The land of hope and opportunity and currently Stormy...

Hey All,

So let me go into detail about my trip to the USA and my life in general as i write this im on the train between boston and new york, its like a 4-5 hour journey so i got a while, and i want to finish my book whilst im on the journey, sleep a bit and pray so i got to be efficent. Just now as i wrote what I got to do in the space of a few hours made me think of my mum, as you know my mum has been staying with me in Qatar and then we went to India together so she got to c me upclose and c how exactly i live and it proved to be rather irksome to her, i chose to live my life at a certain pace and enjoy it that way as i find peace in knowing that i will be busy and not say comtemplatng or sitting around, i HATE just shitting there, i dont mind chilling if im chatting but like sleeping or jus lazing i hate it, i not always been like this AND those that used to know me growning up know for sure i was a right proper bum, a bum to rival any of the great 'bums' in the world but something in me changed, i dont know if its i became a bit more relgious and so i want to do something for every minute thats God has given me on this planet but then if that was the reason i shud be doing good islamic things in all my spare time and unfortunatly thats not the case so what is it then...ummm i actually dont know but i know i have to multitask alot of the time...


Well Washington as i previously said is really clean and really well looked after understanbly well at least around the centre where all the goverment buildings and president lives, but i went to the watch Wrestling in DC at the Verizon Centre (actually its weird all the stadiums here are named after its sponsor its something i noticed that they advertise here at any opportunity, the way these guys take marketing is a joke, i saw adverts for anyone who wants to turn their personal car into an advert for some companies these companies will pay them and then theres this teacher i read in the 'washington post' who cant afford supplies for his students so has been selling advertising space on his exam papers i mean LOL wonly in America man! however come to think about it the naming of the stadium is getting more common in the uk i mean think about it, MEN Arena (manchester evening news arean) 02 Areana, Emirates stsdium) so i guess i should expect my kids to be taking tests with adverts from toys r us on the tests in the future if we continue down that slippertly slope!

Aneway regarding the wrestling, man it was really diverse crowd, you had people from all sorts of backgrounds da, i was shocked as it was in DC at the nuumber of black people there as it wasnt at all surprising to me if i went by the number of black people working in those musems and goverment buildings that i was visiting that there was going to be a black president actually i would probably wonder what the hell took him so long??? I expected to see alot more hispanics on my trip but i have yet to c a great number and instead been surprised by the number of oriental and black people i met and its so weird meeting a chinese person with a full american accent and not like broken english as u often c in the uk (espec with those dam persistant DVD sellers!)

So after Washington i went to Baltimore and checked out a real american town and went to the cheasecake factory restuarant which is something incredible and though i wanted to try new foods each time whilst in the USA i already been twice as the deserts are just something else!! I didnt spend long in Baltimore at least not long enuff to judge an opinon however i did manage to go and c one of my aims before my trip, the Islamic Bookstore.com warehouse lol its cool and i ordered an absoltu shit load of stuff!

Anyway onto what has so far been my favourite city/place in the US so far Philidelpia, its not as cheesy as i thought it would be nor creamy at all :P but it is as delightful as the its toast topping namesake sugguests! The city hasa certain buzz that i dont think any of the other cities i been had so far, the people are friendly, cool and have a different vibe to the other cities, i think there was something in it that remainded me of manchester, which i love considerbly, and therefore has an effect on my feelings, like london gets all the attention but its manachester that truly rocks as a city, and i think its the same with DC or New York and Phily, where despite it not being as famous as its neighbouring cities its the city that has all the charm! I went to an Ice Hockey game there and the crowd was like ALL white, a few orientals but thats it, i dont think its because phily is a white area but rather that ice hockey is a white sport, all the people in the team were white apart from like one chinese guy, ok to be fair hes probaly korean but you get my jist its like me saying one paki guy when hes indian u know wot im saying....

Aaaaaaaaaaaaanyway ok well i my first couple of interactions with the bengali usa community in phily as well as two of my taxi drivers i had were bengali which was cool, one of em was a prick thou he told me he married a girl from nigura (somewhere in central america) so i imagine shes hot and he was butters so he did well forhimself and the other guy was a bit of a freshy but he was a nice guy he told me how some bengali kid the other day got BATTered by a group of black guys, and that i shud be careful of like the black gangs here in phily,. well Will Smith told me that growing up in the song to Fresh PRince but i thanked him anyway for the advice....

