Pittsburgh lovely people stuck in a sh1t city

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It is snowing our balding, straggly haired taxi drivers rotting teeth disconcert me a little as he points out the baseball and football stadiums. He takes us over the Fort Pitt Bridge that crosses just after the Ohio has split into the Monongahela River to the South and the Allegheny River to the North. We go through the Fort Pitt Tunnel and travel a short distance before turning off onto Banksville Road which we follow for a short while before pulling onto the hotel parking lot. We have booked a budget hotel in order to save our rapidly depleting funds, America was way more expensive than we bargained for. The room is a little grubby and looks like the setting for a cheap horror movie but perfectly adequate for our needs. We drop our bags and head down to the restaurant. We sit at the bar next to a man with grey hair and glasses in his sixties. Further along the bar is a young man in a suit who I take to be away on business. The bartender is an attractive woman in her fifties with a noticeable fit body, she looks like she spends allot of time on her abs in the gym but chain smokes as she works. We order a couple of beers, get our IDs checked and peruse the menu. Dave, the man we sit next to advises that the meat balls are excellent which sparks up a conversation about food, travel and all kinds of things, the bartender joining in from time to time. A large bearded man in a Steelers shirt stops in for a beer on his way home and we start talking about the Ultimate Fighting bout that is on the TV and the Steelers chances in this Sundays coming AFC divisional championship final. We are all getting along really well I feel a little like I am in an episode of Cheers. Dave leaves but buys us a drink as he goes. We crash out looking forward to discovering Pittsburgh the next day.


We had booked the Hotel online and not knowing much about Pittsburgh the location looked fine but in the light of day we realised that we were on a major road with no pavements and a tunnel heavy with traffic separating us from most of Pittsburgh's cafes, shops, museums and places of interest. Without a car we would be forced to taxi to and from everywhere making a false economy of the saving we were making by staying in a cheap hotel.

We call a cab that takes about thirty minutes to arrive and go to the Carnegie Natural History Museum which has a fantastic dinosaur exhibition with casts and bones supported on iron stands into the form of all the great dinosaurs. Diplodocus, Triceratops, Terradactyl, Stegasarus and of course the mighty Tyrannosaurus. It's a fantastic display enhanced with touch screen interactive information including 3D renders showing how the dinosaurs moved, how muscle attached to bone and the differences between them.

We head out into an area dominated by the university. Students, college shops and dorms are everywhere. We walk around for a while before doubling back towards the main road by this time my chin has become numb and fingers and toes are feeling painfully brittle. It begins to snow and my brain seems to be unable to make simple decisions so we duck into a sports bar for a beer. We would have sat at the bar but were beaten back by the smoke so take our two for three dollar beers to a corner and try to warm up the old grey matter. We left to find somewhere to eat having abandoned the plan to walk across town to a Vegetarian restaurant. After a lap and a half of the block I drag Lou into a second hand university book store on the pretence that they may sell novels and I need a new one. I had to get away from the bitter cold. After ten minutes or so I feel sufficiently warmed enough to battle the elements again and we complete the lap finding an Indian Restaurant that looks reasonably priced. Making note of where it is we complete another half lap of the block and go into an Italian dinner for an appetising drink. I order a Dogfish head on draft which turns out to be a very pleasant, vaguely sweet ale, dark brown and reminiscent of proper English beer. The news on the TV shows a US airline plane that has been forced into and emergency landing in the Hudson River, happily their are no casualties. I comment on this to the woman sitting next to me which opens the food gates to another bar conversation. It turns out she was in Pittsburgh with here daughter who was very ill at the children's hospital. She had a kidney transplant at five months old and was now sixteen. She had stopped taking her meds and nearly died but is now on the mend with the added complication of diabetes. The mother had a hell of a day trying to take all instructions about diabetes in and dealing with a typical sixteen year old who does not appear to have grasped the gravity of the situation and is more interested in texting her friends than listening to the doctors and specialists advise and instruction. The Mum unloads a little on us but we are happy to listen feeling once again very luck to be alive and well and doing what we are doing.

