October 21

Is America friendly? Yes. Right friendly. But I don't know how to properly describe their friendliness. It's quick, sharp friendliness. Welcoming, helpful and curious.

What gets to me a little bit though is how remote people's lives are - especially away from city centres. There aren't really highstreets. No local shops, bars, pubs or cafes. A lot of people ferry themselves from place to place in their cars - one big supermarket for shopping, a gas station, a waffle house. All seperated by miles of asphalt. People's lives are very private here. It's not possible to share a walk to the shops or bump into someone on the way to work.

Well, we took the wrong ferry from Ocracoke (a deserted island at the bottom of the penninsula where people still talk a weird 17th century version of English) and ended up in Cedar Island. This was quite a long way from where we should have been. There is nothing on Cedar Island. The map - a good map - showed about two-square inches of white. Not wanting to stay in a place that is dubbed "remote" by people who speak 17th century English we drove eight hours to Asheville, a happy-clappy hippy haven in the mountains of west North Carolina. I had the job of keeping my friend awake as we drove at 80mph along empty highways. We had an hour-long conversation about basketball. Neither of us know the first thing about basketball but at 2am it didn't seem to matter. We stopped at Dairy Queen - a fast-food ice cream chain - and purchased armfulls of diabetes-inducing snackfoods. You can buy 64 oz ice cream tubs. Think about that. I couldn't reach the bottom of one of those with my whole arm. Who eats like that? Oh right. They do.