Well I'm back on the oul sod. And I'm actually very happy to be back. I was so delighted to hear some old men talking in extremely strong Cork accents that Americans couldn't even understand about Kerry defeating our football team on Sunday, although I was less delighted to hear that Kerry had defeated our football team! Apparently, we had been going for the double this year!(football and hurling titles.) I was exhausted from jet lag so I slept until 2PM today. As I write this on my laptop I am on a bus to Cork to see some of my friends after my extended absence. I'm going to see my friend's band play a gig and then there's talks of my own band having a gig next week and recording this weekend if I can jam enough in the meantime in order to get back up to speed with the set. So already I have been plunged back into my busy life and I am making the most of it because I know I only have a few weeks before I have to move to Dublin and start my life from scratch yet again. It's nice to start with a clean slate again but it's also exhausting and it makes you realise that there really isn't anything at all wrong with your old slate if you know what I mean. But even though life goes on here, I will never forget America or all the very special people I met there. But I'm skipping ahead. I should really tell you about my flight over first right?

            Well it was only a five hour flight on the way back because we had strong tail-winds instead of headwinds and the world was spinning towards us instead of us chasing after it. Security in JFK was fine but Heathrow was a nightmare. I was very lucky to have arrived four hours before my connection because I needed three hours of that to get through security. You would queue up, get to the top of a queue, be treated like crap and then directed to the back of another queue and this was repeated over and over for three hours. I was accompanied through this ordeal by a fellow student traveller from UCC named Rory, who had also come to the US on his own this year and had the good fortune to be seated next to me on the plane to London, where he would subsequently transfer to Shannon instead of Cork because his travel agent is confused. Rory, is the spontaneous kind of guy that I spend my whole life trying to be. He worked all over the states this summer: Chicago, Seattle, San Diego, San Francisco, Boston and New York. If he didn't like where he was, he just looked up the internet for an apartment in a new city, booked the next flight there and quit his job. I don't know how he managed financially to do this but he did. He had already done a J1 visa to the states two years ago when he stayed in a frat house in Cornell. Last year he travelled through Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia and it was so cheap that he didn't have to work (obviously he had a fair bit of cash saved up though). He didn't stay in one place for more than two weeks. I have to do something like that sometime. He said that language wasn't that big a problem and he would only go to places that were okayed by his Lonely Planet book and stayed safe that way. He had reached slightly different conclusions about America after his time there and like it so much that he said he wanted to move there some day. He said that everyone he met was not only extremely nice and interested in Ireland but very honest and unafraid to express their emotions. This is indeed true and it was refreshing for me to see that too. Almost everyone I met was extremely nice and interested in Ireland too. In hindsight, the vast majority of  jingoism and 'America is the greatest country in the world' sentiments that I found so offensive came mainly from the media and government propaganda (such as those emotive, intelligence-insulting 'join the army' ads) and hardly ever from actual people. Most people I spoke to wanted to hear about the outside world and were willing to laugh at the funnier flaws of their own country. So with that in mind, I think I may have been slightly harsher than I intended to be in my last entry, in judging America. (I don't think I am in a position to judge a country having only spent three months living there, but I felt that my departure was a cathartic event that demanded that I reach some conclusions on where I had spent the last three months of my life.)

I enjoyed Rory's company all the way to London, gave him my email and blog address (if you're reading hi how are you!) and had a quick cup of tea with him before catching my flight to Cork.

            When I arrived back in Cork airport and stepped back onto the tarmack, I was delighted to feel temperatures of about 15centigrade blowing past me and to see the ever-familiar sight of reassuringly looming grey clouds. As I speak, it is drizzling. Oh how I missed the cool invigorating drizzle. Oh how I longed for the schizophrenic indecisiveness of these temperate climes! I'm sure the novelty will wear off rather quickly though.

            However, my delight quickly changed to suspicion when I looked around and noticed that we were being led into the newly constructed 2^nd terminal of Cork airport which hadn't been open when I left. Having two terminals in Cork somewhat detracts from the 'small airport' atmosphere that Cork evokes. On the bright side, the 'passport control' was still just as informal as before. Just one bored guy sitting in a box saying 'thank you' as people walked past him holding up their passports. I had no problems at all getting my BB gun through (obviously it wasn't in my hand luggage!) All I had to do was walk under the sign saying 'nothing to declare' and smile back at the Irish lad in the fluorescent jacket. Having picked up my luggage and made my way into the new arrivals lobby, I was horrified to see…wait for it…a Starbucks!!!! Noooooooooooooooo!!!! They sneaked over here while I was gone and Cork airport is no doubt just the beginning! They'll have taken over the whole country before we know it! I was devastated to return to an Ireland utterly changed since my day. There's a new bar across from McDonalds in Daunt's Square called The Roundy. Ok apart from that, nothing much has changed.

 (The bus I'm on has just dropped me off in college so I am continuing this entry in the only place I could find that is still open and has wireless (a corridor in the Science building outside Campus Kitchen). The college is totally deserted. Even the library is closed after 4PM. They have nearly finished restoring the old Crawford Observatory in my absence and construction of the new post-graduate library continues.)

 The crazy guy who stands outside Virgin Megastore, dancing to music on his walkman for no particular reason is still there. I already bumped into a friend from my job last year on Cape Clear in the bank when I went in to lodge my massive Johnny Rockets cheques. And predictably, the first thing I did when I got home was catch a cold. Now I really feel like I'm home. (Don't worry, having a cold isn't miserable – it's my default state when I'm here.) I don't think I sneezed once when I was in the US. The first thing I ate was a lovely Galtee's Black Pudding. Today for dinner I had spuds and a chicken fillet with gravy. It's so standard here and so alien in America. My sisters were to return from the Czech Republic the evening I arrived but several hours later and then they were to travel north, directly from the airport all the way up to the other side of the country to Donegal with my old man for the Fleadh Cheoil (Irish traditional music festival). So I won't see my sisters until next week but I'm still seeing a lot of other people. I went to visit my neighbours yesterday and much to my delight, they had prepared an ENTIRE welcome home blackberry pie just for me! I had some and a real cup of tea. It just tastes so much better out of home-made mugs (my neighbours have a pottery) than it did out of plastic cups that I got free at cheap restaurants. I hadn't had a blackberry pie in ages because they're only in season for a few weeks and then, there's rarely enough of them to make a pie with but this year, apparently, there was a particularly high yield. Also this was one of the hottest summers in a long time with temperatures often up in the high 70s/20s. In fact, it only started raining when I came home. People are actually happy that it's raining because many of people's wells had gone dry and they didn't have any water! This hasn't happened in years! And it had to be the year I decided to go away for the whole summer. I'm sure God is just taunting me! Ah well. That's all I really have to report for now but I hope you've noticed how I've tried to explain Irish references which are self-evident to Irish people but that Americans wouldn't get but at the same time have tried not to break things down a lot because I still want Irish people to be able to enjoy my blog without feeling that they're being patronised and I want Americans to be able to enjoy it without feeling alienated. The explanations will decrease over time as I expect my American readership to become au fait with the Irish terminology. I will probably post photos as I go of people and places that many of my Irish readers will probably already be familiar with but that Americans must become familiar with. I hope that this way, Americans will become more familiar with what my day-to-day social intercourse involves without feeling alienated by the fact that they don't know any of the people in these photos and that Irish people will be able to relate to the people in the photos without being bored by the photos of places here that they are painfully familiar with. Hopefully, there will be little explanatory notes under all the photos so that Americans know what they're looking at. OK I've got mingling to do! I'll write again whenever I have built up enough witty observations to do so!

