Concrete Jungle That Dreams Are Made Of

New York, New York - so good they named it twice. Only one thing to do with that kind of hype - a one-day smash-and-grab of Philadelphia. In your face you over-sized, pomacious metropolis.

Philadelphian highlight? Was it the Liberty Bell? Was it the birthplace of America? Of course not, down in the boho ghetto a crazy man has turned his house into a mosaic - Philadelphia Magic Garden, down on South Street - and whilst you're down on South Street you can get yourself a Philly cheesesteak. Or not bother, because it's just a hard to eat sandwich. Overrated.

Speaking of which, one of the big things I was aiming at whilst in the States was to eat as many of the local dishes as was viable. So here goes the Traveller Cliche guide to the cuisine of Louisiana - remember I eat these things so you don't have to:

Biscuits and Gravy
Biscuits and gravy? Get right in my face you. Oh no, wait, you're not what I was expecting at all - you're flavourless bits of dough in a boring white sauce. How mundane? I was expecting chocolate hobnobs in beefstock - at least that would've provoked a reaction of more than an ambivalent shrug.

Crawfish Etoufee
What is the fuss about. People go crazy for this and I don't understand. It's not unpleasant - well the taste isn't unpleasant, the smells fairly bad and the texture / look reminds you just how crawfish live - but it's not something I'd go voodoo for.

Grits
Feels a bit like you're eating an ants' nest. Taste's alright though.

Gumbo
Watered-down curry.

Shrimp Po'boy
Right, shrimp bo-boy sounds really quite exotic whereas a scampi sandwich sounds a bit Kerri Katona. They're the same thing.

Oysters
If you deep-fry stuff in breadcrumbs it tastes of chicken - why would you do that to the poor little oysters?

Jambalaya
Jambalaya=good

Fat Tuesday

I don't get Mardi Gras.

Actually, that's not true. I completely get Fat Tuesday itself - a day of indulgence where everyone wears fancy dress and gets so drunk that they can't stand up and uses the parade as their preferred method of transport (got to get to Rampart and Dumaine? Gonna need at least a trombone for that kind of journey).

What I don't get are the proper parades. What we'd call carnivals. You stand in the cold for up to twelve hours at a time, whilst people on lorries throw stuff at you. A drive-by beading if you will. And people seem to take the accumulation of beads seriously - the locals all go out with step ladders and massive beachbags to put the beads in. I just don't get it in anyway - and it goes on for five days. Five days of people throwing tacky plastic beads at your face. Five days.

Me? I lasted about twenty minutes.

The Big Easy

So, I made it to New Orleans.

New Orleans is just about everything I expected it to be - a hotchpotch of old houses and spicy food. The whole city is limbering up for the big one, which makes the whole place seem a bit more, erm, Jersey Shore than I was expecting (for the record, I'm not really sure what Jersey Shore is, but I imagine it to be a lot like Bourbon Street is at the moment. i.e. A lot of drunk Americans whooping - if Jersey Shore isn't like that, then please imagine I used the word frat party instead).

Weirdest thing I've eaten since I've been here - 'gator jerky.

What happened there then?

Funny how things turn out. Originally I tried to book this trip via Chicago but it was going to be really expensive, so I didn't bother. Now, due to a series of clerical errors by United Airlines I appear to be getting paid to be in Chicago. Which is nice.

I've already had a cheeky smash and grab just been up the Willis (nee Sears) Tower - it's impressively full of pro-Willis Tower propaganda - I was reliably informed that it was the tallest building in the Northern Hemisphere by one of the attendants. Maybe she's trapped in 1986?

Seen Anish Kapoor's shiny bean thing too - now that was ace. I might even post a photo of that.

Chicago's been my third city in three days. Yesterday I had a cheeky smash and grab of Baltimore, wandered around for the day pretending to be Stringer Bell. Ate crab cakes in Lexington Market - they were as good as the hype.

One of the downsides of this predicaent is that my bag is a couple of thousand miles away, which means I need to get me some clean pants. I'm on a road called the Magnificent Mile - there's a Tiffany and a Gucci opposite - I'm not sure I'm in the best place, wish me luck...

A Washington Post

I can't convey quite how unreflective the reflecting pool was. I always thought it worked quite well in a double kind of way: it was made out of water so it physically reflected stuff; it was all peaceful so allowed you to do some metaphorical reflecting. It was nether. It had been drained and was being dug up. There was a lot of plant there. And to add to the noise, there was a fleet of helicopters shipping dignatories in to the White House.

Apart from that Washington had a very impressive world-famous-stuff-what-I-saw to photos-what-I-took ratio. I saw loads of really famous stuff off the telly - The Capitol; the White House; the Lincoln Memorial; the Washington Monument - and didnn't take photos of any of it.

Dystopia

Shoe shopping is one of my least favourite things. I can't think of many worse examples of style over convenience. The shoes are almost always laced up so that you can't tighten them and inevitably there'll only be one available so that you're at the mercy of an over-worked sixteen-year-old running her legs into nubs. Angers me. Still, I faced it today. Hopefully that will see me through another five years or so.

Lately I seem to have been reading a whole heap of dystopian teen fiction, apparently it's the hip new thing. Here's some words about some of them:

Hunger Games
Yes it's almost a straight rip off of Battle Royal. Yes it's about a teenage love triangle. Yes it's obvious. Yes the third one stretches the suspension of disbelief so far past snapping point as to be laughable. Yes the film is about to come out and smear my expectations against a massive hunk of disappointment (Prince Harry as Cato? Really?). But if you can think of a more enjoyable book I will fight you and I will prevail because I will have right on my side.

Wither
Yes it's almost a straight rip off of the Handmaids Tale. Yes it's about a teenage love triangle (well pentagon). Yes it's obvious. Yes it's only the first part of a trilogy and the next two could very easily be rubbish, but I for one am going to find out how good they are as fast as I possibly can - which will probably be about eighteen months - come on Lauren de Stefano get back to your writing.

Pure (no not that one what's been in the news, the Julianna Baggott one - incidentally, if you google Pure Julianna you get someone trying to sell you pigs)
Well hello, Pure. I was told that you were going to be teen fiction, but you appear to be rather more literary than that. You're like a book for grown ups that just happens to have sixteen-year-olds as the main characters. You're also mighty twisted, with your deformed lead characters and your brutal, brutal world. You know, Pure, I think that we could be friends.

I'm too ______ for Milan

It was only when I went to buy a paper this morning and saw the dregs of humanity that had managed to make One stop that I truly realised how stylish everyone, that's EVERYONE, in Milan looked. There was no one who looked like they'd just stumbled out of bed and landed in something resembling the outside. Everyone was tailored up to their eyebrows.

I liked Milan 'though. It's dismissal as an industrial hellhole seems somewhat unjustified. I guess when you're comparing it to VeniceFlorenceRome it comes out short, but it seems to be a proper place, rather than the upper-middle-class Disneyland of the big three.

Pleasantly surprised.