Hi, friends! It’s Monday and I’m always surly on Mondays. I assume many of you are as well.
Friday night we had an awesome NOT about underrated places.
I want to talk about overrated places. Places where people talk about how great it is, but it’s either totally not your thing or you get there and it’s shit.
Silver Dollar City/Branson, MO. For fuck’s sake, don’t go. It’s basically the motherland for midwestern super Christian families, but also roller coasters and tourist trap shit. If someone tells you that they like going there or go there often, fucking run away from that person.
The Redneck Riviera. Listen I understand rationally that there’s some lovely beaches and views on the stretch of the Gulf Coast from Orange Beach, Alabama to Panama City Beach, Florida. But the nice pockets are definitely overwhelmed by all the fuckers and rednecks that show up in droves down there. You’re also getting tons of idiot Missouri people who just love the gulf coast. I’m sorry. In case you’re like, but brighter, it must be affordable if all these asshole rednecks constantly vacation there? And you’d be WRONG. The last time I was there, 2 summers ago, it had been like 15 years and I was unhappy to realize it was even worse than I remembered. Never again. NEVER AGAIN.
In 2016 I chaperoned my daughter’s class trip to Dublin, Great Britain and Paris. It was a typical whirlwind package tour, but most of the stops were still great.
But the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace was a huge bore. And based on the photos I’ve seen, Buckingham Palace in general looks about as interesting as the Department of Agriculture building or the NJ State House.
Hahahahah that’s hilarious. I was in London for a few days in high school for a school trip, but I don’t remember going to Buckingham Palace at all. I do remember being exceedingly pissed off that we weren’t going to the British Museum and that our “free morning” was the day of the week that the museums were closed.
My memory of London is that the crud to fun ratio was worse than Dublin and Paris. The Albert Memorial in particular was hideous. But the Tower of London was huge fun, and I liked the National Gallery even though I think most of the kids were bored.
Now here again I disagree. I LOVE the Albert Memorial. But then again I love High Victoriana and if I had my way everything would be made of brick and adorned and kind of sooty and it would be 1890.
I think the Victorians were best when they had to work on the edges, like the old police stations in my city. They did great stuff when they had to sneak it in.
Oh no, Buckingham Palace is fabulous. What you do is stand in front of the Victoria Memorial (which itself is this remarkable tribute to civic statuary that we moderns seem to be incapable of, so we get lots of crap like that odious new MLK, Jr.-inspired statue on Boston Common.) So then you’re facing the gates and the public facade. You can walk around the perimeter and the Palace is not so impressive from the sides or back, maybe that’s what you saw. But in the back are the gardens, where the teas are sometimes held. Those invitations are highly coveted.
Our cheap hotel wasn’t that far from Hampton Palace, and if I’d had the time that’s where I’d have liked to explore.
It’s a weird, unfinished, badly restored place that I have to imagine makes it much more interesting than Buckingham Palace. The kind of place where weird royal cousins and forgotten princesses who marry the wrong man are sent.
Have been to the gulf coast on multiple occasions and can confirm. Also lived, and worked, in Branson for a summer when transitioning schools, and holy fucking hell was that a terrible place.
The entire state of TN is overrated. Stay away.
Oh fuck I’m sorry you were tortured in Branson.
Branson and Lake of the Ozarks needing to exploit teen labor for the tourism season is why our dickbag governor signed into law a few years ago that no public school district can move the school start date before Labor Day because ugh so annoying for those important tourism and service industry low paying jobs lose their staff because their junior or senior year of high school is starting.
The Party of Child Labor strikes again.
If Missouri legislators could get fetuses to crawl through the birth canal and emerge with coal mining tools, ready to start working at birth, they would.
*Tiny* hands can reach the smaller pieces of coal, in the little veins, after all!🙃😖🥴
If we’re on the topic of England, Stonehenge is a huge waste of time. Everything’s roped off and policed and no one knows exactly what this was supposed to be, theories abound, and there are these freakish acolytes who kind of camp nearby, because we’re entering late-stage capitalism and their parents pay for this.
No. If you’re in that part of Wiltshire head down to Salisbury and look around the cathedral, or go up to Bath and go all Jane Austen.
bath is straight up gorgeous
it does suck tho…..
very specifically it sucks on a mountainbike with as it turns out failing brakes…
you really apreciate just how steep those side roads are as you careen towards a major intersection
and then blow straight through it……somehow not hitting anything…
never been so scared in my life
Niagara Falls.