PS: Check out my new photo albums if you haven't already for new photos from Cork and old photos from the past year and before, including photos of me when I had facial hair last year, which in hindsight, probably wasn't a great look for me...

 Earlier on today in the subway, there was a big breakdancing show on. It was totally daycent. I got some photos for ye but they don't do it justice. To check out what it was really like, you have to take a look at this video that I so kindly took just for you: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5145401813830729635&hl=en

Now yesterday I did a very touristy thing. After all, I am technically a tourist. I went out to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. I thought it would be kind of run of the mill but the guided tour on Liberty Island was actually fascinating and so was the museum on Ellis Island. As you probably know, the statue of liberty was a gift of friendship from France to the USA. (That obviously hasn't been working very well lately.) But the tour focused instead on how it symbolised opportunity and freedom. Interestingly, the tablet that Lady Liberty is holding comes from the bible verse 'the stone that the builder refused shall become the cornerstone'. In other words, send me the rejects from all the nations of the world and I will build a country with them. An American poet called Emma Lazarus wrote a great poem about it and it goes like this:

The New Colossus

 Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Liberty is a dangerous word though. It's a word that's very difficult to define and that conjures up idealism and idealism without a foundation in reality is a very dangerous thing indeed. So many wars have been allegedly justified in the name of this very nebulous concept. Indeed, there was a type of bomb used in the Second World War by the Americans called a 'Liberty Bomb'. It had a picture of the statue of liberty on it. It seems that slapping the word liberty before any other word can dampen or sometimes even neutralise the negative connotations of the second word. But how far can you go with this? Liberty killing? Liberty torture? Liberty genocide? Liberty detention? At some point, this carefully planned vocabulary will enter the realm of Orwellianism. Oh yeah, we're getting high brow tonight! I hope you brought your thinking cap and your 'question everything' bumper sticker! The stockpile of these so-called liberty bombs was called 'the arsenal of democracy'.I'm not even going to comment on the oxymorony here! On another matter, there was a sign on the docks of Liberty Island saying 'uneven paving, proceed at your own risk'. See the photo of that sign for my thoughts on it: http://www.blogtext.org/gctrionaem/myimages/album655.image4775.html

After Liberty Island, I went to Ellis Island. I'm sure you all know what that's all about. There's a museum there dealing with the issue of early immigration to the US and how those immigrant communities shaped the US we see today. At the museum I saw an oul fella wearing a t-shirt saying Pat Spillane's Pub. I asked where the pub was and he said Kerry. I was surprised because I expected him to be American and for the pub to be the same. He was actually English, but unlike many Irish people, had actually heard of Ballyvourney and claimed he had often been there. Then he revealed that Micky Ned O Sullivan, one of the teachers in the secondary school there, was a friend of his! Small world huh? I saw some very interesting statistics in the museum. For example there are 20.5million Irish descendants living in the US. The original immigrants must have been very busy altogether because that's five times the population of Ireland. The three most Irish infested states are New York, California and Pennsylvania in that order. Florida is also very heavily infested. The midwest is the only region that really escaped being taken over. The Zimbabwean community on the other hand, is very under-represented with only 1,500 in the whole country. Most of these are in New York. Apparently, there isn't a single Zimbabwean descendant living in Hawaii or Alaska, according to the 2000 Census. You see signs all over the place here proudly declaring '100% American' (even a so-called Irish pub in Myrtle Beach). It seems to me that there is no such thing as an American unless you happen to be one of the remaining 2.6million people who call themselves Native American. Every person I have met in this country (because I haven't met any Native Americans) has been an immigrant or the result of a combination of immigrants. Therefore, it seems like the height of hypocrasy for Americans to give out about immigrants when all they're doing is the dirty work that no one else will do. There's a funny story about an Italian immigrant's reaction to life in America a hundred years ago. He said ''I came to America because I heard the streets were paved with gold. Since coming here I have learned three things: One: the streets are not paved with gold, Two: the streets are not paved at all and Three: I am expected to pave them!'' Being a firm believer in the proverb that far-away hills are green, I was never naive enough to think that the metaphorical streets here would be metaphorically paved with any kind of metaphorical gold. However, what I didn't expect was that everyone would be so desperate to pave the lining of their own pockets with everyone else's gold. I have found that most places I went were very money-grabbing. Also, jingoism is ingrained into many American children from a young age. They are taught that America is literally the greatest country in the world and that the reason so many immigrants come here is because every other country sucks and foreigners are all poor and desperate for 'opportunity'. While this may still be the case for certain developing countries, many Americans seem to assume that all foreigners are basically the same - Unamerican...which is seen here as being a negative trait;) While I personally am poor, I am no poorer than any American who worked exclusively in Johnny Rockets and the cause of my poverty is the obscenely low American minimum wage, not my nationality. Newsflash! Irish people haven't been starving in the potato fields for over a hundred and fifty years now. We've been doing grand since we figured out how to grow carrots. You must excuse my glib tongue-in-cheek tone but it can be very frustrating to encounter such undercurrents of xenophobia on a daily basis. Of course not all Americans are guilty of ignorance. I have met many, many highly intelligent and highly educated individuals here who are under no illusions as to where America actually fits into a socio-economic map of the world. But only 10% of Americans own a passport. I think if you don't travel, then you really just don't know what's going on at all. There are many other intelligent Americans who have educated themselves but for financial or other reasons, are unable to travel. And then there is the majority of well-intentioned, kind-hearted but ultimately mis-educated Americans who really know very little about the rest of the world. Many Americans who I have met learned everything they know about Ireland from the back of a Lucky Charms cereal box and that is what they think Ireland is. It is very convenient for a government to have a population who believe that they live in the greatest country in the world. After all, if this is as good as it gets, then what's the point in complaining when the government fails to improve the country. Let me clear up any doubt that might exist now: America certainly is not the greatest country in the world. I don't know what is, maybe Norway...or New Zealand...they seem to have their act together...but I've never been to either of them so I can't say. I know it isn't Ireland either. Lord knows we have about as many problems as America does although they are mostly very different problems. I would strongly encourage everyone to visit America before they die. You need to see this place at least once and if you really like it you might stay permamently if you were that way inclined. But stay away from Myrtle Beach and don't stay in New York for more than a week unless you are filthy stinkin rich or have a real job lined up for you here - not a minimum wage job because you WILL starve. Asheville, Cullowhee and Washington DC are all lovely and I'm sure their are loads and loads of other places that are just as nice if not nicer. In the Ellis Island museum there was a mock naturalization test. If you want to become an American citizen, you have to sit this little MCQ on basic American history and politics. (Incidentally I passed the mock exam although without flying colours.) If you want to become a citizen though you also have to renounce your own country. I don't think I could do that. I suppose I could always just say it and not mean it and keep my fingers crossed behind my back. I'm not saying I want to move here permamently and I'm not saying I wouldn't either. I won't rule out the possibility of life's path leading me to any given part of the world. But you see...I learned something today (well ok not today but over the course of the past three months). It really doesn't matter where you live. Climate, distance from the shops, price of cars...mere trifles are these. Sunny weather will not make you happy. What makes a place home is being surrounded by loads of people that you care about. For now this place is Cork for me. It may not always be but for now it is. Perhaps one day, life will take me to another country for a while and I will meet lots of cool people who live there and circumstances will dictate that that is where I will settle down. And maybe not. It doesn't matter. I will be satisfied with anywhere as long as there are many friends there. I have no plans to return to the States again in the short to medium term but I may or may not come back some day. If I do I certainly won't be going to Myrtle Beach. I have been as fair and honest as I can throughout this blog and I will admit that I am as subject to prejudice and fallibility as any human. Therefore I hope you will think no less of me if my opinions conflict with yours. I have made so many friends here, some from Cork and one or two from Dublin and I am happy to say with confidence that I will see those again. However, I have also made many friends from various different parts of America who I hope to see again someday but don't expect to. This makes leaving rather difficult. However, the prospect of seeing friends and family and eating some Denny's black pudding again eases this pain to some extent. So thanks a lot America. It's been a blast. Maybe we'll do it again some time. This is not the end. I'm just changing my geographical address but the address of my thoughts will remain www.blogtext.org/gctrionaem for as long as you're willing to read them and I hope that your interest will continue for a very long time to come. So check back here again in two or three days. Peace...

