Ah, the South!
When I first arrived here, 5 months ago, all I knew of the South of the United States was that it was a peculiar place.

“Well,” I thought to myself ” I survived Utah with some grace. How bad can this be?”

After 5 months, I can tell you that nowhere else have I heard more random praying than here.
They pray everywhere and for strange, though not at all mysterious, reasons.

And yet, there’s nothing humble about southerners.
There’s nothing humble about their manners.
Nothing humble about their food.
This is an exuberant and prideful place. With a tinge of sadness.

The writings of Margaret Mitchell, Joel Chandler Harris, Lillian Smith, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker, Erskine Caldwell, Lillian Hellman, William Bradford Huie, Eugene Walter, William March, Albert Murray, Truman Capote, Harper Lee, Zelda S. Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, Shelby Foote, Richard Wright, Margaret W. Alexander and William Faulkner become full-fledged in obscure dives that serve fried chicken, under bright skies, along dirty roads, amongst charming mansions.

Everyone around here can tell you stories: long, heavy, old, dusty, musty, tired stories about what happened in the not so distant past.
Their history weighs so heavy on them…
It weighs heavier than it does in Europe, where people has learned that we’re all survivors, in one way or another.

In the south of the United States, they don’t let their flesh forget.
That’s as peculiar as it gets.

Ben Folds is often playing inside my car.

I don’t say “I” anymore.
Around here everyone says [ah] /æ/ instead of [ahy] /aɪ/.

I often get lost ( I should REALLY invest in some GPS gadget).

When I get tired of driving around, I stop and take pictures while I wait for my amused colleagues to come rescue me.
It seems to me that every road here leads to a cemetery.
The last few times I’ve gotten lost, I’ve walked around old graves and gotten startled when I’ve heard my colleagues calling my name. They joke that the next time I end up in a cemetery, they’re really gonna scare me.

So my goal, from now on, is to not get lost around cemeteries anymore, but around a Waffle House instead.
Though now that I think about it…I don’t know which one is scarier.