New friends

I have been in the US for 5 days and 4 times I have been out in the evening at parties and to eat. I discovered Atlanta for two days and was most impressed by the Martin Luther King Memorial Site. They have a really good mix of media to teach you about the civil rights movement and who MLK was. Although I have been fascinated by Ghandi and Desmond Tutu and have read about them quite a bit, King has so far been kind of a blank slate for me. I basically just knew about the "I have a dream" speech, but after visiting this memorial site I feel much more connected to him. He has become one of my heroes :)

On Friday I came to Knoxville on a Greyhound bus. All Americans I have met have been either generally opposed or very cautious about the idea of me taking the Greyhound. Somehow in their mind it is not quite safe. Well, if you take into consideration that most everybody has a car, this rather cheap way of public transportation is for those who cannot afford a car or got out of jail recently. But it's also for young travellers like me :) And so I soon made friends again. Oby from Asheville used to study creative writing at Columbia University, Michael is a 19-year-old Christian who was quite interested in whichever county I thought was better, Germany or the US. When the conversation became about religion, Oby, always the critic, founded a new religion on the spot and made us all his followers.

In Knoxville I am currently living with Leila, an old friend who used to study in Germany. She is an egyptologist so the revolutionary things going on in Egypt are a big topic. Save the mummies!! She shares a house with another friend and Jacob the cat. I even have my own bedroom. She is a swing dancer and so we went to a party of one swing dancer who is, lo and behold, off to study in Germany for a semester and was celebrating his farewell. I met an interesting American Sign Language teacher from Trinidad and learnt how to say "I am German" and "Cool".

Now I am off to another day of exploring with my Leila. Hope everything is alright wherever you are!