 I have really seen so much stuff over the past few days and the range of activities in which I have engaged is so satisfyingly diverse that sometimes I wonder if I was actually the same person throughout the whole thing. I haven't told you about half the stuff I've done yet. I'm beginning to wonder if I will still be writing about them when I get home in order to catch up. I better get on with it then.I passed through NYU a few days ago. It doesn't really have much of a campus to speak because it's in the middle of Manhattan and there's no room. It's like part of the public streets and everyone walks through it. Most of their buildings are just scattered around the city streets and the only way that you know you're 'in' NYU is the banners on some of the surrounding buildings. It's like the complete reverse of WCU in terms of location and campus layout. I've been on the Gay district on 8th Ave. It's just a load of shops and cafes with rainbow flags hanging from them and imaculately-dressed, cross-legged men sitting around reading fashion magazines. Nuff said. I visited St Patricks Cathedral on 5th Ave which is rather amusingly located right across the street from what appears to be a protestant church and right beside an upmarket stripclub. Anywhere else, a Cathedral like this would be very impressive, but crammed between skyscrapers, it looks very small. The inside is very impressive though and is carefully preserved. All the churches here have an American Flag and another flag indicating what religious denomination the church is. The Catholic flag is a Vatican flag. I visited the Rockefeller Centre but declined to pay $20 to go to the top. NBC broadcasts from here. Don't really have anything to say about it, you can just look at the photos. There is a really cool Nintendo shop beside it though. I've written a little bit about that in the description of the photo I took of it. Then of course there's Broadway which stretches on for miles and miles. It was originally and old Indian trail and they kept the original route so it cuts very distinctly and diagonally across the whole street grid. It's not all theatres and stuff but it is at its most impressive where it hits Times Square. When I unwittingly bumbled my way onto Times Square, I immediately realised why everyone I met encouraged me to go there. It was amazing. It still had all the skyscapers just like everywhere else but these ones were covered in massive TV screens and bright coloured lights. You can barely move there at night with all the people cramming the pavements. Now maybe I'm just easily impressed but I thought it was pretty cool. Limos are the main form of transport on this part of Broadway. There was one limo pulled up outside a theatre and a big crowd gathered round it that the cops were trying to disperse. I stopped to see what all the fuss was about. The a big bald bouncer started rudely pushing people aside and saying 'make way coming through'. Everybody was like 'wow' because behind him was someone who appeared to be famous. I don't know who she was but everyone else seemed to. She seemed slightly embarassed by all the attention and I was disgusted that all these people would get so excited about some random 'celebrity' that I left without bothering to find out why she was so brilliant. So the next day I dug deep and coughed up $45 to go see a broadway show from the crappiest seat the Schubert Theatre had to offer (which was actually perfectly adequate.) The show was a musical adaption of Monty Python's The Holy Grail and was called Spamalot. It was simply magnificent if I may say so. It had many of the songs I love such as Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, which they got the whole audience to join in for at the finale. It also featured much of the original script and therefore contained such gems as 'I fart in your general direction'. The songs were really difficult and funny and the singing was flawless. I would expect no less because all the actors had pretty impressive CVs judging from their summaries in the program. I found myself whistling the aforementioned song all the way to the subway afterwords. It was well worth $45 and I would recommend it to anyone with a sense of humour. I spent about five hours in the Metropolitan Museum yesterday. That's the problem with museums. Once you get started, it's really hard to tear yourself away which is why I had avoided them up to now. It really is an activity to do on your own because it's just so massive you could spend several days in there and not see everything so the last thing you want is someone tugging on your sleeve and whining 'can we go now?' You can even become a 'member' of the museum so that you could spend an hour one day and then come back the next and do this over and over for the rest of your life. The great thing about the Met is that it's a museum and an art gallery at the same time and there's some really great art in there including Picassos and Salvador Dalis (but there's also art from every other period and place you can think of). Art I think is more of a two-person activity because you should really be discussing what you are looking at to get something out of it. I won't even begin to talk about all the museum exhibits because there are too many, but I will say that my favourite was the weapons and armory section, particularly the Asian exhibits. There were so many suits of armour, helmets and swords. And you could see that the swords were the real deal. The samaurai swords were inscribed with the signature of the swordmaster who made it and you could tell just by looking at the blade that it was as sharp as the day it was forged and so clean and shiny you can see yourself in it. If you just stroked it I'd say you'd bleed. They make my samaurai swords look like crap (which technically they are). There was also a whole section on the evoluion of different schools of fencing in Europe with countless displays of rapiers and shortswords which was very interesting from a fencing point of view. OK once again it is 3AM and I am exhausted so I cannot go on and tell you all the other stuff I have done (there's still quite a considerable amount to tell you about). But tomorrow I'm not really doing much because I feel I've done all the tourist 'must-sees' and can't think of anything else to do so I'll write some more tomorrow afternoon ok? Sorry today's entry was mostly all about what I've done instead of all about what I think. I'll put in a few 'you see I learned something today' s tomorrow instead. Until then, from all the Eoin team (I have voices in my head........shut up...), a very good evening to you.

