The great minds over at Twentysomething Bloggers have decided to restart the "Blog Carnival." For those of you who don't know what the Blog Carnival is, basically it's a time where the team at 20sb picks a topic or theme and the 20sb community writes about it. Pretty straightforward, no?Well the topic for this month's Blog Carnival is "looking back." The goal being to see who we were when we first started blogging. We were asked to pick a post or two from our first two months of blogging, but I'm going to cheat a little bit -- kinda. You see, the first 2 months of the EAP's existence was pretty rough. Back in 2001, 18 year old Terence wasn't too high on writing for anyone other than himself and it shows. So in an effort to ignore my horrendous early writings (not that I'm much better now), I'm going to pull a post from August 2005 -- a little more than a month after I decided that the EAP could stand on it's own as a proper blog. It's in it's original form, so please forgive any spelling or grammatical errors.
But before we get into that, I just want to remind everyone once again that “This post is a part of 20SB’s Looking Back Blog Carnival, and Ben & Jerry’s is awarding free ice cream to lucky bloggers and readers!” What's that you say? I didn't mention anything about Ben & Jerry's offering FREE ICE CREAM to lucky bloggers and readers? You mean I forgot to tell you guys about the FREE ICE CREAM Ben and Jerry's is offering in celebration of their newest product FLIPPED OUT ICE CREAM? Hmm. Guess it must have slipped my mind...
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Oh I'd love to haul 'em all down around Spartanburg...
originally posted August 31, 2005
originally posted August 31, 2005
During the summer I went up north and visited family in New York. I had a good time, but I wouldn't trade it for living in the south. They would ask me multiple times if I would want to live up there, and my response usually was, "It's nice and fun to visit, but you guys are just packed on top of each other a lil too much for my liking. Plus I'm not a fan of this whole lack of grass thing." I would tell them about how nice Greenville is and how even though I HATE Columbia and Charleston, they're really nice areas to live too. They heard my stories of walking around barefoot at my leisure or being able to park almost anywhere without having to look for change for a parking meter. It wasn't something I talked about all the time, but I'm sure I made a lasting impression.
Well now I have an Uncle who's looking into relocating his family down here. Him, his wife, and my cousin Whitney all came down here Sunday night and I've been floored as to how much they love the stuff I hyped up before, but how much they are just in awe of the things I take for granted. Half of the trip back from train station in Florence was spent either being amazed that there weren't any bars on the storefront windows at 4am or how goregous the stars looked. Two things I see all the time and really don't notice.
Then they were just amazed at how we do things down here. They went on a school tour of one of the middle schools in the area and they were just amazed at how polite and nice everyone was. I think they were floored at the fact that at 2:50 in the afternoon the school principal was willing to take them on a tour of the school. They even loved how nicely they were treated when visiting USC-Sumter and USC-Columbia. They said that in Brooklyn there's no way people would take that much time out of their day to give them all of the information they receieved and to give them guided tours. Between giving them promotional CDs, allowing them to set up audition times in advance, to just general paperwork they got more than enough information. To quote my aunt, "You just don't get treated like that for no reason in Brooklyn."
Even the landscape floored them. They loved the way houses were built, how all of the schools were beautiful, and how everyone had plenty of grass. They even loved how Columbia is set up in that all of the high rises and office buildings are in the hidden in the center of the city. Which is amazing, because I HATE how Columbia is set up (Main St. anyone?), but coming from New York, I guess its a step up.
Then there were the little things, like how people would park a convertible with the top down and not think anything of it. Heck, it took my Aunt about 3 days before she finally realized she could leave her bag in my car without anyone bothering it. I think it took me mentioning how I never took off my CD Player faceplate, even though we'd been in Sumter, Columbia, Florence and everywhere in between.
And even though they developed an unhealthy obessions for Waffle House (seriously, I went more times to the Waffle HouseS in Sumter than I had in my entire life. And in the past week I'm halfway to matching my number of sober trips that don't involve strippers or coming back from a Bowl Game blowout (damn the '02 Tangerine Bowl sucked)), they love all of the food. And the beauty. And the lack of traffic. Looks like the South has converted another select few.
But let's not shout this from the mountaintops. Like they said, "We gotta keep this quiet. New Yorkers get wise to this they'll all be down here." Very true. I don't know about ya'll, but I can do without Dollar Vans running around in the middle of downtown Charleston.
Well now I have an Uncle who's looking into relocating his family down here. Him, his wife, and my cousin Whitney all came down here Sunday night and I've been floored as to how much they love the stuff I hyped up before, but how much they are just in awe of the things I take for granted. Half of the trip back from train station in Florence was spent either being amazed that there weren't any bars on the storefront windows at 4am or how goregous the stars looked. Two things I see all the time and really don't notice.
Then they were just amazed at how we do things down here. They went on a school tour of one of the middle schools in the area and they were just amazed at how polite and nice everyone was. I think they were floored at the fact that at 2:50 in the afternoon the school principal was willing to take them on a tour of the school. They even loved how nicely they were treated when visiting USC-Sumter and USC-Columbia. They said that in Brooklyn there's no way people would take that much time out of their day to give them all of the information they receieved and to give them guided tours. Between giving them promotional CDs, allowing them to set up audition times in advance, to just general paperwork they got more than enough information. To quote my aunt, "You just don't get treated like that for no reason in Brooklyn."
Even the landscape floored them. They loved the way houses were built, how all of the schools were beautiful, and how everyone had plenty of grass. They even loved how Columbia is set up in that all of the high rises and office buildings are in the hidden in the center of the city. Which is amazing, because I HATE how Columbia is set up (Main St. anyone?), but coming from New York, I guess its a step up.
Then there were the little things, like how people would park a convertible with the top down and not think anything of it. Heck, it took my Aunt about 3 days before she finally realized she could leave her bag in my car without anyone bothering it. I think it took me mentioning how I never took off my CD Player faceplate, even though we'd been in Sumter, Columbia, Florence and everywhere in between.
And even though they developed an unhealthy obessions for Waffle House (seriously, I went more times to the Waffle HouseS in Sumter than I had in my entire life. And in the past week I'm halfway to matching my number of sober trips that don't involve strippers or coming back from a Bowl Game blowout (damn the '02 Tangerine Bowl sucked)), they love all of the food. And the beauty. And the lack of traffic. Looks like the South has converted another select few.
But let's not shout this from the mountaintops. Like they said, "We gotta keep this quiet. New Yorkers get wise to this they'll all be down here." Very true. I don't know about ya'll, but I can do without Dollar Vans running around in the middle of downtown Charleston.
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Dollar Van - Wikipedia
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