Conference Trips, Southern Roads, Sun, 15 Nov 2015 | written by Simon
Simon at a City in North America, USA

One of the great things about sleeping in the car is that it makes you appreciate a proper bed once you have one. The first night in the hostel was great. Add a bathtub to the mix and we’re getting very close to heaven.

Hostel building

The hostel turned out to be an interesting meeting place. On the first night I met a couple who are traveling around the US trying to promote sustainable living. Really needed, considering how wasteful everything is here – the amount of petrol burnt in cars or the amount of food wasted seem much higher than anywhere in Europe, recycling bins practically don’t exist… Not great. While we were talking, there was some noise that I didn’t even pay attention to and they got all alert, saying that they are listening for gun shots. The US seems more and more like a very unevenly civilised country.

On the second night I walked in to the common area and found a person whom I met at a conference in Leeds and who is here for the same conference as me. The world is small!

The conference was good. Talks about games, rock covers and fiction. My presentation was on the first day and went pretty ok. I gathered some praise for the reading list project during the Diversity Caucus, and promoted the DRL. Good to renew some contacts.

On the last day, on the way to the airport I managed to lose my phone. I left it in the taxi that brought me there together with some conference colleagues. Well, crap. I managed to get on the airport wifi and change all my passwords, so hopefully I won’t get in too much trouble over that. Hope I’ll manage to recover my phone number.

And that’s the end of story, really. Here are some assorted observations about the trip:

Perhaps I just saw what I was expecting to see, but a number of stereotypes about the South seem to be true. Visible racism, lots of baptists, lots of obese people, huge food portions, significant gun related problems… Especially the race issues came though quite strongly, as the divides are really visible in where people live, hang out, what jobs they have (virtually all of the staff of the hotel where the conference was were African American). It was really quite depressing.

Some positive stereotypes, too: people do seem more relaxed and approachable than in Britain and do much less of this frustrating polite indirectness thing. It’s refreshing, though at points I was somewhat annoyed by it, simply because I wanted to be alone and people kept chatting to me. But hey, at least here I felt comfortable to impolitely ignore them.

On an unrelated note, I now love automatic cars with a Cruise button. The whole trip was so much more pleasant for not having to watch my speed and having rested feet.

Towns here are quite confusing. You drive into the suburb with ground floor houses and some retail parks, continue through it for a while, and then… the town ends. Not centre, no mid or high buildings, no nothing. It’s just a big spread blob of houses. And both towns and cities are all very obviously built for cars, not for humans.

As to the famed Southern hospitality, I am not sure. I didn’t feel much like asking hospitality from people in baptist living communities or those with Confederate flags and Donald Trump posters in their gardens.

Anyway, this is it. The trip was fun and educational, and offered a great deal of much needed rest and solitude. Looking forward to being back home now.