We leave for our curry where the Indian waiter on hearing our English accents jokes that we probably know more about curry than him.

The next day is washing day the hotel has a washer and dryer for residents use but no powder. So I wander out to find some. There is no pavement so I head towards the super store walking across petrol station forecourt onto wedding shop parking lot, across mechanics driveway and on using business car parks and the snow covered verge as my path. Having bought the detergent and some bits and bobs for breakfast I return bag in hand. I forgot my gloves so I swap the bag from hand to hand every couple of minutes placing my free hand in my pocket to keep warm. My hands red raw with cold by the time I reach the hotel. We pass the rest of a fairly dull day washing and drying clothes and watching films on the movie channel. In the evening we go down to the bar where it's Karaoke night. We do not stay long. The pipes in the kitchen are frozen so there is no food. We return to our room and order Pizza.

In the morning we store our bags at reception to be collected later when we leave Pittsburgh on the eleven fifty five night train to Chicago. We get a taxi to Station Square where several railway buildings have been redeveloped into cafes, bars and shops. It is a little drab and uninspired but the Vegetable omelette we eat sets us up for the day. We walk around to the Monongahela Incline and take the funicular up to the top for great views of Pittsburgh. We are beginning to realise that there is not all that much going on in Pittsburgh. After returning down the incline and adding another pair of socks to my freezing feet we cross the river into town and head to the Senator John Heinz History Centre where there is a brilliant exhibition about slavery in Pittsburgh called Free at last?, a sports museum and an exhibition on the English, French and Indian War plus some more stuff that we didn't have time to see. We walked out of town on Penn Ave heading for Quiet Storm vegetarian restaurant it's address is 5430 Penn Ave. we were at 1300 Penn Ave. and decided to walk perhaps catching a bus or taxi along the way. We walked up through the Strip Districts markets and China town then on and out past the children's hospital as it grows dark. The streets seemed deserted I'm not sure that we passed another pedestrian the whole walk. We pressed on up a long winding hill pass 3004 Penn Ave. Forty five minutes after starting off we were at 4300 Penn Ave. with no taxi's around we pushed on to the welcome light and warmth of Quiet Storm where we ate spicy soup, artichoke dip, lentil loaf and tofu stir fry washed down with lemon, ginger and soya smoothie and finished off with hot chocolate and cayenne peppers it was delicious and worth the effort of the walk out there. We catch the 38B bus back Downtown and wondered into the first bar we encountered which turned out to be a gay bar hosted by a very charming, camp and way over the top bar man called Joe who chatted and bitched to us breaking off to sing along to show tunes holding a broom in the air pretending to be a witch. The cliental was made up of an outreach worker who was going to audition as a table top dancer the next day. She was on a first date with a guy that didn't go to well. There was an old grey haired Venetian with pot marked skin and a long carrot of a nose who followed me to the toilet and told me I was good looking. A lonely middle aged black man who played the gambling machines and told us stories that didn't ring true. There was a woman known for begging in the area who stuttered and asked three times how much each drink costed before ordering, her eyes rolled around in their sockets as she giggled at nothing and everything and a couple of other guys playing pool. We had fun and the barman gave us a few beers on the house. We grabbed a cab back to the Hotel picked up our bars and returned to the Amtrak station where we waited and waited for our hour long delayed night train to Chicago. It was a huge silver machine, a double decker with large reclining seats. I stretched out then curled into a ball and slept under my coat trying to ignore other peoples snoring and conversations.


Pittsburgh seemed a dirty industrial town that loved it's sport but aside from that, working drinking and making babies their seemed little else to do. It is the shittyest city we have visited so far with the friendliest of people. I have a new found affection for Pittsburgh I'm going to support them in their American Football divisional championship game but it is highly unlikely that I will return. However if you ever find yourself travelling between Philadelphia and Chicago stop off there and pull up a stool at the bar and order a beer it can be very rewarding.

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