Jan Carson's Blog, page 25

“This Land Is Your Land” : Four Days in Washington DC

The thing about Washington DC is you have to brace yourself for the patriotism before you arrive. It’s over a decade since I last visited the nation’s capital, and as this was just about a week before September 11th I was prepared to encounter a very different city this time round. Much has changed and the events and repercussions of September 11th are so entwined with the city’s DNA now, it’s almost impossible to walk from one end of a street to another without encountering some subtle, (or not so subtle), reminder that America is not the country it was on September 10th 2001. I gave up counting how many pieces of the World Trade Centre I saw displayed in various museums. The first piece of shrapnel I encountered was deeply moving. After the third it began to feel a little crass. There are no easy answers to how a tragedy of this magnitude should be commemorated but I must confess to feeling a little sickened by the sight of a tourist, (American not international), taking pictures of the various photos, and artefacts removed from Ground Zero which are on display at the Newseum, (a reasonably new museum dedicated to the history of the free press in the US, which is, in most every aspect, extremely well put conceived).

I thoroughly love DC. I had an amazing time here including a fantastic reading hosted by Solas Nua and a wonderful catch up with an old friend I hadn’t seen in almost eight years. My hosts, Paddy and Darlene were exceptionally wonderful people who made proper tea and were happy to talk late into the night. I sucked the life out of the free museums, walking miles and miles in inappropriate shoes to take advantage of all the amazing art and history collected in such beautiful buildings. I’ll even commend DC’s fantastic underground system which is clean, (clean, I tell you, London!), efficient, and extremely easy to negotiate. It is a great city and much more lively, cultured and safe-feeling than the last time I visited.

However, there’s a little something about Washington DC which irks me. There’s very little humility here, very little room for dissent. Outside the Lincoln Memorial, I was greeted with a sign which read, “please keep your national monuments tidy.” Im pretty sure that there are no similar signs in London or Edinburgh and confidant we don’t have any such thing in Belfast. DC is a city, which despite the tremendous number of international tourists who swing through the Mall each year, views itself as primarily existing for the American visitor. For the average US citizen, visiting DC is as close to a modern pilgrimage as they’ll ever come. Here, surrounded on all sides by the gleaming monuments of their country’s history and the glaring absence of litter, they can find out things they never even thought they wanted to know about their presidents, (shoe size, First Lady’s wardrobe, names of the presidential dogs), breach the sanctuary of the White House, and hear the old, old stories of America retold, for free, in the world’s best museums.

This, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Every country is entitled to celebrate its own culture and history once in a while. However, DC doesn’t seem prepared to leave any question unanswered. Much of America’s history is ambiguous and troubled, yet even the most difficult periods of the nation’s history appear already resolved by the time they’re curated in a Smithsonian exhibition. The inference here is that everyone passing through the corridors of the National Museum of American History automatically falls on the right thinking side of the debate when it comes to Civil Rights or Vietnam, foreign policy in regards to the Middle East or even the Civil War. Many of these events and issues are still unresolved within American culture and yet in DC the good and the true, the essential patriot seems already triumphant.

I’m a museum snob. I have extremely high standards for what I perceive to be good museums. I could offer many of the criticisms listed above to the Titanic Experience in Belfast and a host of other museums and heritage experiences I’ve visited over the years. I cannot fault DC for the accessibility and standard of their exhibits or the sheer volume of material curated here. The very idea of so much “free museum” and the “free knowledge” which comes with it is intrinsically tied to my notions of civil liberty. However, I don’t like to be patronised or force fed some overly simplified meta-narrative. I like ambiguity and as such my favourite thing in Washington DC was the exhibition of American folk art I saw at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, for it was an unholy and disparate collection of paintings and sculptures reflecting the perimeters of American culture and it neither tried, nor needed, to resolve or even compliment itself in order to be thoroughly enticing. More of this sort of thing please DC.

Postcard Stories- Madison, Wisconsin

22nd September 2014 – Roisin Whyte

 “In Wisconsin it is illegal and also sinful to paint your barn any colour other than burnt fire red. During the great cheddar rebellion of 1873, a group of dairy farmers from a small town outside Baraboo united and, inspired by the Great Lakes and Satan himself, began to paint their barns a wild and wicked blue. When spring finally emerged, green and golden, beneath the white winter blanket, they soon realised their own folly. The blue barns were all but invisible against the wide Wisconsin skyscape, the corn was lost and their hearts, for one heavy moment, wished for a grey, Christmas sky to guide their way home.” 