 I am well rested now. So anyway after I left that piano bar, I went for a stroll through Central Park. There's a lake there called the Loch (Irish for lake). Walking around the lake provided me with my first amazing panoramic views of the city. It also provided me with an insight into the mind of the New Yorker (I know yeah, me and my insights). Central Park is laid out not really like an Irish park but as a series of pathways to walk along. Irish parks tend to be more about chilling out and relaxing but Central Park is moving all the time. It's microcosm of Manhattan. There aren't really that many chill out areas with benches where people can relax or grassy areas for people to lie on and look at the clouds. There are roads going right through it, kind of like Phoenix Park in Dublin. The place is alive with cyclists, roller bladers (this is more of an excercise thing rather than a skating lifestyle), dog walkers and joggers. Joggers. You can't spit in Central Park without hitting a bloody jogger. I suppose I admire their tenacity but question their sanity...ok it's not insane to jog. It's just insane for everybody to jog. I'd say the New York marathon must have thousands of joggers eager to show off the fact that they're always jogging. Nobody walks along enjoying the scenery like I was. EVERYBODY jogs. The only time you'll see someone walking is when they're covered with sweat and clearly unable to continue jogging. When standing by the lake and looking around the perimeter, the lakeside path looks freakily like an oval track with all the joggers running around anti-clockwise. Jogging is even more popular here than in DC. It's such a definitive activity for New Yorkers. They don't have time to stop and smell the roses. They're always in a rush. I know this sounds really cliche. I suppose when I'm at home I walk around as quickly as I can because I always have somewhere to be or something that needs to be done. When I'm here, I'm never really sure where I'm going and I'm so amazed by everything around me that I take things slow. This is a dead giveaway that I'm not a native. This is how all the tourists at home walk around. What a role reversal! The driving here is the same: insane. I would say possibly worse than in France or Italy. Everybody drives as fast as they can and the taxi drivers are like bats out of hell. They use their horns more than their indicators. A red light means little to them if they think it's safe for them to go. If someone walks out onto the road a bit ahead of them they don't slow down they just hoot.I've been all over Manhattan by now. I've done a lot of walking. I bought some new shoes a few days ago and I'm trying to break them in. My feet are having a hard time getting used to them. This isn't part of my shoe problem ( I have a shoe problem - I always want to buy them). It was about time I bought some new shoes cos the old ones had holes in them and had been at least partially responsible for several near-death experiences on the treacherous floors of Johnny Rockets. The shoe shop was fairly surreal. It had tiny little TVs embedded in the floor and there was a DJ spinning and scratching up on top of a tower. The selection of shoes was fairly eccentric and suited me down to the ground. In the end settled on a relatively conservative back, blue and white pair. By now I've seen most of the major tourist sites and then some. I've been to Chinatown, Little Italy, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Staten Island ferry, Greenwich village, Chelsea, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, Soho, Madison Square Garden, Broadway, New York University, the 8th Avenue gay district, Alphabet City, St Patrick's Cathedral, The Rockefeller Centre, Times Square and the Metropolitan Museum. Who said you can't do it all in a few days? I'll probably do the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island tomorrow. I have decided to limit my explorations to Manhattan because if I went out into the other burroughs - well there's just too much of them.Yesterday, I recieved a guided tour from a very nice Puerto Rican fellow by the name of Richard Padro. He walked me all around the city over the course of four hours and showed me stuff I wouldn't have got to see otherwise. We had coffee in a French cafe and lunch in an insanely cheap place in Chinatown. Everything was between a dollar and $2.50. I got five pork dumplings for a dollar. My first foray into Chinese food was relatively tasty given that it only cost a dollar. Incidentally, Richard studied law for seven years in the University of Minnesota. He taught history so he knew everything about New York from the eighteenth century to the present day. He was a mine of information on present-day New York society and provided some very fascinating insights. The New York he describes from back when he was growing up in it is vastly different to the New York I'm walking around in now. The New York he descibes sounds like...hell to be quite honest. Apparently it was a very dangerous place to be and crime was rampant. But it's very safe now. Like ACDC said, 'I feel safe in New York City'. And I do. I feel about as safe as I did in Myrtle Beach at night and I felt pretty safe there after a few weeks. Another change that seems to have occured over the years is Chinatown expanding massively and taking over large parts of Little Italy and the Jewish district. There are so many foreign communties here. I know we think we're after getting fierce multicultural altogether in Ireland but it's still nowhere near NYC. Every nationality seems to band together and live in a seperate part of town. The main groups are the Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Chinese, Italians, Jews, Russians, Vietnamese, Koreans, Japanese, Indians, Pakistanis and of course Irish. I'm getting strong vibes that NY is a very transient city. While there are tons of people that are born and raised here I think more people probably just work here for a few years and then move on. I could see myself doing that. I think people who have lived here their whole lives must have kind of warped minds. Do they think the rest of the world lives the same way they do? I think New York would be a very weird place to call home. For one thing, you would have to be filthy rich to live here. Manhattan has been totally purged of poor people. They all live in the outlying burroughs and travel in on the subway to work crappy jobs. The only poor people who live in Manhattan are homeless because property prices here are just silly. You shouldn't even come on holidays here without loads of money because every aspect of daily life in Manhattan involves spending money and spending it in large quantities. 1 peach from a street vendor will cost you 75cents. 1 good seat at a Broadway show can cost around $250. If you're stupid enough to get a taxi, you will always pay at least $15. It is very difficult to have a good time here without lots of money and it can be quite depressing if you don't have any. Personally I have just decided to spend whatever I have to in order to enjoy myself. I'm only here for another two and a half days after all and who knows when/if I'll be back again. I suppose I should probably give you the lowdown on all the places I've visited since I came here. Well there was Brooklyn Bridge. That was probably one of my favourites actually. I walked all the way out to the first pillar. There were many other people walking, jogging, cycling and roller blading on the walkway which is suspended above the traffic right in the middle of the bridge. Cars flashed past under me and the walkway rumbled. The view was just incredibIe. Check out the nighttime photo of all the skyscrapers lit up. It was very surreal leaning on the railing as the cars whizzed by below and the skyscrapers across the way stood like an intimidating, unmovable army. Below me, dozens of ferries, coastguard speedboats and other vessels swarmed around in the water like fish at feeding time. Above me, the only visible stars were the blinking lights of aircraft passing by swiftly overhead against the Manhattan backdrop. They all moved in straight lines and seemed like cable cars gliding along on a complex web of invisible wires. I had never seen so many planes in the sky at the same time. When it was all put together, it made an agonizingly beautiful scene. It's for moments like these that we travel. We spend outrageous sums of money and put up with endess hours of boredom, hardship and those irksome moments of extreme anxiety in the hope that we can experiene scenes as beautiful and alien as this. It was bittersweet though. It was so beautiful that looking at it made me sad because there was nobody to share it with and say stuff like 'man...ain't that somethin huh?' to. That's the biggest problem with travelling on your own - being human, one is subjected to an occasional longing for human solidarity. Of course there are so many advantages to travelling on your own: you do exactly what you want and don't have to put up with boring things that you don't want to do or the conversation that invariably goes 'What do you want to do? I don't mind. What do you want to do? I don't mind either.' Nor do you have to tolerate the indecisivness of your potential travel companions before you leave when they're still deciding at the last minute whether they want to go or stay at home or totally change the destination. You can be a lot more spontaneous and just take as much time as you want with everything. But I think the advantages are outweighed by the disadvantages. No perk will ever be an adequate substitute for human companionship. Craic isn't really craic if you're having it on your own. I took a photo of a Mexican guy on Booklyn Bridge for him with his camera phone. He was on his own too and had no one to take a photo for him. We had a brief meeting of minds despite the language barrier. I felt the same way again when I took the Staten Island ferry much later that night. The views again, were breathtaking. The ferry was free. I had no desire to actually go to Staten Island but just wanted to get a good look at Manhattan at night. As soon as I reached the other side, I got on another ferry and came right back. The following day Richard took me to Greenwich village. It's called a village because it originally was a farming village. It doesn't fit onto the Manhattan street grid but follows and expands on the original street layout of the farming village. There are no skycrapers here but old brownstone buildings. It was a haven for starving artists back in the day when Manhatten property had reasonable rent so it was kind of bohemian but now the starving artists have been outpriced all the way to the Bronx. Nearby is Alphabet city which is really just a series of four avenues and a few streets which have constitute a seperate street grid to the rest of Manhattan. It derives its name from the fact that the avenues are called by letters of the alphabet rather than by numbers. OK it's 2:40AM now and I'm exhausted so I'll pick up where I left off tomorrow. I have plenty more things to be telling ye about. I did all manner of exciting things today. For hints on what they might have been, all you need do is look at my photos. Talk to ye tomorrow...

