Day Three
Trip Start
Jul 25, 2007
1
4
8
Trip End
Aug 01, 2007
Cleveland, Ohio
Friday, July 27, 2007
Woke for real much later and had fresh cherries for breakfast, and when H woke up too, he made us smoothies and J gave me some Life cereal. J's house is great, and we hung around the kitchen for a while, settling in and waking up before we headed out.
We went to Cleveland. It looks like New York in old movies and has a feel a little like London, but more brown then grey and full of slightly out-of-date, harried-looking people and empty shop fronts. J says the revitilization is still underway. It would be easy to get a shop or an apartment there-- everything is for rent, and it's really remarkably appealing.
We went to this mall type thing called Tower City Center that looked like an office-building from outside and existed half underground and half behind the hill we came in on. It's a new thing for me, this being-underground. I've never been in a basement until yesterday and never lived somewhere where you can build entire worlds underground, under the city. It's like the Metro, accessed from something as small as a storefront aboveground, but it's a whole world -- three floors of shops, a Ritz-Carlton, restaurants, banks, everything. Their signs said something about living, working, eating and shopping all in one place and I thought of the habitation hives in scifi stories, of space stations and colonies on other worlds where everything has to be in one place, and I wondered why you'd have to isilate youself like that inside of a normal city, but it was all very lovely.
And we went to the Science Center on Lake Erie, and it was as science centers generally are. We didn't get to see the dinosaur exibit or the battleship museum, but there was one of those jupiter-cloud-forming spheres and a table that showed how wind changes landscapes and one that showed how erosion works, and there was a water clock I'm pretty sure I could build myself and a picture that somehow became colored when you looked through a special filter... and the giftshop had lots of books on going green, and really cute organic teeshirts for kids that said 'play in the dirt'...
The walking is rediculous, but I think it's mostly because my poor legs have adapted to being a flatlander and Ohio is all up and down. And I'm having trouble breathing here, like there isn't enough air or the pressure is all strange, and everything just seems so far away...
We met some of J's friends, who were all lovely, at this great little coffee shop that had fantastic massive sunflowers outside and blue tiles around the door and wonderfully decadent desserts inside. They had Monin syrups like H uses at work, but they had flavors I've never seen in those before-- apple and guava and pomegranite. We were supposed to go to the bar afterward, but C's boyfriend was having trouble and it upset her so J and I took her home and H went without us and had fun. He came in very late...