23rd September 2014 – Helen Crawford

“Every other Thursday Sybil gets her hair cut at Divine Image Salon. The hairdressers is situated in a strip mall on West Side, sandwiched between the Earring Store and I’m Board, (fun and games for all the family). Marge at Divine Image has been cutting her hair since long before the grandbabies began to arrive and, over the years, they have become firm friends.

“Make me look just like Jesus, Marge,” Sybil always says.

It is a running joke between the two ladies but Marge can only do perms.”

24th September 2014 – Mary Hegarty

“Road kill is particularly common in Wisconsin. Skunks, raccoons and possums are just as common as the more pedestrian birds and rabbits found in more sophisticated states. Wisconsin drivers are neither faster nor more careless than their peers in Minnesota and Illinois. It is the animals who move slower here, sliding under the snow tires as they keep gentle pace with the corn and the cows and the slow circling rain clouds.”

25th September 2014 – Nicky Bull

“This September around half a million people, mostly American, will descend upon the small, Wisconsin town of Monroe for the annual cheese festival and parade. In peaked hats and Badgers sweatshirts the adults will line the streets with picnic rugs and collapsible deck chairs, positioning their children within grabbing distance of the good stuff -candy, Frisbees, key rings sponsored by the local car dealership- as it gets tossed from passing floats. The mice and ground dwelling rodents of Monroe, Wisconsin will gorge themselves on the leftovers; their tiny palates grown accustomed to a better class of cheese.”

26th September 2014 – Kate Mairs

“In their mid seventies, just two years shy of their fiftieth wedding anniversary, they finally figured out a way of working together.

“I shall do the across clues,” she suggested, “and you, my Love, shall work on the downs.”

This system soon proved itself far superior to previous systems: the many years of separate newspapers, the week she’d flirted with Sudoku, the hundreds and thousands of crossword grids abandoned, incomplete, on the kitchen table. Working around each others’ weaknesses the words seemed to slip together easily, like hands clasping in agreement, and, in their early eighties, they entered the finest puzzling period of their life.”

Everyday I (Try To), Write The Book

I’m more than three quarters of the way through the first draft of my next novel, Roundabouts. If someone gave me the option of tossing it into the nearest rubbish bin and starting again I’d jump at the chance. After sixty five plus readings from Malcolm Orange Disappears I’ve become very fond of my first novel. This next book is a different fish and, right now, like a terribly bad mother, I’m struggling to find any love for my second born. The characters are still fresh and a little awkward to me, the stories not quite as familiar as the flying children and the weight of it is hanging over me like a two ton sandbag waiting to descend upon me every time I give myself a day off.

I remember struggling with these same feelings at roughly the same point last time round. I had three chapters left in which to draw together a swirling spaghetti pot of plot lines and no clear notion how this could be done. I had no idea if what I was writing was any good or not and a horrible suspicion that I’d have to content myself with the fact that the book on my lap top screen was never going to be as good as the book in my head. To extend the bad mother metaphor a little further, birthing the bloody thing had almost killed me and yet, with edits and rewrites and all the circus which goes alongside promoting a new novel, I fully understood that the exhausting part of bringing a book into the world had barely begun. Back then I had no time limits and I took full advantage of this, stretching the writing process out over some three and a half years. There were days I wrote like a runaway train from morning ‘til late evening and whole months when I never went near the manuscript.

This time round I’m wrestling with all the same fears and foibles but I’m also writing to something of a deadline. With travel and the unexpected demands of promoting Malcolm Orange Disappears, it seems unlikely that I’ll have a first draft ready for my initial target of November 1st. January 1st 2015 is now seeming like a much more realistic time frame. This will give me a couple of extra months to write the last two chapters, slip in the factual sections based on the Bob Dylan research I’ve been carrying out in the US and allow me the luxury of actually being able to sleep at some point between now and Christmas.

Tomorrow I’m leaving DC and I’m off to lock myself in a hotel in Baltimore for three days. I know virtually no one in Baltimore and have no plans for my time there. This is completely intentional. I fully intend to find a quiet corner in a nice bar, look at the sea, put some Bob on my headphones and focus on getting chapters thirteen and fourteen written before I head back to the day job at the beginning of November. I may well be MIA again for the next few months when I return to Belfast. I don’t want this draft to drag into the New Year. I’m slowly realising that novel writing is not so far removed from bricklaying. It’s equal parts craft, imagination and sheer hard graft; a long, slow commitment to that final full stop.

