Are you really trying to tell me you don’t get homesick for London?
It’s a phenomenon I know well myself …
Or are you trying to convince yourself?
After all, fun though the U.S. is to visit, it’s a bit of a cultural wasteland really, isn’t it? When you’re there you don’t feel like it’s a melting pot of cultures so much as each nationality that went there took some aspect of one of the other nationalities’ cultures and then tried to explain it someone from yet another culture, who didn’t speak the same language … and that third person recounted what they had misunderstood to their kids … who didn’t listen and told their kids something that was almost but not quite entirely unlike it …
From the Pennsylvania ‘Dutch’ from Germany to the Hefeweizen with a slice of lemon in it like it were a Hoegaarden, to the pizza with cheese made from tasteless plastic …
… not so much a melting pot as a cauldron of gumbo made by too many cooks, each trying a new, exotic dish with which they are entirely unfamiliar and from a recipe translated through multiple foreign language dictionaries, by people who spoke none of them …
(Ironically, that’s also the way American ¹ seems to be spoke!)
And it’s just so un(der)developed … the shopping mall standing in for a market-place that ceased to exist here in Europe last century; sure, it’s a young nation, but you’d think modern life would have impinged at least a little by now: we have trains and planes and automobiles … it takes hours, not weeks, to travel from one o̶n̶e̶-̶h̶o̶r̶s̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶w̶n̶ metropolis to the next and, when we reach our destination, it’s home to millions, not hundreds … there’s more to do there than go to the town square to promenade around and be seen by the local VIPs — it’s the 21st Century, not the 18th …
Don’t get me wrong … whenever I‘ve been’ there, I’ve had a blast … it just strikes me that Vegas is a pretty good metaphor for the whole of the U.S. really … a cheap caricature of itself … and it seems as though the locals spend their lives walking around it with a pair of AR goggles on, overlaying reality with Hollywood fantasy.
Even you must yearn for some down-to-earth reality and honest character now and then …
And think to yourself …
But, okay … I’ve had my fun 😉 … seriously now …
Where in London did you ‘live’, why and why did you leave after only three months — was the planned stay over or did you simply decide “fuck this, I’m leaving”?
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¹ Well, you couldn’t call the mongrel creole ‘English’, could you?
