Travelling to Chester County, PA for Thanksgiving, I am reminded of Alistair Cooke's Letters From America series. For all that has been written about the sameness of America's "monumental and mundane", there is a multiplicity of nuances when one traverses the unpeopled distances between states.

Yes, we stopped in at a Home Depot very much like the one in upstate New York. There was a DSW and a Staples and a TJ Maxx. And yet, in this little gem of the country, there is the mushroom capital of the United States, if not the world. The land is given over to pasture - the area is generally affluent and the terrain of gentlemen farmers. There is a Fresh Market - I have not seen that in New York so far - and in Kennett Square, there is a real thriving community with its own idiosyncracies.

Driving to Chester County takes you through New Jersey and brings you quite near to Elizabeth whose towering cranes and cargo ships can be seen from a distance. Elizabeth also happens to be the largest port on the Eastern seaboard and was to the east coast what Pearl Harbour was to the west. The drive through it is not the most pleasant but it was most surreal to see the machinery ablaze with night lights against a cool, black sky.

There is the America of strip malls and large box stores. It is the cultural desert (that is also a cultural monolith) which we grew up to fear, deride and scorn. Growing up in a different country, I sometimes wonder if our Anglophilic teachers had an unspoken prejudice against American culture and American norms. The traditions of a dead empire are always a lot more quaint when viewed through the lens of nostalgia. They did not prepare me for the astounding diversity of people, terrain, ideas and manners found in this country - and for me to say this, when all I have explored is but a sliver of this great country! - and against their words, their snide comments about American pedagogy, American literature, American food, American politics and American society, I find increasingly that they have given this country short shrift.

God bless this sainted country for it is indeed, the New World.

C'est tout.