Music City, Tennessee: Four Sweet Days in Nashville.

I’ve been in Nashville twice before and, on both occasions, had an absolute blast. Nashville is one of those cities which is world-renowned for one thing, (commercial Country and Western music), and in reality, much more complex and endearing than its own stereotype. It’s not an enormous city like Chicago or LA. Person for person it’s actually comparable to Belfast but it feels like a much bigger, busier and more cosmopolitan city than Belfast does. Even in the seven years since my last visit the downtown part of Nashville has become virtually unrecognisable with new hotels, businesses and stores springing up almost weekly as the city seeks to meet the demands of its brand new convention centre.

While it’s great to see Nashville expanding and it was really encouraging to hear stories of the ever-increasing tourism industry, the main street downtown- home to the Ryman Auditorium, (original venue for the Grand Ole Opry) and all the traditional Honky Tonk bars- was awash with inebriated tourists and football fans on Saturday night; the atmosphere less authentic Nashville than Hen Party gone awry and not dissimilar to the weekend night life in Temple Bar, Dublin. Nashville is a city with two faces; the hard-faced commercialism and air-brushed consumerism of the music industry and the tourism this industry generates, and the much more palleatable old Nashville which revolves around good music, good company, food and genuine Southern welcome. I’m glad to say this was the Nashville I got to sample during my brief visit.

I knew this wasn’t going to be a particularly restful stop. Belfast is twinned with Nashville and so, as well as the two wonderful readings I got to give at Barnes and Noble, Vanderbilt, (where I bumped into a fellow Ballymena-ite in exile), and at Bongo Java Coffee house with two amazing local musicians and fellow novelist, Warren Denney, there were also a host of meetings and visits to some ofNashville’s fantastic literary projects and programmers.

I got to spend a fantastic afternoon on the beautiful campus at Vanderbilt. I got to visit with the archivists at the Country Music Hall of Fame, (and drool over Gram Parson’s Nudie Suit and EmmyLou’s guitar). I got to drop in to Country Music Television and meet some of the folks at the Ryman, (where Jerry Lee Lewis was just about to take the stage- talk about coming full circle from Hibbing High where Bobby Zimmerman broke the school piano thumping on it Jerry Lee style, to the man himself). I also spent a wonderful morning with two really inspiring ladies at The Porch, a brand new Nashville non-profit specialising in literacy and writing. Every aspect of my stay was packed full of incredible experiences and great times catching up with dear friends like the Nashville-based musician and artist, Julie Lee who has played an incredibly influential role in my own artistic journey. However, it was such a full trip that I was absolutely exhausted at the end of each day and so so grateful for my incredible hosts Karen and Reggie and the enormous, all-embracing wonder that was their spare room bed.

There were so many brilliant moments on this leg of the adventure, (and I haven’t even mentioned the food: brisket to die for and deep-fried okra, chicken fried chicken and devilled eggs, pancakes on my first visit to the cracker barrel, sweet potato fries and all things Southern), but special mention must be made of last Saturday evening’s outing to the Grand Ole Opry. Thanks to the very lovely John Lassiter we were able to get backstage at the Opry, meet some of the performers, nosy round the dressing rooms and actually stand on stage behind the musicians as they played. It was incredibly surreal but most definitely the highlight of my trip to Nashville and one to boast about in front of the Ballymena folks as soon as I get home. Thanks to my visit to Tennessee i’ve rediscovered my love of bluegrass and my good Southern manners and am off to the East coast now for the last few cities on this never-ending tour.

Postcard Stories- Seattle

20th September 2014 – Hannah McPhillimmy

 “Cliff had always been an anxious child. When he grew up he became an anxious pilot flying United Airlines, domestic from Seatac, Washington. He worried about his uniform. He worried about his health insurance. He worried, between flights, about his plane, and whether, at the end of the shift, he’d remember where he parked it. He ate nervous little meals alone: plastic-wrapped bagels and pre-packaged sushi from the airport’s food court. He worried about his cholesterol and deep vein thrombosis and why none of the other pilots ever sent him Christmas cards. Everything but flight made him anxious.”