So I got on a bus and came back to Myrtle Beach. It took 19hours. On the way I stopped off for four hours in Charlotte bus station and for five hours in Columbia station again. The temperature has dropped significantly everywhere including Myrtle Beach so it was actually just as cold outside the bus station as inside so I slept indoors this time. Luckily I had my newly purchased Western Carolina University hoodie to keep me warm. It's purple. Very purple. I have neither the time nor the will to describe to you how heavy my heart was leaving my friends in North Carolina so I won't. Instead I'll briefly mention a few characters I met on the way. There was one redneck couple who were practising the CORRECT way to fold up an American flag in Charlotte bus station. That provided several minutes of entertainment. In Charlston bus station, there was a young black man who was travelling around with a small iguana on his shoulder. Nobody seemed to find this strange. I arrived back in Myrtle Beach at 10:55AM on Sunday morning...just in time for mass. So I hopped in the first taxi I saw and it took me to Trinity Episcopal church. I hadn't had a chance to visit this one yet and it had come recommended. Also, Kevin thought I should meet one of the priests there, Rob, who's only a young fella himself - he's around 24. Episcopal is almost exactly the same as Catholic. Almost all the same prayers in the mass and communion and everything. I had lunch with Rob today - my third Mexican meal - I know which spicy dishes to avoid now. He made some very witty observations on Myrtle Beach that I couldn't help but agree with. He descibed it as the 'armpit of South Carolina' and he said moving here a month ago from Oxford University in England (where he graduated recently) was like getting hit in the face with a board. It was great to have someone relate to my sentiments on Myrtle Beach in such a succint and imaginative way. I will not miss Myrtle Beach one bit, although I will miss my flatmates...I spent some time with them yesterday playing pool and walking on the beach. I feel like I really should have walked on the beach more. I only went around five times and it was right across the street from me. I definately prefer mountains to beaches though. Trees don't get in your shoes...usually. Apparently Johnny Rockets has disintegrated further since my departure last week. Now there are only four Irish workers left. They are all working twelve hour shifts because of the staff shortage and the life and soul has gone out of the place apparently - I am of course referring to myself. I'm just kidding but apparently there's no more craic there. I'm glad I got out in time. I have very little time left to write and have very little left to say except that Myrtle Beach has been an eye-opening experience. I have learned a lot from this place and am glad I came but am also glad to be leaving. I would not recommend it to a friend. To the friends who have emailed me in the past few days, I am very reassured by your corrospondance which I appreciate but clearly I will not have the opportunity to respond until next week when I have settled back in at home. I will be sure to write though. I don't know if I will have the opportunity to update this again until I get home but if not I'll let you know how New York was and if I find the time and the facilities to do so while in NYC, then I will update from there. Start spreading the news (ba da ba da ba) I'm leaving today...

