First leg down
IMG_2092, originally uploaded by shrieking.
This isn’t what I expected from Chicago, but it’s what I got. I had a few down days in Chicago, where I wanted to go out, or at least hang out with someone, but no-one was around, and for a while I felt pretty low, but then I finally got chatting to a few interesting people, then went out for a quick pint with some Irish guy which turned into 9 or 10, and felt a lot better. I went to the zoo whilst hungover and saw loads of cool animals. I’m not really into zoos but it was free and penguins are awesome. Afterwards I laid about on the beach and decided that all hangovers should come with a free beach.
I liked Chicago a lot. Perhaps it was due to the fact that I did more not-quite-touristy stuff there: I worked up the courage to do things like going out for real meals on my own (The pizza isn’t the same if you don’t eat it in the place where pizza was invented) and going out to blues bars on my own. I met some hippies, which was nice because apparently they don’t exist on the East coast.
So that’s the first leg of my journey down: I’m currently in New York waiting for my flight to Los Angeles. I’m staying down by Venice Beach, so the basic plan consists almost entirely of sunbathing and swimming. Perhaps I’ll get round to learning to surf, who knows. For the first time, I have the next 2 weeks planned out ahead of me, so perhaps I’ll be able to relax a bit more.
The last 6 weeks have been really interesting. Sometimes it’s been awesome, like the days in New York hanging out with all the guys I mentioned a while back, going out with Danish guys in Boston who pretended to be famous in order to meet girls, joining a drumming circle in Chicago, and sometimes it’s sucked, like the 19 hour bus journeys where it’s too cold on the bus and too hot outside and no-one knows when you’re going to hit your destination and if you’re even going to get there, and the days where I have to find a new hostel and I have no idea how to get there and when I do I’m all alone in some crazy city where everyone tells me I’m likely to get mugged, and when I spend evenings stuck in the hostel with nothing to do because the only people there are the strange ones who don’t talk to anyone. All in all, though, I’m glad to be out here, it’s been cool so far. America is basically a sucky country though: it’s got some cool stuff but it’s spread across a massive area. You find the good bits, and it’s great, but the bad bits are really bad. The whole place is really uptight about everything and they all just need to relax a bit.
Greyhound deserves a special mention. Greyhound, you see, is the cheap bus service of choice for travelers and crazy people and hobos. Now, when you get on a cheap bus, you don’t expect customer service to be at an all time high, but Greyhound is something else. For a start, even when you’ve booked your tickets, it’s first come first serve and you’re not guaranteed a seat. Then, the bus will be rammed full, every time, and I’ve heard stories of people standing for 10 hour journeys. What you paid for may not in fact be what you get, and that zero transfer ticket may become 3 transfers, or it may dump you in Ohio at random. When you get to a station where you have to transfer, you have no idea where you’ll have to stand or how long you’ll wait, but you have to make a guess and stand somewhere, because if you’re at the back of the line, you might not get on the next bus. It’s just amazing.