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I had a transit in Fort Lauderdale Hollywood, which I spent writing the mandatory blog to the Principal’s Go Abroad fund, from whom I received money for the trip. The passport guy had not been as smily when I said I didn’t have my friend’s address - but then the guy that actually kept the entry form didn’t make any comment about it, and even asked me friendly, non-immigrant/border control-like questions. The first guy had gone along with a phone number and full name. It turned out later (or rather, I later recalled) that actually I had both asked for and received my friend’s address in Philly, but…yes, had obviously forgotten about it and not written it down at the time. Silly me.
Since I came in from Florida, I arrived in the domestic hall, where there were no controls - but what’s more, there was no separation between the luggage conveyor belts and the ‘receiving hall’. Not only did I not realize this, but I’m used to everything being so slow when not in Iceland, so I took my time going to the bathroom, and brushing my teeth after my long trip (or actually the transit was almost just as long as the flight from Lima…) before going out into the luggage hall, seeing that my backpack was already circulating the belt, and then as soon as I had taken it off I spotted my flatmate from Edinburgh looking for me. She had been waiting - and suspected it was my bag, but didn’t know it she had just gone extremely blind. But so I explained I had just gone to the bathroom.
The very few metres to her boyfriend’s car were already extremely hot. Not just those 34 degrees, but so extremely humid. In a way it was nice though, after the extreme dryness of both Atacama dessert, and Salar de Uyuni. My hands had mostly recovered - but only mostly.
Her boyfriend - or now fiancé as I found out while in South-America - was waiting by the car. We had met when he came to visit in Edinburgh. It was nice that he was there, that kinda he had been bothered to come all this way - and not even for one of his own friends - but at the same time I felt extremely rotten not having showered for…what - 3 days? Since after getting back from Machu Picchu! A 20h bus ride (it was 1h early - did I write that…?) and two planes… In that sense I didn’t quite feel like having male company - and even less so going to the store, but I figured I’d get hungry before the party that was going to be at 7 PM. That wasn’t until in 4h so even if I wasn’t hungry there and then, I would end up being so.
The store was gigantic. Obviously I was aware that we were in the States……but still! You know the two times I’ve been before, it’s always been with my parents - and you end up eating out, or going into a corner shop in New York to get a bottle of water in the heat. Never done this before. My flatmate was kinda laughing at me because I was just so amazed at the maze of a store. My favourite thing they had though was ‘mix n match’ protein powder paid per 100 grams or whatever, maybe rather paid per some American measurement, I don’t quite remember.
We got some Asian food from the ‘salad bar’ (there was an actual salad bar too - but I don’t know what else to call a mix n match table of food) and a drink with lemonade and cranberry for the party for me, and some beers for her and her fiancé.
When we got to their place my flatmate and I had the food - feeling bad for eating fake Chinese food after having spent a year with the best Chinese food of our Chinese flatmate. Then I had shower, since we didn’t have much time before we were leaving for the party. It was probably the best shower I had had in…5 weeks? It was the first time it wasn’t freezing cold when getting out of the shower!! There was a really fluffy carpet on the second floor where the bathroom and my guest-room was, so I also didn’t need any flip flops, nor to put my socks and shoes on immediately, while still half-naked, or on half wet floors, as I had otherwise needed to do at various points during my trip. It was just so good to be in a proper house. Surely, it didn’t have heating, but air condition pitched at a perfect temperature. It would be so nice to go to sleep in a single layer and single blanket. When you sleep with 5 blankets - or however many there are, it also gets hard to move because they’re just so heavy…
I put my dress on, leggings and sandals - finally. I hadn’t used my sandals nor dress the entire trip, so I was glad they came to some use. I think I had used my leggings a single time to replace my thermal leggings.
‘You clean up real nice,’ my flatmate said when I came downstairs, having also put on my new earrings from Chile.
‘Well, it was the only clean things I had left.’ And that was not an exaggeration. I had clean shorts, which I hadn’t used either, but nearly nothing clean to go with it though.
It was quite a drive to her friend’s place. When we got there, there were maybe 4-5 other girls that had arrived. In fact, the party was a welcome-back party for my flatmate and another friend of theirs who had also spent the year studying in the UK, so we meant to get there early, but obviously we hadn’t got there early enough.
There was a really wild dog there who kept barking, but simultaneously swinging its tail in happiness - and ouch it hurt if you got hit by that tail. She also had two cats, one of which my flatmate had told me about, that it had been found in the wardrobe starring into the wall, and that it didn’t know how to meow - but they were locked in a room upstairs, because one of the girls that were coming was allergic.