Someone emailed me a comment yesterday after reading my entry detailing my grueling journey to Asheville. I found the last line of that email particularly poignant so I thought I'd share it with you. “Travel is an odd mixture of long spells of boredom and small, irksome moments of extreme anxiety.” That is so true! And the trip back will have about an extra four hours of boredom and two extra transfers of extreme anxiety crammed in there!
       I recently discovered that my blog is listed on the main blogtext homepage as the top photoblog! I have more photos than anyone else! Isn't that cool! So if any of you ever lose my blog address for some reason just visit the main blogtext.org homepage and you'll find a link to my blog on it!
 I saw my first cricket yesterday! It was trying to escape from a lawnmower and I saw it! They had always hid from me so efficiently and I finally got the better of their undercover operation and got a good look at one of their faces. I expected them to be skinnier for some reason. He was kinda fat! He couldn’t really hop properly he just had to kind of skip. I felt so victorious having finally seen one of the noisy but invisible little creatures.
 I had another first last night too. I baked a cake! O yes I did. Me…baked a cake! It was Katy’s birthday (if you don’t know who she is by now then you’re either new or you haven’t been reading my blog enough or looking at the photo albums – shame on you!) so we baked her a chocolate cake. Obviously there were two girls helping too but lets just gloss over that fact for now and focus on the fact that I baked a cake! It had eggs and butter and everything and I whisked it all up with a big whisky thingy! O yeah! That’s right! Eoin the cake-baking extrordinaire! Lots of friends came over to hang out. Two of her friends drove half way across the state to surprise her on her birthday. We all sat and ate cake and I made cups of Earl Grey tea for anyone who was curious enough to try it and we played Mario Kart and chatted and sure twas just lovely altogether! Then we experienced THE most spectacular thunderstorm I have seen since I got here. Unlike in Myrtle Beach where the lightning is pink, the lightning here is blue and looks far more dangerous. We’re not just talking about flashes here! We’re talking about all the mountains being lit up and single jagged bolts of immensely blue light going straight down into the forest and turning orange where it hits a tree and sets it on fire. The lights inside were flickering and everything. It was so cool!
 On another completely random note, bees are so much worse over here than at home. There are so many species of bees and it’s difficult to tell which ones are actually bees or just flies and some of them can’t sting so it’s really very confusing. I end up being scared of pretty much anything that buzzes. Every house seems to have a bee problem. There are hives everywhere and you have to attack them with bee-killing spray which is very dangerous cos they won’t die straight away. Today Kevin stuck a broom handle into a hive that he thought was dormant cos he had sprayed it the day before but there were still a few of them alive and they weren’t too happy at all at all. We all escaped unscathed however.
 Today I went to see some American football. The WCU Catamounts train everyday in the stadium next to us so we went down and sat in the empty stands to watch them go through the drills. Kevin did his best to explain how it works. It’s not as complicated as rugby. Basically it’s all about doing whatever is necessary to get this little oval ball from the middle of the pitch to the end but it’s harder than it sounds cos there’s loads of massive men trying to do the same thing with the same ball but to the other side of the pitch. If you think you’re not going to make it all the way to the end then you can kick it over the goal instead but that’s not as good as getting it over the line for a touchdown. That seems to be the basic premise. It does look a lot more entertaining than baseball. It’s mostly about brute force – the heavier you are the better you are – but you also have to be able to run fast and throwing that ball properly is a lot harder than it looks. It looks like a lot of fun to play too if you happen to be a big massive beast. It’s like Gaelic football while wearing armour and a lot less rules about tackling and no rules about soloing and throwing instead of handpassing. Ok it’s probably a lot more like rugby but I don’t like rugby?
 Cat went to South Carolina yesterday for a wedding shower so Kevin invited a load of lads over and we had a big barbeque and a Mario Kart marathon tournament with four controllers. It was great craic altogether. Not looking forward to going back to Myrtle Beach tomorrow.
       I just found out about the hand luggage restrictions for UK flights today. Restrictions is just a euphemism. Try hand luggage fundamentalism! It's ridiculous!!! I can't even bring on a book! What am i going to do with a book for God's sake?!!! I mean seriously? Do they think I am going to knock the pilot unconscious with a paperback copy of Eric Van Lustbader's 'The Ninja'? Them bloody Brits again! First they take our country, now they take our hand luggage!!! What next? Our right to write stupid pointless blogs? Never! Never I say! They may take our hand luggage, they may take all our good soccer players...but they will never take our blogs!!!
Sin a bhfuil for now.
 

