My train rides so far on this trip have been pretty short: NY to Philly was 90 minutes, Philly to Baltimore was just over an hour, and Baltimore to DC was barely 45 minutes. So I was pleased to restore my traveller credentials with a 7-hour Greyhound ride to get to Pittsburgh from DC. Thanks to a combination of luck (double seat to myself) and preparation (noise-cancelling headphones), the ride was really quite tolerable.
So far on this trip I've visited prosperous East Coast city centres, where people wear suits and hail Ubers and buy macchiatos using contactless payment apps. Now I'm in a Mid-West suburb, where people wear checkered shirts and drive old pick-up trucks and buy peanut butter using food stamps. It's a generalisation, but hardly a false one. And I think on the whole I prefer the people out here.
But of course the looming election highlights these divides. In the East Coast cities you meet diverse college-grad metropolitan types, almost none of whom will vote Trump; in the Mid-West sports bars you meet white male non-college-grad suburban types, almost all of whom will vote Trump. They'll vote for him because he speaks to them. Everything he says is of course nonsense on stilts, at best, but he speaks to these people. It's analogous to the Brexit vote, really. A country divided in two and the cracks beginning to show. One keeps hearing anguished cries of 'I don't understand how people can vote for that.' Correct. You don't understand. Give it a try and you might get somewhere.
More constructively, it must be observed that if the Democrats could have just found a candidate who wasn't the most widely loathed person in America, the election would be no contest at all. I also suspect that no senior Republican politican seriously believes in Trump - they have to pretend to support him, because if they all abandon him then their party base splits, and in a first-past-the-post electoral system that means they're all toast. It's pragmatism, not principle. (This is also the reason why most Labour MPs still take the party whip.)
Sorry for going off-topic. See below for Pittsburgh pictures. Tomorrow I'm picking up a rental car, which I've got for 10 days. I don't have anything else booked, I'm just going take off in a vaguely north-easterly direction, and see where I get to. In the meantime I'll leave you with a joke I overheard in a bar....
What's got nine arms, and sucks?
Def Leppard.
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| Pittsburgh by night, from the southern bank of the Monongahela River. |
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| Pittsburgh by day, from Mount Washington to the south-west |
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| Statue outside Carnegie Mellon university. Symbolising a long hard slog, at the end of which...nothing. Welcome to your student years, kids! |
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| Downtown Pittsburgh, from the fountain in Point State Park |
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| Edd vs Food #41 Pierogies, stuffed with pepperoni and cheese. At Hough's, directly opposite my AirBnB room. Pierogies are dumplings, by the way. I'd never heard of them before but apparently they're a big thing in Pittsburgh. |
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| Soccer memorabilia in a South Pittsburgh bar. W T actual F? |
