Baltimore

I woke up hungover in the hostel.  It wasn't too bad a hangover, but it was enough to give me a headache.

Rehan was nowhere to be found.

After we had split up the night before, he had gone to a party while I had fallen asleep inside the hostel.  I walked around the enormous old house and he was nowhere to be found.  I decided to make some breakfast and wait for him.  Still he didn't turn up.  I went for a walk through the local forest and then went back to the house.  Rehan was now in his bed in the hostel dorm.  He hadn't been able to get back into the locked hostel building and so he had fallen asleep in the car.  I was by now feeling much better, but Rehan looked like a guy who had slept in a car....

Eventually, we gathered the necessary strength to drive off.  Rehan drove at first and we immediately headed to the drive through of a McDonalds.  We were driving through West Philadelphia, and everything was as rough as you would expect.  The image of "West Philly" from Will Smith is a saccharine dream compared to the neighbourhoods we drove through. 

The hangover was too much for Rehan and we switched over so that he could rest in the passenger's seat.  We pulled into the carpark of a Walmart somewhere in Maryland.  I had never been to a Walmart so we thought we'd go have a look inside.  It was everything I expected and a little bit more.  It was truly enormous.  We have large department stores in Australia, but I really hadn't been to anything of this size.  There was an enormous amount of products on offer, but I was quite shocked by the sheer space.  The aisles were incredibly wide and honestly there was just a lot of "space".  I'm not sure if it necessarily had more than a K-mart or Bunnings back in Australia, it was just that everything in here was so spaced apart.  However, nne thing it definitely had which was very different to Australia was guns and ammo!  So many guns and so much ammo!

We swapped seats and I drove.  I had practiced for a few minutes in the car park (which was unsurprisingly enormous) and I was surprised by how quickly I was able to adjust.  It didn't take too long to get used to being on the other side of the road or to even be seeing the cars coming towards me on the other side.  As we drove down the highway, the only thing that I found I had to adjust to more consciously was the tendency to drift a bit towards the right.  Rehan mentioned that he had the same issue when he started, so it's probably just the mind being too used to where you as the driver should be within a particular lane.

The drive to our next destination was short.  After driving through the terrible neighbourhoods of West Philly, I wasn't expecting too much as we entered into Baltimore.  The outskirts were bleak, but the further into the city centre we reached, the prettier the city became.  The inner city was full of brown stone terrace houses, much like in New York and there were small cafes and restaurants all along the waterfront.  Nearby was the famous Camden Yards. 

The Orioles were sadly not playing that day, but it did mean that we were able to walk around the ground and look at the field.  It is a lovely stadium and it has done an excellent job of combining the historical and modern elements together.  Out behind the outfield, there were numerous little brass plaques to commemorate the landing spots of some of the bigger home runs that had been hit over the years.  I walked around and managed to find one that had been hit by my favourite player, Jim Thome, a monster shot of 440 feet.

We drove away from Camden Yards and through some lovely neighbourhoods in the vicinity of Johns Hopkins University.  It wasn't too surprising that the area around this famed university were full of historic and well preserved buildings.  Rehan wanted to see something different though.  He was a huge fan of the Wire, and so he wanted to see some of the places where his favourite characters were murdered.  We drove into the projects and the scenery changed dramatically.  Surprisingly, the buildings remained quite beautiful.  They were all still old brick and brownstone buildings, but there was almost no upkeep and there seemed to be no services or amenities anywhere.  Building after building was boarded up and many were covered in graffiti.  There were even a few which were burnt out husks.  Some of those burnt out husks looked recently burnt out as well.

We stopped at a corner to look around a bit more.  In hindsight it probably wasn't the best idea.  The area was rough.  A group of guys were milling around a local corner store.  It had been the only store we had seen for several blocks.  They saw us park and get out of the car and started to walk towards us.  They were all holding bottles in paper bags and they were much bigger than us.  Initial impressions were not great, so I thought I would take the front foot approach.  I walked straight towards them and offered my hand and greetings.  Their collective demeanour completely changed as they all smiled and shook our hands.  I was curious about this place and started to ask them about it.  The buildings were still lovely, but it was clearly a problem area.  All of the men agreed.  They spoke with a degree of sadness about how there was nothing there for anyone.  There were no public spots for people to gather.  The community centre had been shut down.  Even public transport into the area had been cut.  I asked them about work and jobs.  They referred back to the public transport.  How could anyone get to a job if there was no transport?  It seemed to be a cyclical tragedy that had been created through lack of a care and resources.  When I asked them who's fault of this was, they were unanimous, the mayor.  There was a hatred for the mayor.  We said our goodbyes and we drove off to another one of the projects that was famous in the Wire.  There too, all I saw was squalor and a complete lack of any people.  I think what shocked me the most about some of these areas was how empty they were.  There were no people walking on the street, and there just seemed to be almost no sign of life or activity at all.

For a final stop, we went back to the area around Johns Hopkins and went to a bar that was apparently quite famous in the show called "The Brewer's Art".  It was a beautiful old building and the interior was classically decorated, with lots of deep dark coloured wood and brass fittings.  It seemed a complete world away from the projects we had just driven through, which were sadly not far away at all.  I had never been to a city where there was such a sharp divide between the good and bad parts of town.  It was all in such close proximity and there was a racial element to the divide which also made me feel extremely uncomfortable.