Maybe it is because I have been there too many times but it is really boring there. Once you’ve seen the Falls that’s it.
The rest of the place is tacky tourist traps meant to separate fools from their money. Like the casino.
Stay away from Niagara Falls NY. If you want to see depression defined by a city… That’s the place.
When my parents got married they left the wedding reception in my father’s brand spanking new 1951 Chevrolet (I was a later-life baby) and headed out on their honeymoon. They spent a night in Niagara Falls, I don’t know which side, en route to visit my mother’s large Canadian family contingent, who couldn’t attend for whatever reason but wanted to meet this handsome latest addition to the family. They were similarly underwhelmed.
You know, all of that said, I love going abroad because I love the arcana and don’t really think any of it is overrated. I love the way people talk and act and dress, even if it doesn’t vary much from us USAmericans. I love the pop music stations. I love the billboard advertising for things I wouldn’t buy, like a micro-dishwasher. I love menus handwritten on chalkboards outside of restaurants and learning what the term for sea urchin is in Italian (it’s “ricci” or “riccio,” by the way, depending on where you are in Italy.) Buses! Those are fun. Commuter trains that take you through dreary inner suburbs and leave you wondering what the lives of the locals are like. Waiting online for a ferry and listening to parents scold obstreperous children. The street food. I even found Stonehenge kind of interesting, I’ve actually been more than once because a friend lives nearby, just to see this dark, neo-Paganist side of British life. What are the news media saying? What are the local politicos up to? All fascinating.
I always get a thrill when I go somewhere new and there’s the rack of brochures of local attractions. You never know what you can find.
If nothing else, there’s a brewery with decent beer, or museum with fossils, or a crazy car collection, or something else worth seeing.
Not too far from my daughter’s school there’s a museum with a stone out front with an indentation that is supposedly the handprint of a witch who froze to death fleeing the locals. How cool is that?
I was in the South of France once and came across a Catholic religious organization willing to bus pilgrims to Lourdes, and put them up in convent/monastery housing, for next to nothing. I declined, because BH thought it would be weird, but I’m kicking myself (figuratively) to this day. Lourdes is at the base of the Pyrénées, a very beautiful village, and at the time I could have approached a shrine or a church staircase on my knees. Never look a gift horse in the mouth. Even if you do commit a little blasphemy.
The problems with the major religious sites are the lines, the velvet ropes, the obligations, and the gift shops. The little ones where the guy comes out of the back with a key and shows you what you need to see in 15 minutes — much better.
That’s part of the fun. I cannot tell you how many times I have been to St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal. It’s on the top of the mountain, Mount Royal in English, and has commanding views down to the city and the St. Lawrence River. Within, you can take a tour of this strange set of dioramas that illustrate the life of Brother André, and then at the end you get to one of the best gift shops I’ve ever encountered.
If I could be assured of a steady supply of wine (and I’m sure I could. This is a Catholic basilica in Montreal, not a dreary Presbyterian outpost in one of the Anglophone parts of Canada) I would convert and become attached to the Oratory. You never know. Miracles do happen. The Chicago Cubs won the World Series in 2016, after more than a century of failure, even I know that.
NYC. Boston. Vegas. Disney.
I will agree with you on all points (although I’ve never been to Disney.) I’m getting to the point where I don’t understand why anyone lives in New York anymore. It used to be this incredible melting pot full of professional and personal potentials, business cards flying around, bars packed at happy hour, but now everyone works from home and conducts their social lives online. Places are going out of business right and left. The crime. The subway chaos. The race for the exits.
That said, my partner-in-crime was scheduled to meet a client today for lunch. The client wanted to choose the restaurant. They went to Balthazar, where the client has a standing reservation, but not for a particular table, just “We’re coming for lunch [or dinner] so make room.” I was so jealous. I love Balthazar, and it’s still a hot table to get, 25 years after it opened.
Speaking of SoHo, which is where Balthazar is, I once hosted my sister and my very young nephew and we went down to SoHo for some reason, maybe one of the galleries at the time was hosting an exhibit on comic book art, who knows, and we got a little hungry. So we came upon this French restaurant that was open but it was a little early for lunch, by midweek SoHo standards. But we were greeted warmly and I was assured that my young nephew would be no problem as long as he behaved himself.
