Saying goodbye to America

Three of us from portside´s watch woke up early to prepare breakfast for the others. It was the usual porridge and bread but preparing it ourselves really made us understand how much work goes in to making breakfast every morning.

After running back and forth setting tables and
spilling cornflakes all over the large mess hall we sat down at the
tables with the others to plan what we were going to do with our day. It
was the last day in Charleston. It´s fascinating how fast you
familiarize yourself with a new location, it was only the sixth day and
already we felt like we had a good understanding of Charleston and what
the city had to offer. Downtown is beautiful but after a few days we
felt like we had seen most of it. The day before we had a scheduled trip
to a nearby high school so everyone was happy to have the last day free
to do whatever we wanted. Most of us started out with the usual walk to
the very American grocery store Target. Unlike Swedish stores the
American ones have everything. They have clothes, medicine, books, food
and basically anything else you can think of. We bought lunch and after
asking for spoons for our ice cream in a cafe with a cashier that looked
like a bit tired of giving away spoons instead of selling anything we
walked to a nearby park. There we sat on a bench and ate our somewhat
random assortment of bananas, ice cream and soft drinks.

Even though we only sat there for less than an hour 3 passing
pedestrians stopped to talk to us. In Sweden you could sit in a park
like that for a week and not be approached once. Since we consume so
much American culture I think we get a somewhat false sensation that our
cultures are more similar than they really are. Americans are a lot more
talkative and throughout a day here you will probably talk to several
random people you meet. Most people are really nice and I like that
people are more social here. The Americans however, as the stereotypes
say, talk a lot about themselves. For fun we listened to a bus driver
talk to our teacher during a trip and during the 20 minute drive he
asked her a question once. The other 19 minutes he talked non stop about
himself.

Almost everyone dined at the boat since most of us are finding our
wallets thinning out quicker than expected and the food is really good.
After dinner it has become somewhat of a tradition to play football at
the nearby football field. Almost everyone participated and it was
really nice even though the ball was so broken it looked more like an
American football than a European one which I found quite fitting for
our last day in America.

Olle Gren, Portside