American Eating

This morning I experienced the sensation of hunger for the first time in almost six weeks. I had entirely forgotten what it felt like to be hungry and for a brief moment thought I might have picked up another kidney stone. It had been over twelve hours since my last meal. Whilst this might be an entirely appropriate amount of time to pass between meals in any European country, in America, I’m discovering, most people don’t cope well with hungry. Since arriving here at the beginning of September I have ate with a regularity, variety and appetite better suited to a marauding Viking raider than a thirty something Ulster woman. Consequently, my return to Belfast shall see me subsisting on Special K and celery for as long as it takes to get back into my good jeans. Until then I propose to keep munching on. It would be awfully rude not to. I also intend to begin the process of integrating the regular use of a knife back into my every day eating habits and start weaning myself back on to proper tea (with milk). Here for all those foodies who enjoy such things is my eating highlights so far. 1. Best thing I’ve eaten: the veritable banquet of traditional Chinese food I sampled in this restaurant in Vancouver, BC 2. Strangest thing I’ve eaten: pig fat and herring, potato and beetroot cake in a Russian restaurant in Portland 3. Best breakfast/brunch: a toss up between the old faithful eggs benedict at the Tin Shed in Portland and this amazing skillet of breakfast paella in Vancouver, BC 4. Oddest eating experience: watching a Thai lady prepare our dinner of traditional Pho in a log cabin in rural Minnesota. 5. Best milk shake: I’m a die hard Burgerville milk shake fan but this chocolate, cookie dough malt in Duluth, Minnesota has completely transformed my standards for what can be expected of a milk shake. 6. Strangest thing to happen in a restaurant: having the chap at the next table buy our entire table a round of vodka after burping so loudly the entire Russian restaurant turned round to stare. 7. Best cup of coffee: Duluth coffee company, Duluth, Minnesota, (though the music is just a tad too loud). 8. Best airport food: Seatac, Seattle where I had some amazing and very reasonably priced salmon and Rough Trade also organised some pretty decent musicians to serenade me while I ate. 9. Best salad: strawberry, spinach, pine nut and chicken salad at the Alcove in Los Angeles where our table had dozens of tiny short stories stuffed inside the drawers. 10. Favourite food rediscovery: the humble Wisconsin cheese curd; just as squeaky awesome as it was seven years ago and still likely to leave you nauseous after a half bag.

Postcard Stories Vancouver BC

18th September 2014 – Tom Saunders

“At ten minutes to three a taxi pulled up outside the man’s door. He had not ordered a taxi nor even considered leaving the house this afternoon. However, curious to see where the taxi might take him, he put on a jacket, locked his house and slipped into the backseat. He had nothing with him more substantial than a handful of coins and a supermarket loyalty card. Without consulting him the taxi driver drove the man to the nearest airport and left him by the departure gates. Having come thus far, the man considered flying to some unspecified destination. Checking his pockets, he discovered that he did not have enough money for a flight. Even the taxi ride home was beyond his means.”

19th September 2014 – Noel Griffin

 “This was not the strangest thing she’d discovered since moving in. The man in the apartment below kept an owl in his ice box, dead and wrapped in a Ziploc baggie. She stumbled upon it whilst searching for ice cubes. She was fixing gin and tonics before dinner.

 “What’s this?” she asked, holding the dead owl aloft. It’s face, ghost frozen against the whitening plastic, was some arctic creature emerging from the snow.

“An owl,” he replied.

 And she did not know him well enough to press for an explanation.”

20th September 2014 – Clinton Kirkpatrick

 “I am working on a scientific formula to calculate exactly how long I must linger in any independently owned coffee shop before hearing a song by veteran singer-songwriter, Bob Dylan. I am harnessing my inner mathematician, using pie charts and bar graphs; time, plotted along the vertical axis, proximity to the Midwest, running like a constant variable along the horizon. I am hypothesizing an average of 7 minutes, the number, for some reason, decreasing if and when a pastry is purchased alongside a caffeinated beverage.”