Over the course of the lunch, which took like two hours, but that was mostly my fault, the restaurant started filling up with all of these runway-ready women, which my nephew appreciated, and power-brokers and their wannabes, and suddenly I felt like I was beamed into an incredibly exclusive club. It’s random occasions like that which make NYC living bearable. Not paying $1,000 a month to share a two-bedroom with four other people in East Bushwick, wherever that is, but I know it exists.
My stepfather had a job offer in SoHo when I was in high school. We wound up in Honolulu instead, which I didn’t love but it was better than NY.
I wonder where the new hip city is or will be. Somewhere affordable so artists can thrive with at least one decent university to keep the population young and a food and nightlife scene because duh. It also needs to be diverse in all intersecting ways. I hope it’s not in a red State. Maybe it doesn’t exist in North America. Capitalism is killing the souls of our cities.
I think it will have to be an artsy/hipster bubble in a red state.
Within my lifetime, the Hudson Valley went from being fairly affordable, depending on where you went, to “how much do you want for this tumbledown 3-bedroom shack? Are you crazy?”
But if you keep going, and you avoid metro Albany, which is kind of expensive, you can still find incredible bargains. This is deep-Red New York, the nest of beloved hometown heroine Elise Stefanik and nominally Democratic but really beholden to one constituency, her husband’s employer Delaware North, Gov. Kath O’Lantern Hokum.
I read once about what sounded like a cool city or town in Indiana, of all places. I think it was called Columbus, maybe? So maybe somewhere like that. Or people can start colonizing inland Washington and Oregon, which are also hotbeds of white supremacy movements but must have cheap real estate and some kind of potential.
Columbus IN *is* a pretty neat place!
Cousin Matty, you’d *love* poking around St. Bartholomew’s Catholic Church. The architecture of the building is SO COOL, and while it’s incredibly impressive, it’s *ALSO* entirely *cozy* and human-level once you’re inside.
Buildings which are “fancy” to look at can be imposing, many times…
But the chapel at St. Barts, was amazingly “homey”, and I was both *shocked* and pleasantly *amazed* by everything about that building, when I was there a few years ago….
And, after finding that “52 Weeks” blog post…
And in *particular* this section of the post,
“Exterior walls are covered in rough-cut golden buff colored Mankato Kasota limestone.”…
I *cackled,* annnnd I have a suspicion, that I *probably* know WHY that church is *both* “GRAND(!) yet *Homey*” all at the same time.
I know some ties, between that church, and *other* places with that particular limestone, *AND* with a small-town church (now extinct), which had a similar “Simple” Crucifix, Stations of the Cross, and similar touches of that *exact* same color of natural wood…
I suspect, that at least *one* source of private funds–which will most likely never be revealed, and who knew of those places even better than *I* do, had some… shall we say… influence (😉😄🤣💖) on those particular “design choices”🤭🤗😘😇💝
Let’s just say that that possible “influence” was an incredibly good human, and is *privately* known for having done *many* “quiet & behind the scenes” things, to do that Mid-century Minnesota concept of “Reach back, once you’re able, and pull *UP* more people, who come down that path behind you.”
It was a concept that ran *DEEP* across much of the Midwest, back in the middle & latter half of the last century–and some of us who heard that idea as we grew up *very much* internalized it, because of the incredible opportunities we were lucky enough to receive😉💖
I forgot to say, you’d most likely love Columbus *as a whole* architecturally & Art-Wise, TOO, @MatthewCrawley!
I forgot the *other* link I snagged;
https://www.fastcompany.com/3064965/the-little-known-midwestern-town-that-modernism-built#:~:text=So%20how%20did%20this%20small,that%20is%20based%20in%20Columbus.
Some things don’t translate well from language to language.
Tonight after work, I drove behind someone who had a personalized plate. It said Jiha Jii
Jiha Jii in Korea means penis.
I snickered all the way home. Best not to go to Koreatown in North York or Scarborough or they’ll have a bunch of Koreans pointing and laughing.
Not on-topic, but the irony of this, and the line, “I’d like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony” in the old jingle, *is* pretty damn epic!😆😂🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
The other *interesting thing i saw linked, were the folks on Legal-Twitter, mentioning that, apparently since this occurred *at Bedminster,* and it would *apparently* fall under the umbrella/category of *Treason*, this particular bit of Audio most likely *Hasn’t* yet been charged for…
Because–having been recorded at Bedminster, the charging jurisdiction is New Jersey😉😁😈
More, in “NOT making Good Choices”😆😆😆😆;