So as usual i found a really cool shisha place in phily, and its not like the uk where the shisha vibe is jus bare chilled but it was like in a bar with a dj and so u had people smoking dancing and drinking and it was a really fun atmosphere and despite it being a tuesday night was relatively busy which i was quite impressed with and the people were really friendly and i was asked to join a number of tables and hang out and meet new people which was really cool and like jus summed up the people of this city where they have that as Lupe fiasco states the coolest of the cool...

I just saw a great scene, it was of the sunset on this lake and the lake was so still that it looked like it was a mirror o the sunset, then i thought about Forest Gump of when he was running around the USA he stated how he saw all the wonders of the mother earth whilst he was running and made me think that whilst i been traveling as i see so many different scenes but as you know im a country bumkin at my heart (knutsford is the architypical queintessentail english village/town) so i really apprciate the nature of the country (as i was going on about why i liked Goa so much recently) and the nature of the USA is really vast and as i travel on the train i get to see America the way hollywood shows us america and i mean by that those quaint little towns that with the autumn sun and browning of the leaves its so pictureesque it couldnt be made up, you see these beautiful little towns with the big timberframed houses that are usually around a lake and its really nice and though i been visiting the cities this is where like proper america lives i guess and the majority of the 300+ million populouaton lives and again like i said its properly why they love their country so much! i mean i know alot of america is under the poverty line and those areas are usually immigrant areas so hopefully inshallah their lives with improve now that an immigrant has taken over the whitehouse but for those living that american dream i dont begrudge them at all and made me think i wouldnt mind maybe one day to live it at least for a few years but who knows what the future holds apart from God...


So anyway from my time in Boston, I learnt that no matter where you are in the world a yuppie is a yuppie, the people here remainded me of everything i hated at UCL (and i loved UCL) and MGS (and yeh i loved MGS as well) (btw ucl and mgs stand for university college london and manachester grammar school respectively) where you have complete utter toffs who think their better than everyone else, it doesnt surprise me i guess considering harvard and MIT are both in boston and aload of other universities that are mostly full of arrogant so-so's. Walking around Harvard felt like back in the day when i used to visit my friends in Cambridge where its such a studious enviorment and the people though maybe friendly can tell they are up themselvles and in their own self-conceited world where they have their lives planned out for them. The way i might be coming across is like im a complete hater, im not at all and everyone is entitled to live their life as they c fit, but what i dont think is right for these people to look down on those that arent as fortunate as them... like theres a guy sitting next to be on the train man hes so public school hes absolutely hammered (as in drunk) and its like lunch time here, and if anyone else was in his condition like a black guy people would be like a hobo or thug but here people find it funny and socially acceptable as a typical rich boy attitude, and hes winning about being in normal class (and before those that travel with me in the uk i do not mind normal class and certainly dont moan about being in it on the train but if i can ill upgrade but here the trains are really good in normal clas and there really isnt a difference at least not one to throw drunken strop!

Anyway about Boston, well its 24percent irish and is where lilke the whole revolutoion against the English started so has strong links to the British and is a very white area more so than any other area i have seen so far in the US. I went to c the boston celtics and i was expecting as most of the team of the celtics is black that alot of the crowd would be black, but nah hardly a black face in the crowd i mean there were a few but hardly any surprisingly its like full of irish and itallien guys who it seemed spoke with like a slight american accent thrown into the irish and itallien accents they had. The people has i have constantly found on my trip are extemly friendly and really polite. I have come across relaltively few people who are rude, and ironically one of the most rudeest people i have met was this Muslim girl who studies at Harvard, I wanted to know where the Mosque was at Harvard to check it out but i couldnt c any muslims and finally i found a girl wearing a hijab so i asked her if she knew where the mosque was and she jus dismissed me and walked offf saying she was too busy??? im like WTF shame man the first muslim i c at Harvard and shes BARE stuck up and rude, hopefully that was an unfortunate coincidence and the other muslim students are nicer at harvard!


Ok so now on to the NYC the big apple and the city never sleeps meets the guy who hates sleep so shud be a good mix! inshallah will let you know how it does soon! take care

Stormy