A Few Observations

I can't, in all fairness, claim that these observations are about the South in general, since, on this trip, I have been limited to the Opryland Hotel/ Opry Mills Mall/ Opryland Music Hall acreage and the big Baptist church across the highway. Here's some things I noticed about the area I visited:

• In the mall here, there is a Saks Fifth Ave. outlet (where the first pair of rather ugly jeans I saw cost $119 -- at the outlet). There is also a Bass Store. Not a Bass shoe store, like we have. No, it is a Bass fishing store. All bass. All the time.
• The men flirt a lot. A lot.
• The women like sequins.
• I was going to be disappointed, since as of Saturday night I had not seen a bone-fide cowboy here in Nashville (that's pronounced Nashvul, BTW). All I needed to do was park myself outside of the Music Hall and, lo and behold, here they come! I don't know really how bone-fide they were, but at least they had the obligatory cowboy hat, boots and big, dark mustache.
• The people who work the little kiosks in the middle of the mall vie for one's attention like it is a third world market. "Ma'am, would you like to try this wig?" "Ma'am, why don't ya have a sit here and let me show you all these pretty necklaces." The ones who work in the stores hardly give you a glance.
• They have these tour buses that will take you everywhere around, some for free, others for a lot of coins. We rode one last night to the mall, which took about ten minutes. We missed the last bus back, so we took a cab, which cost five of us $9. Tonight I decided to walk back and enjoy the night air. The end of the mall and one side of the hotel are about a city block apart. It just took the bus and cab all that time to drive all over the enormous parking lots and drop us at the far end of each building!
• The weather is pretty schizophrenic. The first day it was just like my old Arkansas days (it's weird to think that I have ol' Arkansas days) -- so humid you could cut the air with a knife and something like 85 degrees at 11 p.m. Yesterday if rained. Today it is 60 degrees. It's hard to know what to wear.
• Another reminder of Arkansas -- the crickets which are loud enough to drown out the noise of traffic.
• People smoke here. A LOT. And inside restaurants, at that! Disgusting.
• There are a lot of pregnant women at the Opryland Hotel. I don't know if there's some old wives tale about inducing birth here or what. Now that I think about it, there are a lot of brides here, as well. Maybe some connection there?
• I knew I was in the South again, when I looked across the freeway and saw a Waffle House. sigh.
• I walked at least twenty miles in the last four days. Two of those were intentional; the other 18 were spent thinking I was going the right way (have I mentioned that the Opryland complex is big?? The world's largest, by the way).
• The Baptists were smart and put an enormous church building right across the freeway from Opryland. I did the best I could to figure out how to get to one of our mega-C of Cs, but none were in walking distance, that's for sure. So I trekked over to worship with our cousins across the way. It impressed the four people I met (one whom gave me a ride back after) that a Church of Christ girl would walk so far to go to church with the Baptists! I suggested they put a sky bridge in over the freeway, then they'd really have a chance to get some of that hotel traffic!

I'll post some photos after Allan gets back from D.C. with the card reader!