No, unfortunately that’s not a cool theme park, but the sprawling mass of suburbs that surrounds America’s ‘second city’.
Having travelled through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, I started thinking a bit about politics. I admit that’s not usually my first thought when travelling, but it’s hard not to notice the big differences between regions when you’re driving through states. In the last US election, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana were all pretty close between the Democrats and the Republicans. I watched the elections while I was in Canada, but never really understood until I came here. Like a mentioned in my previous post, Pennsylvania has two big urban cities where most of the population live, but between that is a lot of farmland and small rural towns. Ohio is the same with a few big cities like Cleveland, and Indiana the same with Indianapolis and the areas bordering Chicago. But venture outside them and suddenly you see signs popping up for McCain Palin ’08, and strangely lots of anti-abortion roadside banners. Pop and R&B radio stations are replaced by country and soft ‘classic’ rock stations, and people start to talk funny. Seriously. On my way down to Chicago the other day I stopped in a small town in Illinois for lunch. Like a lot of small American towns, the town centre had about as much life as a funeral. I found a diner, which was about the only thing open, and stepped into the 60’s. Not in a cool Motown, JFK way. More like an old fashioned redneck way. The people in there couldn’t understand what I was saying to them, and I couldn’t understand much of what they were saying to me. This, by the way, was an hour and a half from Chicago. I suppose what I’m saying is that America is big. Like really big. There’s far too much room and most of the surplus space is taken up with farms and small towns. The people are different to the people in the cities and have different interests and different political ideals. You don’t need to be in deepest Iowa to find that. Go to upstate New York or Eastern California and you’ll see the same thing. That’s something you don’t find as much in the South-East of England because you just can’t get too far away from urban areas.
In addition to the terrible radio stations I’m forced to listen to (my iPod only has 4 hours of music on it, and there’s only so many times I want to listen to the same song), when I get to my hotel room I switch on the TV. I think living outside the States you grow up thinking how great American TV shows are, and how exciting TV in the US must be. Wrong. For every decent show that appears on BBC2 or Channel 4, there are about 10 God awful shows that never make it across the pond. Daytime television, current affairs shows, terrible terrible reality TV shows, and news channels. Every day I've been here I've been thankful for the BBC. You cannot watch the news over here and just get the news, without getting some biased opoinion along with it! It seems that all the news channels lean one way or the other, and some are just ridiculous. And then there are commercials. I laughed a lot at the commercials on Canadian TV, but although American commercials are slicker, they’re just as bad. Especially when it comes to putting the fear of God into people. Check out this horrible scaremongering commercial for home security:If that wasn’t bad enough, there’s a whole series of commercials like these! Check out this equally terrifying one! (can't embed this one)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syjM1dPriBA&feature=channel
And of course there are all the adverts for prescription drugs. These usually make bold claims to make your life healthier and happier, followed by a 2 minute legal bit about all the nasty things that can happen to you if you take the tablets. This is one of the greatest adverts I’ve seen here, for so many reasons:
So for my next trip, I have an 18 hour drive to Colorado, and about three days to do it. I get to travel through the exciting states of Iowa and Nebraska, and pretty much the whole thing is on one very long, very straight road. Wish me luck!
Take care,
Jamie
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