  Today you have two entries to read. This is because I have written them on Kevin's iBook but for some reason, Safari or Mac Internet Explorer doesn't support KTML which you need to upload blog entries on blogtext.org so I have to upload these all together on a borrowed PC when I get the chance. I realize this is something you may forget by the time you get down to the bottom of this entry so I will remind you again at the end to go ahead to the previous entry. Actually it would be a much better idea to read it now and then come back and read this one in order to keep things in chronological order. Ok off you go then, see you in a few minutes…OK you're back, hello again. So what news do I have for you? Well first I think I need to applaud the pillows in Kev&Cat's spare room for being so exceptionally springy. They're big massive things that your head sinks into and then amazingly, when you lift your head, they reassume their original position – unlike Rainbow Court's pillows which are more like a grayish-brown damp sack of flour with a big Eoin's-head-shaped dent in it. Appealing isn't it. Of course I was always so exhausted after Johnny Rockets that the concrete of Columbia would have been appealing. But forgive me, I digress. The purpose of today's entry is to further inform you of life in the Smoky Mountains. It continues to kick ass. Incidentally, there has been a change in my travel plans. I am no longer going to Atlanta as my friend there has unfortunately suffered a family bereavement and as a result is not at home at the moment. Now, I'm going to be here until Saturday afternoon when I will return to Myrtle Beach. I will leave here at 4PM and will arrive the following day at 11AM. Yes this is a 19hour journey but the infuriating part is that it's actually a four and a half hour journey but I will have multiple transfers and lay-overs and whatever stupid route they're taking is zigzagging all over the place. No matter, I shall read, I shall sleep, I shall have a ball. I just better not miss any transfers or I shall be fuming! So yeah anyway, here I am in Cullowhee NC and I'm loving it. Yesterday, Kevin took me on a bit of a drive through an even more remote part of the country. The roads are more like the roads in Ireland here – very narrow and very winding, with hairpin turns and everything – when you're trying to build roads down the side of a mountain, it's the only way to go. The more I saw the more I loved the place. There are trees EVERYWHERE. It's just one big massive forest really. I got to see real Hillbilly country – red barns falling apart, covered bridges, old wooden houses with screen doors and porches for old men to sit on and look at the traffic, old pick up trucks (check out the photo of the old blue 55 Chevy pick-up) some rusting away to nothing on concrete blocks in rusty vehicle cemeteries, little country shops in the middle of nowhere with rocking chairs on the porch. It was rustic, quaint and charming, everything that rural Ireland is regularly accused of by Americans and they have it in buckets here! We left Jackson County and entered Transylvania County. We passed places with names like Bear Lake, Wolf Lake – there was even a fork in the road named The Tuning Fork! Apparently there's all sorts of wildlife up here in the Mountains, deer, black bears, wolves, mountain lions, lynx, even black panthers…but in the 24 years Kevin has lived here he has only seen one or two of each so they're fairly rare. Eventually the road became ridiculously narrow and untarred until we were driving on dirt tracks – it was even worse than the road to Milstreet! I think this is probably a side to America that a lot of people miss out on and it's what I was hoping I would see when I left Ireland two months ago, heading for what I thought was the 'deep south'. We went to Turtleback falls – so named because the water plunges off a very smooth and curving rock face that kind of looks like a turtle's back, as you can see from the photos. You may not believe what I am about to tell you but it is true I assure you. We used the waterfall like a big waterslide! We sat down on the top and pushed off and we slid right off into the deep water below! The rock, you see, where there is water flowing over it, is covered in an extremely slippery and mysterious substance, a substance even more slippery and mysterious than that which coats the hallowed floors of Johnny Rockets. The smooth curved surface of the rock, carved over thousands of years by the waterfall, is the perfect natural waterslide. To get to the top of the waterfall, we had to swim into the river and catch a rope which was attached to the top of the waterfall and then climb up the side of the waterfall. You will notice a photo of me standing casually beside a sign that warns of death or injury and cautions that 'people have died here!' Yes I am quite the daredevil amn't I. But what we did at Turtleback was nothing compared to what we did next. We continued down the river a little way on foot until we reached Rainbow Falls, so named because of the little rainbows that form at the bottom in the mist. This one is WAY bigger than Turtleback, it's so big that there's actually wind blowing down at the bottom caused by the crashing of the water and it's really cold. There is no way you could jump of the top of this one – it would be suicide. The depth of the water was more unpredictable here. The water is murky so you can't see rocks that are right under the water but then right next to it, there are places so deep that even teams of scuba divers that were sent down there couldn't safely reach the bottom. What we did there was very foolhardy and/or brave. We climbed up about thirty or forty feet up the sheer rockface beside the waterfall. It was very difficult trying to find tiny handholds and footholds to drag ourselves up to the ledge where we could stand. It was like the climbing wall in UCC only without ropes, without a padded floor and with way less convenient crevices. Considering I had only done climbing walls a few times, this was a way higher level than I should have attempted. Check out the photos. We don't look like we're that high but trust me we were high! One guy, Kent, was a total psycho and he went up even higher. On the way, he stumbled upon a beehive and was attacked at about forty feet in the air. It wasn't safe to jump from that position so he just had to take the stings and keep climbing. I have a photo of him that I zoomed in for so you can see how worried he is as he's swatting them with one hand and hanging on for dear life with the other. When he jumped off he swam back to the shore and got a stick, stuck it down his shorts and climbed back up to the hive for revenge. He is a psycho. He was actually mad at the bees. He climbed all the way back there and stabbed every last one of them to death with his little stick! Personally I would have just let it go to be honest. Jumping off that ledge was so scary. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to jump out far enough to clear the rocks and just as I jumped, I chickened out and grabbed onto the rock. This was the most dangerous thing I could have done and I nearly just fell off (falling off will result in at least broken bones – you have to jump out as far as you can to avoid the rock). The second time I just did it and I can tell you it was a lot scarier than jumping from a hundred feet with a rope attached to you. At least I knew that was 99% safe. I knew this was extremely risky and foolish and that people had died doing it. But I did it anyway cos I'm just so cool it's not even funny. This is more scary than a bungee jump because in a bungee jump as soon as you feel the rope boing, you know the scary part is over whereas here, every pico-second of your descent you're hoping you don't hit rock and then when you hit water, you're still hoping you don't hit rock and you don't really know you're safe until you swim back up to the top again and get some air. The feeling of relief at being alive is similar though.

        After all our exploits, we were exhausted so we hiked back up to the car park and went to visit Devin's house (he had been jumping down the falls with us). He really lives on the edge of nowhere – it's really isolated. He has a small farm, about five acres. Farming isn't that major an occupation out here because there are trees everywhere – construction and landscaping are apparently the major occupations for these country folk. His farm is carved out of the forest. It was nice to see some cattle again as I hadn't seen any since I left Ireland. Also he had a piano so I got to play some for the first time since I left Ireland. Then we went down to his basement where he uncovered some old sparring pads and I had my first sparring match since I left Ireland with the bee-killing psycho, Kent. Luckily he was a bit easier on me than with the bees. It was good to get some practice in again but I realized that I would have a lot of work to do when I got home to get back to where I was fitness-wise when I left. I have room to practise patterns out here though and have started to do so – I'm relearning the higher ones and getting the hang of them again – it's a great location for practicing surrounded by all these mountains and it's a bit cooler up here than in Myrtle Beach. Well..I guess that's all I got to report for today. If you haven't read my previous entry then scroll down now and do so – check in again tomorrow and hopefully I'll have some more for ye. I might write about the Native Americans. I haven't met any but I've been talking to the people here about them and learning about how they fit into modern America and I've come to the conclusion that they pretty much don't. More about this later. Peace out.

  Well I'm in North Carolina and I have so much to tell you about it but first I have to tell you about getting here because of course that's half the fun. I left Myrtle Beach on Monday night at 7:05PM and arrived here yesterday at 10:25AM. That's 15 and a half hours of fun! It wasn't that the journey took that long - I was probably only travelling for about eight hours of that. But I had to get transfers at three different cities. First was Charlston SC. It was dark by the time we got here but it was all lit up and it was encouraging to see a real city again. I remembered what it was that made a city a city - namely, a big mad river flowing through it. He had to go over a 2mile long bridge to get into the city. Charlston is a major inland port and the massive river was full of huge ships moored up to the docks and then after the docks were lots of big factories with smoke-belching chimneys. I never thought I'd be glad to see industrialisation but it was great to see somewhere that wasn't just a big gimmick. We were running late when we arrived in Charlston and I nearly didn't make it in time for my transfer. I got off the bus and straight onto the next one just in time. I would have been totally screwed if I didn't make it. Next stop, Columbia SC. Columbia is the capital of South Carolina and by the looks of it, it's a bit of a hole. When I got off the bus, the first thing that struck me was that I was finally an ethnic minority! About 80% of the people hanging around outside the station were black. It was after midnight and I had to hang out here for five hours before my next bus arrived. I went inside and tried to catch some sleep but the air conditioning was way too cold and I couldn't stay there. I went outside and after trying to sleep on an insanely uncomfortable bench, eventually just curled up in the foetal position on the tarmack and used my rucksack as a pillow. It sounds uncomfortable but it was the best sleep I'd had in days. I slept soundly until some very considerate lady woke me up to tell me that the bus was here. I stumbled over to it in a disorientated daze, and had enough sense to check that it was the right one before I got in line. The line was very slow moving and long and the bus was already almost full from wherever it had come from. I was near the end of the line and I suddenly realised that there might not be enough room. I got really worried - remember I had been waiting for five hours, it was about 5AM in a dodgy part of a dodgy city that I had never been in before and where I knew nobody and this was my ONLY way out. If I didn't make this bus, then I wouldn't make my next connection and even if I waited for the next bus (probably the next day), then I would have missed my next connection and I would be stranded in an equally inhospitable city. My fingers were crossed the whole way up the queue as I watched each remaining seat on the bus being filled. Well I'm writing from North Carolina so you can guess that they just managed to squeeze me in. I had to sit next to a redneck woman with an inexplicably large posterior. She soon informed me that she was a truck driver on a week's holiday and that she had been travelling for over a day now, having come from Tampa Bay, Florida. She produced her ticket as evidence of this fact, lest I proved to be skeptical. I commended her for her endurance and hoped she would shut up and let me go back to sleep. No such luck. She smelled of alcohol and stale sweat and she liked to mumble incoherently at length. I adopted defensive body language and crossed my arms. I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. Nothing worked. She didn't seem phased at all by the fact that I was clearly 'fast asleep';) Apparently, she was a more engaging conversationalist than I in any case so she continued her discussion on the merit of travel with herself in her southern drawl. This continued for what seemed like an eternity. Then she slumped over and promptly fell asleep on my shoulder, much to my frustration! The stench was overpowering and her frizzy hair was getting in my nose. I shifted positions and shrugged my shoulders but she would just make little snorting sounds, sit up straight and then  slowly keel over again. This continued until dawn came over the horizon to rescue me. Eventually, after two and a half hours, we reached Charlotte NC and I was glad to see the back of this well intentioned but smelly lady. Again, we were running late and I only just made it on to my next bus in time. This was my last transfer. Incidentally, Charlotte looked like a real city too. It even had half a dozen proper skyscrapers. It must be a fairly big city because all the big concerts are on here, Def Leppard played there a few weeks ago. Charlotte kind of looked like a city where lots of people worked but nobody lived unlike Columbia which looked like a city where lots of people lived but not many worked and also unlike Myrtle Beach where few do either. Anyway to cut a long story short I endured another two and a half hours of sleepless travel with a tenaciously screaming baby across the aisle from me and was very relieved to finally reach Asheville NC and see Kevin and his wife Cat.