There were some snacks, and American…weird things, like beer bread, and peanut butter cake. The party mostly consisted of my flatmate’s old work colleagues, and their boyfriends or husbands. Maybe it’s just because I happened to be the youngest person there, but they all looked too young to be married - at least on the Scandinavian level that I’m used to… But maybe not, because around 11 PM almost everyone had left; people were so tired even though it was Saturday. Even my flatmate complained how lame it was that everyone was so tired. I think we didn’t leave until midnight is though, or maybe even a bit sooner.
Day 37: Eastern State Penitentiary and the Rocky stairs
We woke up late the next morning - or shall I say the next day… I got up a bit earlier and had got dressed and was re-organizing my things a bit when my flatmate got up. As promised, we made blueberry pancakes for breakfast - like she had made in Edinburgh on my last day. Super yummy. With maple syrup, and bacon.
I think we weren’t out the door until 2-ish, and since they don’t live in the city, it was another 45 minutes or so into Philly. My flatmate had also been completely indecisive on what to show me, but finally we parked the car nearby the Eastern State Penitentiary. She had told me a bit about it; that it was an old prison that had this particular shape and some stuff. So I thought you mostly went there to see the architecture, and the old rusty place ish - but certainly not:
We ended up spending around one and a half hour there - and we hadn’t even seen it all, but got “thrown out” since they were closing. I really wished they were open till 6 PM, like in Peru. Yes, surely, the architecture was both really smart for an old prison, but also unique and important; it’s shaped…how to explain this, like a star, but the kind of simple star, like when you write an asterisk (*). That way, sitting in the middle, you can see down all the corridors. It also served as a prison model in…all European prisons during a certain period (or something like that), so kinda historically a very important prison. Insanely interesting in every aspect.
There was an audio tour, which went down, I think, 2 and a half of those corridors. You could walk down the other ones too, where you’d find other rooms (kitchen and stuff) and could listen to the audio device as well, but it wasn’t part of the ‘official’ tour. But instead of doing that, we ended up in a part of the museum outside in the courtyard, where there was a separate exhibition on prison statistics and…I don’t really know how to give it a collective name. Basically, we ended up in the courtyard because part of the audio tour was about it, and out there we had seen columns of the American prison population in comparison to other countries, the ethnicities of the American prisons, reasons why the prison population had gone up since…the 70’s or whatever, despite crime rates going down…lots of different things. And whether different prison systems were based on punishment, retribution, rehabilitation or…I forgot the fourth thing. Having studied global crime, justice and security, this was obviously extremely interesting, but luckily it seemed neither my flatmate nor her fiancé were bored either, so as I said; we spent a lot of time there. On the way out, we also saw the room where the infamous Al Capone stayed when he was imprisoned for one year.
After being ‘kicked out’ at closing time, we walked around for a bit, in the direction of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It was obviously closed too - and we knew that, but that’s not the only point in visiting the museum site; it features in a film called Rocky (I myself have not seen it nor had I ever heard of it I’m like one generation too young…) and so the majestic stairs in front of the museum is like a famous 'signature' from the film and landmark of Philly (ish) apparently. Indeed, despite the museum having closed, there were a lot of tourists hanging around in front of the museum, both at the top and bottom of the stairs, taking all kinds of photos. And nearby, there was a statue of Rocky, that contained a long line with people waiting to have their pictures taken at the statue.
My flatmate told me I had to run up the stairs to the museum and then pose with my hands in the air - that’s the pose Rocky does apparently. I looked up to the museum and all the stairs and was sure I’d be dying half way up, but my flatmate - and her fiancé - said it was a touristy thing that all tourists had to do - and I saw some other people running up the stairs. It just looked so hard.
But so I left my camera with her, so she could take my photo when I got up there, and started running. I ran up the first part, the second, the third…however many there were, all the way to the top. I turned around to do the pose when I got to the top and was not just surprised; I was literally shocked how easy it was to run up. I wasn’t tired at all! At all! And I realized that I had just been in such high altitudes for so long that I had started believing I had absolutely zero stamina. I mean that walk up to Machu Picchu…and acrobatics in Salar de Uyuni or walking up to that cactus island (Incahuasi)…everything had been so hard! Now, I wasn’t even panting. It was amazing to be back in a normal altitude again!!
After my ‘epiphany’ (and having taken some more pictures), we went back to the car discussing where and what to eat. We decided to go to a Mexican place; the favourite place of my flatmate which she had been longing to visit since she got back from Edinburgh. I got some super delicious enchiladas and a virgin…margarita? I think… I’ve only ever had virgin mojitos before so this was the first time I had a virgin whatever it was. But it was really yummy. A friend of my flatmates, whom I had also met when she had come to visit in Edinburgh, joined us at for dinner, although she didn’t eat anything herself. After that, we went back home, since my flatmate’s fiancé had work the next day, but it was fine since we were all kinda tired anyway.