A-me-rica

I have never been able to use the word "great" on something and fully mean it -- until now, that is. It has been slightly more than a week since I left for the USA last Friday and it could not have been any better.

Saturday was spent at Washington DC, where my friends from the conference were frantically moving from one memorial to another, and one museum to another, snapping shots and all.

If you know my attitude towards travelling, rushing all over the place, just so that you can say you've been there is SO not my cup of tea. It's totally selling out on my indie-travel creed.

I mean, we are travelling so that we can relax -- so why bother being so frantic on a trip that is supposed to give you a time to be not-so-frantic? Besides, it's not as if this is going to be my first and last trip to America.

So a couple of like-minded folks just took a short, leisurely walk to the main shopping street at Georgetown and just did a little bit of shopping.

But it was so bloody hot it was almost Singapore.

So anyway, Charlottesville, Virginia is so nice, quaint and full of character, I could actually imagine myself living here. The UVA Central Grounds just simply inspires me to want to study and the collegiate spirit is so infectious -- one week into being at UVA, I am so bloody sold.

It certainly helps that the people at the conference here are generally quite a wonderful and fun bunch of people, but the most interesting person I have met here is not actually a conference participant.

Having said that, it's been quite a crazy full schedule here, with morning and afternoon lectures and the nightly partying/drinking sessions led by the indomitable Irish folks. I think I have drank more in the last week than I did in the last 6-9 months in Singapore combined. It certainly helped that beer, in particular Natural Light, is so bloody cheap here it's obscene.

A lot of things have been swirling in my head, but I think I would start to start to concretise them into words in my second week here at Charlottesville. I think I have forgotten what I had set myself out to do at this conference by being way far more social than I should.

I need to sit more at the lawn in the nice summer weather, with my cold drink, Bible/book, notebook, read, contemplate and write a little bit more. And maybe squeeze in a swim and a run sometime in the evenings as well. Oh well.

I am definitely heading to New York after Charlottesville, with a day trip to Boston to meet Khang over the July 14-15 weekend a distinct possibility. And I can't wait to get to NYC.

My flight to NY from Bangkok got delayed by 2 hours last week and I consequently missed my connecting Greyhound bus ride to Charlottesville at 11.30am. I had to wait at Adrianne's apartment for a couple of hours, but it was good.

My first walk down Broadway was so surreal. It was like I was living a dream. Those townhouses, yellow cabs, street signs, newspaper dispensers and all the other NYC icons were the stuff of television until last Saturday.

We had a sushi takeout lunch at Central Park, then I napped a bit, showered and got onto the 11.15pm overnight bus to Charlottesville via Richmond. I thought I had missed the opening dinner, but it turned out I referred to the wrong schedule and the timing of everything was just simply perfect.

Other things I have done this past week included the Richmond Braves-Syracuse Chiefs baseball game, July 4 celebrations which started with witnessing a citizenship naturalisation ceremony at Thomas Jefferson's home at Monticello and ended with a fireworks thing at some hilltop resort and speaking to a UVA sociology professor about graduate school in the States.

I really can't bring myself to think of July 21, when I have to board the plane for my 17-hour ride back to Bangkok. I really don't want to go back to Singapore.