Living in the suburbs

Two months now, since I got to the USA. If you’ve read at least the titles of my posts, you can notice that last weeks I’ve been in Orlando, but most of the time I was in Greensboro, a city in North Carolina. Greensboro I one hour away from Raleigh, which is NC capital, half hour from Winston-Salem –yeah, where all the witchcraft hunt was developed- and one hour away from many cities that are growing and developing every day in this country-like state, like Chapel Hill, Cary or Wilson.

Living in Greensboro, or in any nearby city, is not at all like a movie. It is not glamorous, exciting or special. These cities were born only to take people in, they are like hotel-cities. They have houses, schools, supermarkets, pharmacies, police station, hospitals… everything needed for a community to survive. If you take any empty, big space and you put one of each of those things I just mentioned, you can have an American city, just how the like: an easy, magical, fast recipe. And, sadly, this is the real American life. Not NY, not Miami, not LA, no… all of those cities are unique, characterized by different things, and with different origins. Those famous cities are not an expression of the American life style; these small cities and towns are, and they are all the same. It would be impossible to get a quick recipe or an instruction book to grow a new NY or even a new Washington, but the cities around them, are just a copy, a place developed for people to live in some place.

Greensboro and the nearby cities made me think all the time about those famous lines in Ana Karenina’s book: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” Yes, because in these cities everything works perfectly, everything is in order… and this is why many Venezuelans bring their families here: to reach the stability, the tranquility that is impossible to enjoy in our country; they look precisely for something predictable. It is easy to adapt to a place like this, is like living in a How to Be a Good Citizen book for dummies, rules are simple, and almost everyone follows them. Maybe that’s why American can move from one town to another easily: you move your house, but the living style is almost the same. I think about how it would be to live in Maracaibo, Puerto Ordaz, even Barquisimeto, and it is a total change of routines, food, dialect… it would be almost like an emigrating to another country. I believe Venezuelan cities would be like those “unhappy families” Tolstoy was talking about, each of them with so many different problems, so particular each of them. Each of our cities is a different country every week, a mutating, changing, living body.

But the only thing that comes to my mind when I think about Greensboro is monotony. You wake up, turn on the car, go to work or school, and come back to home. You know your kids will be brought to the house at the same time every day by the school bus and, if you are lucky you will make some time to take them to some complementary activity. Weekend to weekend, maybe you will be able to spend a nice time in the Downtown, but just if you can steal some time you usually take to do the shop, because Walmart is powerful and doesn’t like to share. And, again, I think this kind of life is the real expression of American life. In movies the show NY and LA because they are culturally different, cities that got out of the American control and that now are half American and half any other thing, and that’s why we want to go there, to find them out, to get to know the culture, the mix of cultures… but would you like to explore Greensboro, for example? The monotony is these cities is so serious that many of them are known because of the universities that represent them, of for the famous players that arose from them. Maybe you never heard of Chapel Hill, but you do know Duke University.

That’s why I sometimes wonder about American culture: what do they have to share with the world?

The other thing they show us in movies and TV shows are these very, very small towns –Gilmore Girls, Stranger Things…- where everybody know everybody and personal stories can be developed, but regular-size American cities are big enough for people not to know each other, to have places far away so you have to have a car. And everybody is isolated from the rest! Each on them in their car, in their house, in their cubiculum, you don’t even have buses and a normal transportation system so you can interact with people in the stops. But I guess this solitude is what many people like, to get the chances to live their lives as they want.

People in Greensboro is very kind, maybe not like people in big cities that are too busy or are too important to help you our… but that monotony and repetition and series reproduction is something that I don’t buy. Not, at least, to live it at my age. Apart from this, it’s crazy that such a developed country like this one doesn’t have a proper transportation system. If you are not in the Downtown, you don’t have a way to go from one place to another if you don’t have a car or the Uber app. I mean, streets are not designed to be walked. Bus stops are always alone, they don’t even have the space for buses to stop. And if you do decide to walk, you are the weirdo, and people will look at you as a homeless. While I was in Greensboro I as work in a DWI office. DWI means Driving While Impaired and is what you get if they catch you driving drunk –of course, driving here is so important that they cannot have drunk people doing that- and is also a problem because if you want to party or just going to a dinner, you cannot drink, or you cannot take your car, but then how do you go there? –I don’t know how blind people get from place to place in Greensboro-. So, the thing is that I got to see many DWI stories, and I know of a guy which license was suspended –it can take over a year to get your license back- and he decided to move to a different city, in which he could move around walking or with buses, because in Greensboro is simply impossible to be without a car –or without spending a lot of money in taxis-. Imagine that: moving to a different town because you are not able to drive and you know you will become a prisoner. This is the thing I hate the most about the States. And I don’t know if it is like this because is so easy to buy a car that they won’t spend money in a public system, or because they prefer people to spend money in gas… but I just see so many affected people.

Living in the suburbs is hard and boring, but maybe this is just because I'm only 23.

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