The southern world of the States

Virginia, the last southern state before one gets into the blue states in the north on the east coast of the United States. I had the joy of staying with my cousin and her family in Chesterfield for two weeks, sometimes heading out on my own, sometimes going on trips with them, sometimes just chilling out at the house. The downside is that their house is so far away from a center, you have to have a car to get anywhere. The upside, the neighborhood is very nicely situated right next to the Pocahontas state park and it’s very quiet. So it made a perfect place to just chill if you wanted to. Besides, my hosts had a proper american Ford pickup truck I could borrow for my excursions so I wasn’t completely locked down in the forrest.

The workshop, not the main house

Chesterfield seems like a place where people live out their american dream. They have their own house, sometimes with white picket fences (most of the times without), a good piece of property, a couple of dogs and so on. In the neighborhood where I was staying the people would wave at you when you pass them on the road. And probably they knew immediately that I don’t really live there. It was the type of place to which you move if you don’t want your neighbor within ten meters from you, yet you want to hear the gossip every now and then.

Richmond, the first big city close to Chesterfield has a very strong history in production. Main industries at different times have been steel mills, tobacco and cotton. You can see the remnants of old factories especially along the canal, which now has been converted into a nice walk along the water. The city is still a big rail road junction. Partly because of this I think it has a very industrial feel to it. I went into the city a couple of times, visiting among other the Museum of the confederacy. This museum mainly discusses the confederate states and their view on the civil war. There’s also the Civil war museum, which in turn gives a more objective view of the events as it portrays the war from the view of the confederate states, the union and the slaves. If you have to choose, I’d say go to the Civil war museum as it gives a better overview.

Take a walk along the canal and you'll end up in some nice and some weird places

One of our day trips was out to Williamsburg, one of the first settlements by Europeans in the New world. The town sports a part called Colonial Williamsburg, which is a sort of living history village where you can see how life was like in the 18th century, down to people wearing clothing from the old days. This town was actually the first one where I though this wouldn’t be a bad place to live in, if I wanted to live in the States. It had everything you need fairly close by and the things you didn’t find were just an hours drive away in Richmond. It also had that small town vibe, with police officers having a friendly chat with the shop keepers, nice cafés where the students sit and do their assignments (the town hosts a very well respected college) and people generally being in a good mood. It’s a place where you could imagine some quirky characters who are the talk of the town every now and then cause a scandal because they planted the wrong kind of flowers in their gardens.

The main strip in Colonial Williamsburg, with one of the many taverns to the right.

Washington D.C. got a visit from me twice as well. It’s about a two hour ride with the train, so in order to make use of the day one had to leave fairly early. The first day I took a tour of the Capitol and also visited the Library of congress (one of their buildings). My cousin repeated many times that D.C. was built to impress. Well, if that was the goal then it succeeded in my eyes, because the areas I saw were impressive. It seemed like every part of the buildings were there for a purpose, down to the smallest bas-relief. The carvings told stories, they weren’t just copy-pasted around the room. Even modern buildings seemed to somehow fit in with the old 19th century buildings (unlike some in Helsinki *cough* Kiasma *cough*).

The story is there, in the walls of the Capitol

The second day in D.C. was mainly spent at the Smithsonian Air and Space museum. Now, the Smithsonian is an institution whose goal it is to bring cultural treasures and knowledge to the masses, and one way to do this they think is to have no admission fees to any of their museums. Awesome! I spent the main part of the day in the Air and Space museum and I still felt like I had just skimmed through it all. I went to see one of their IMax experiences (The legends of flight) but was a bit disappointed as it felt more like a commercial for the Boeing 787 Dreamliner than a factual film about avionics.

Someone thought this would be a good place to park a space rocket (the Apollo-Soyuz rendezvous)

Anybody got a light? Need to get this baby going...

Along the Washington mall alone you have about ten museums to choose from and each of them contain enough to do for an entire day. Most of them are run by the Smithsonian institute.

One place definitely worth a visit is the Vietnam war memorial. It’s powerful in it’s simplicity. Simply put the name of each soldier that died in the war on a wall that sinks into the ground. The wall is divided into plates, where each plate contains on average 83 rows of names, each row containing five names. There are 140 plates. Do the math and you may understand why the memorial is so effective.

Vietnam war memorial with the Washington monument in the background

Of course, as I was staying so close to a state park and I’ve become somewhat obsessed with going on hikes, the Pocahontas state park got a visit as well. My cousin drove me to the ranger station where we picked up a map and got some tips on which trails would be suitable for a couple of hours worth of walking. After that, she drove me to the start of the trail and I headed out. The day was pretty cold and grey, but the park still was very nice. It had a late autumn, early winter feel to it (but as my cousin pointed out, this is their winter). Personally, I really liked walking on a carpet of leaves through a forrest where all you would hear was birds. And the occasional rifle shot. Part of the park was closed for hunting, although I don’t know what the hunt was on. Five hours and two trails later I got picked up again and brought back to the warm house.