great post - all true!

As their hotel was close to Christ Church we began with the Guinness Hop Store. On seeing the old Guinness billboard with the farmer pulling a cart in which sat the horse (the Guinness for strength one) my boss’ manager announced it was a rip-off of Budweiser’s Clydesdale adverts.

Then on to Christ Church cathedral itself. My boss was in complete awe that a building could be so old. And I mean awe. She was babbling incoherently and touching everything. I really thought she was losing the plot.

Newgrange had been my plan for the Sunday but I began to worry that I’d have too much trouble trying to explain its relevance to one, and the other would end up a basket case, and decided on a drive in the mountains instead.

That, it turned out, was even more trouble. But that’s a story for another day.

A year later I was the tourist and was taken to an American football game, a baseball game, a rodeo and a medieval re-enactment. I too misinterpreted a lot. And I babbled incoherently too. Mostly about why it hadn’t rained so we could go to a pub.

A copy was given to me just before I left London to live in KC by a young Scots programmer working for me. Evidently this book tickled him pink and even more to know where I was headed… I really didn’t get to read it (nor comprehend his enthusiasm in donating it to me) until many years later when immersion in the culture made the book (and the donation) all the more hysterical.

Bryson has that great ability to both inside and outside his own culture - mostly because he left it for all those years – making his observations all that much more tangible coming from a Midwesterner.

Bryson’s is much the same in that it’s his first one and a pilgrimage to his American past prompted by the death of his father - he had been living in England for something like 18 years I think at the time he wrote it. It’s very wicked in its sarcasm (makes McCarthy like Mary Poppins), and upsets people when it happens not to talk up their town, but overall it is no less lovingly told. I read it before ever setting foot on US soil and again after my cross-country bicycle trip and it stands up well to time.

Elizabeth, when I move back I may be staying in a kennel. Bring tape for the dog-hair on your clothes. -And stop ruining my stereotypes.