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Published: August 20th 2006
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Empty city 1
View of the street by the Amtrak station facing north.
At least there are a few restaurants here... This weekend we spent in Detroit. We'd heard before, that this is one of the world's most bizarre cities in that the whole downtown is more or less evacuated and everyone lives outside, and this was also more or less true. We could stay at a dorm at Wayne State university, which is perhaps a couple of kilometers from the city centre, and here there were some activities, but we realised that they all depended on the university.
Friday evening, we went around in a car with our acquaintances here, Mark (who's actually from West Virginia and still NOT a hillbilly, he pointed out), Susan and Eric. We got to see all the empty spaces around town and Susan could tell us what had been there, and it did feel a bit like Lodz in Poland or, as someone said 1945 Berlin, except there were no ruins, since most of them had been torn down.
Wow, while writing this I am checking the Swedish news. Apparently, half of Sweden's nuclear reacotors have been shut down after that they found a serious fault, a defect, in one of the Forsmark reactors, close to Stockholm.
It will be interesting to follow that
Empty city 2
View of the street by the Amtrak station facing west.
I heard that the grass lawn on the picture used to have some kind of working place on it. debate!
OK, back to the States.
Here in Detroit, we also managed to visit what we both think turned out to be the best museum we've both been to. That's the museum of African American history. We first thought to visit the Art museum here, but that was closed, and afterwards, we were very happy about that.
This African American history museum is said to be the biggest in the world, even if I doubt they have museums of that kind in other parts of the world, even though for example Brazil has a very interesting history as to what regards African slaves. Anyways, this was very well done, with rooms that were made to look like a slave ship, and below deck on a slave ship (coming out from that room, a 3 year old girl was crying her heart out, and I understand her. They hade made normal size "people" in the bunks, close as they probably were on most slave trader ships, and nothing else. That was really a weird place, and we felt it to be creepy, no wonder a small child finds it terrifying.
So this museum is totally worth visiting if you ever
Marx in Soho
We came to see the play "Marx in Soho", written by Howard Zinn, in Detroit, and the actor (Jerry Levy) is just creepily alike :-) come to Detroit.
By the way, did you lingusitics out there know that the city's name is originally French: ville d'Etroit!?
Anyways, we didn't do much else of interest in Detroit, except from eating good meals. I am presuming that since Detroit is now such a deserted city, at least the restaurants make an effort to get customers, and it seemed to be working. Detroit is to a large extent an abandoned city, som any factories are left empty and so many old builidngs are being torned down that's it's scary. You see all these huge roads through town, with 6 or 8 lanes each, but the traffic is like a mid-size Swedish city. Weird.
Except from being able to see a good play, Marx in Soho (even though the actor feigned a British accent and not a German), we mostly hang out with the people we got there to meet and had a few interesting talks instead, which is not bad, either. This country is indeed fascinating to a foreigner. We got into health care discussions, and one guy, Greg, got almost infuriated when he heard what we get for our tax money in Sweden. He and his wife Andrea decided, 12 years ago, that they wanted to have a baby. To be able to support a child, they needed to go personally bankrupt. That is so weird to a Swede.
This other girl got an appendix problem, but since she wasn't insured, and not poor enough to get social help, she simply had to wait until the appendix burst, the nurses had told her. Jeee.
Now, this was only for a weekend, and on Sunday, we went to the Amtrak station. From there, we got a bus to Toledo, where the train should pick us up at about 10 in the evening.
I will only tell you this: we went aboard the train to NYC at 6 in the morning...
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