. We ate at a great Mexican place and drank god knows how many pitchers of sangria while our very talkative young waiter told us his five year plan, and why he's okay with not having a girlfriend, and plenty of redneck jokes. The best part was when he said that he had eaten at another Mexican restaurant and felt like he was cheating (Peter told him to have a talk with his manager about an open relationship, that maybe they should both try seeing other restaurants for a while).

Here's me and Sandy the next morning, both looking a little sleep-deprived and giddy, although not nearly as giddy as in all the pictures from the night before, which I'm far too vain to show. This one is proof enough that these internet people really exist, and don't just want to chop you up and put you in the freezer. Sandy's way too nice for that.

Some observations from the trip:

-people in the South are friendlier and more open than people in Canada, at least the part of Canada I've lived in all my life, and also more than people in other parts of the States I've been to. Right away we felt like we'd known Sandy and Bob for a while, and I know it was the same way when I met my Atlanta friends too; I only see Kerri and PJ once a year but when I do see them I feel so close to them. Maybe because they call me "baby".

-Georgia is the place where old gas stations go to die.

-it's just not worth it to order tea in a restaurant in the South. I already knew that I had to ask for "hot tea", or wind up with sweet tea, which is a truly awful substance (I've made that mistake before). What I learned on this trip is that when they bring your tea to the table in a teapot, you needn't bother to let it steep.

Because they don't actually put any tea in it. I wonder if they just take their unsweetened iced tea mix and heat it up?

-The American buffet restaurant is a powerful illustration of the terrible imbalance of wealth on this planet. So many people seem driven to take more and more, even though they don't need it, even though it's killing them. Over there, people are starving to death, and over here they have a strange compulsion to eat themselves to death. Of course it's not just food that people are driven to consume, but it's a problem with American society that just seems easier to see when you're standing at the buffet counter. This is something I'll probably talk about a lot more later; for now just thinking about buffet makes me queasy.

Some pictures from Great Smoky Mountains National Park:

When we went through on Thursday it was cold and rainy. At Newfound Gap, halfway through the park and right on the state line, there's this sign

which usually shows visitors an example of the perfect photo to take from this vantage point so that they can all go home with the exact same memories, since we all know that it's not about the experience, it's about the photo op (I'm surprised they don't mark out on the ground the ideal place to stand while taking the photo). That day the perfect view picture was missing. And here is what the view looked like:

Our van, peering into the void.

All around us was perfectly white. Standing way up on a mountain and staring into this nothingness made me want so badly to leap (just like Carlos Castaneda, except that since that was all a hoax and he never really jumped, probably I would not have survived the fall so well as he did. And that's pretty much why I didn't do it).

Coming home on Saturday the sky was a lot clearer so we took the side road up to Clingman's Dome, which I think is as high as you can get in the Smokies unless you live there. By the time we got to the top we were in the clouds again.

Way down there, the sun is shining.

Posted by jodi at June 6, 2005 02:05 PM | categories:  self-absorbtion

Comments

Posted by: Anna at June 6, 2005 02:37 PM

Posted by: claudia at June 6, 2005 04:38 PM

Posted by: Jennifer at June 6, 2005 06:25 PM

Posted by: Jennifer at June 6, 2005 06:29 PM

Posted by: Kirsti at June 7, 2005 09:31 AM

Posted by: Brenda in Toronto at June 7, 2005 02:02 PM

Posted by: Sandy at June 15, 2005 05:16 PM