european boy

This picture is from the wonderful film Le Ballon rouge, or The Red Balloon. It is a 34 minute short film about a boy befriending a red balloon and the 2 of them having adventures through the streets of Paris. Highly recommended. Last year when I was home for Christmas I saw this and several other short films at the Peace Center in Greenville with Cate and friends...fun times!

Last week I was reading The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson and smiled when I read a particular paragraph.....this is for all my American friends who have a hankering for Europe every now and then. These days my thoughts are on America and home and all the wonderful things about my home country. But when I am home, it happens that I long for the smaller streets, the better cheese, the bicycles.
Bryson writes about himself as a young, Iowa boy:
"From that moment on, I wanted to be a European boy. I wanted to live in an apartment across from a park in the heart of a city, and from my bedroom window look out on a crowded vista of hills and roof-tops. I wanted to ride trams and understand strange languages. I wanted friends named Wermer and Marco who wore short pants and played soccer in the street and owned toys made of wood. I cannot for the life of me think why. I wanted my mother to send me out ot buy long loaves of bread from a shop with a wooden pretzel hanging above the entrance."

The Librarian

I met a librarian today. Well, a soon-to-be librarian. Alexandra is studying Library Science at Uppsala University, and she helped me track down some of Bill Bryson's books in the maze that is the humanities library in town. I was always highly confused with the Dewey Decimal system as a kid and had just started to figure it out when I moved abroad where they have a completely different way of organizing books. In our search for Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States, she asked if i was from America, and when I said yes, South Carolina, I was surprised to see her face react with excited surprise instead of the dull unrecognition I am used to getting. She is in fact leaving in 2 weeks for a library internship at the College of Charleston, and as we spoke I tried to think of what to recommend for her to see. The weather will be a highlight, as we have had fallish, greyish, cool weather since the middle of August, and I am sure the South Carolina beaches will still be warmer than a Swedish summer. Charleston is a beautiful city to explore, one i loved as a child because of those cobblestone streets that made it feel thousands of years old. (and that pinneapple water fountain....how cool was that!) I told her she ought to check out the fall colors of western North Carolina, to which she asked the logical (to the European mind) question of "Is there a good train system? ....busses?" Well, not really, i said. Unfortunatly everyone just drives cars. With some hope i suggested she rent a car since it's fairly inexpensive. She doesn't have a liscense though, having never really needed one. So, my question for my SC readers is...does anyone know of a good non-car way to get around our great state? Surely there is a bus or train I have just never looked for before?