             They took me into town and we walked around the place so I could get a feel for the city. It's a lovely city altogether. Medium size, population of 85,000, and a very bohemian atmosphere pervades the whole city. It's like a little liberal, hippy San Fransisco in the middle of hardcore redneck country. It's kind of like Israel stuck in the middle of all them fundamentalist Arab states. There are psychadelic shops selling hippy clothes and beads and craftshops and the like scattered all over the place. We had lunch in a totally groovy pizza place called the Mellow Mushroom. It was very psychadelically decorated in bright colours and they played Hendrix on the PA inside. From what I saw of Asheville, it seems to epitomise it's feel. After lunch we went to a farmer's market to buy some vegetables for the dinner. The farmer's market is like a way bigger version of when Breda sells fruit and veg in Macroom town square out of the back of a lorry under a parasol...or if you can imagine the street sellers on Moore Street (that's the right street isn't it) in Dublin all put into a big milking parlour and selling stuff there everyday. It's handier cos it's indoors. They should really do something like that in Ireland because the weather is so unpredicable. There were eggplants/aubergines purchased. I can't believe people actually buy them but there you go! Then we drove out to Kevin's gaff which is in a little place up in the Smoky Mountains called Cullowhee. It's about an hour from Asheville. This place is so beautiful. This must be what it's like for Americans who do the ring of Kerry. They live here so they're probably used to it but I'm sitting here writing this in the living room on Kevin's iBook and the porch is right in front of me and the view from out the sliding door is pretty 'awesome' to coin an Americanism. It's hard to believe that people can live here with their little wooden houses clinging stubbornly to the mountainside. The whole area is covered in forest. These forests have been here forever, the English settlers didn't bother to chop down many of them because they have loads of room in America. Check out the photos of the sunset in the mountains - it's pretty daycent. I think we're going to do a bit of hiking today and we're going out to Turtleback falls to do a bit of diving and swimming and the like. This house is really nice too. Because it's literally on the side of a mountain, you walk in the front door and there isn't really a downstairs, you have to go staight up the stairs to get to the living room, kitchen, bathroom and bedrooms and when you get up there, on one side of it you're on the second floor but on the other, you're still on the ground floor and the garden just slopes up steeply. There's lots of these little houses all over the place in these mountains. But the most remarkable thing about this little mountain community is that there's a college right in the middle of it all! Check out the photos of the campus. It's just splat in the middle of the forest and the mountains. Every student has a car out here. The campus only has a handful of buildings in it - the student population is about 8,000. There are about two 'dorms' - these are high-rise hotels where students live but they don't have apartments - they just have bedrooms that they have to share with another person. There's no kitchen or living room and they have to share bathrooms. They can't cook or anything - they have to go to a 'dining hall' which is like a cafeteria and eat whatever they're serving there. I wouldn't like that - I much prefer the freedom and choice of living in a city where lots of non-students live and buying whatever I want and cooking it. Anyway then there's only a few other buildings with lecture halls and stuff and the vast majority of the campus is dedicated to sports. They have about four different stadia for all the different American sports and they have loads of tiered seating and proper floodlights and everything - I mean they're like proper stadiums. The college seems to be more about sport than education. If you took the Mardyke Arena sports complex in UCC, multiplied it by five, added loads more spectator seating (and interest from spectators who don't play the sports themselves) and added a dozen buildings on campus and a power plant (they have their own electricity generation station!) and two or three of the UCC Campus Accomodation complexes minus the lving rooms and kitchens - you've got Western Carolina University. It's so weird to find all that up in the middle of the mountains, miles from anywhere instead of in the middle of a city. The college isn't in session yet but the football team is here and they have to practise everyday eventhough college hasn't started yet. They're really serious about the sport here. It's a lot cooler up here in the mountains - I find it very comfortable now but it's still way hotter than the hottest day in Ireland. They have to practise in that heat and also at night. When they turn on the floodlights at night, all the mountains behind the stadium are lit up.

             I managed to somehow lose all my photos and all my music off my camera/MP3 player yesterday. Most of my music is very wisely backed up on the family computer at home so I can get that when I go home. All the photos I had before I came here are also saved on that computer and the ones I took here are obviously backed up on this blog. I've started the very long process of downloading them all again. I'll do around twenty  a day and then I should have them all back in a few months. So the only thing I've really lost is all the music I downloaded while I was here and the photos I took in Asheville yesterday. Last night, Cat made dinner for us. We had corn on the cob. We also had pink chicken - like the inside was white but the outside was like HOT pink - it was raspberry flavoured chicken and it was actually really nice. There was also pineapple caserole which was also insanely tasty. Couldn't get enough of it. Ok I've got to stop writing now cos I've got to enjoy this experience while I'm here. It's like the little house on the prairie except with mountains instead of a prairie.