Positively Minneapolis

I arrived in Minneapolis in the middle of a downpour. I was on a Greyhound bus with a bad comedian for a driver and two elderly ladies who talked non-stop for the duration of the three hour drive from Duluth. I’d been drenched twice in one day, had a nasty dose of hat hair and nothing but an apple to keep my hunger at bay. I was not in a particularly good mood. Duluth had been such an absolutely wonderful experience and I was pretty sure that Minneapolis/St Paul, (which, viewed through the rain slick windows of a speeding Greyhound looked like little more than an atypical American industrial city), couldn’t compare to the rest of Minnesota. Of course I was wrong. Each new stop on the journey has been like opening a door into a fresh room full of new experiences and friends and my Minneapolis stop, though brief, was every bit as brilliant as Duluth.

My host in Minneapolis was the lovely, and very aptly titled Larry Bach, (who teaches music at a Minneapolis College named North Central), and his wonderful wife Jerrilyn. Larry very kindly invited me along to take classes at North Central with some of their creative writing students and it was a highlight of my trip so far to be able to read with them and teach a little about magic realism, artistic discipline and writing practice. This was the first time I’d had the opportunity to teach in a university setting and whilst absolutely terrifying I learnt so much in the few hours I got to spend with North Central students, (best question and answer session I’ve had since Malcolm Orange was published), and enjoyed the experience so much, I’ll definitely seize any opportunity I get to teach again.

The other big highlight of my Minneapolis visit was the chance to visit the Dinkytown area, where Bob Dylan lived during the year in which he attended the University of Minnesota. It’s an amazingly creative little neighbourhood with great coffee, some very authentic American diners, (where I got the opportunity to meet and share a strawberry malt with the Fulks family who are old friends of my good friend, the Belfast-based poet Andy Eaton), bookstores and a Subway sandwich shop resting on the very spot where Robert Zimmerman first took to the stage as Bob Dylan. Larry was a very gracious host, driving laps of the neighbourhood extremely slowly as we tried to work out where all the various Dylan spots were located. Perhaps most famously of all Dinkytown claim to own the famous 4th Street of Positively 4th Street fame. Whilst they’ve painted a mural on a gable wall to mark this iconic pop culture moment, many Dylan scholars would argue that this isn’t the right 4th Street after all and Bob was actually singing about a street in New York. Either way I was sure to get a photo of the mural to add to my ever growing collection of snapshots from the Dylgrimage.

Other highlights of my stay in Minneapolis included a visit to Mall of America, the largest indoor retail venue in the US, (imagine the entire town of Ballymena if it got sucked inside the Fairhill and accessorised with a small theme park and aquarium), getting to visit with Jerrilyn’s book group and discover that a righteous and deep-seated hatred of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, has made it across the Atlantic and is alive and kicking in suburban Mineapolis, a visit to the beautiful Guthrie Theatre and my first experience of American football, albeit a rather inglorious experience as “we” were trounced 50 something (points? goals? conversions? touch downs? the details are still hazy), to 10 by our rivals on the other side of Superior. I left Minneapolis with the promise of snow already heavy in the air and jumped a plane to Nashville, Tennessee. I can’t believe I’ve less than two weeks of my adventure left.

Happy 1/3 Birthday Malcolm Orange

My debut novel Malcolm Orange Disappears is 4 months old today and I thought this would be a good opportunity to bring you up to date on our adventures so far. It’s been a roller coaster of a season for me. When my novel was first published there was a flurry of articles to be written, reviews and interviews with the press and media. I thought things would quickly calm down and in some aspects the last few months have been less of a hurricane in terms of the press but I’ve been fortunate enough to get to continue reading from Malcolm to live audiences all over Ireland and, as of the beginning of September, to an enormous number of lovely people throughout the USA.

Malcolm Orange Disappears is continuing to sell well back in the UK and Ireland and I am so very grateful for everyone who’s bought a copy and particularly those of you who’ve taken the time to give me feedback. I’m around 87,000 words into writing my second novel and each time someone emails or stops me to talk about what they thought of Malcolm, it’s a timely reminder of why I should persevere to the end of this novel. I’m still humbled and blown away every time I get up to read and there are people in the audience who are both, not related to me, and reasonably pleased to be there. The people I’ve met and their responses to my story have undoubtedly been the best part of the whole publishing process and these last 6 weeks in America Malcolm Orange has been such a great vehicle for meeting writers, readers, artists and all manner of incredible characters in ten cities so far, (four more to go). It’s been a once in a lifetime adventure traipsing round America with this wee book in tow.

As I’ve traveled around people have been asking if there’s anything they can do to help. There are a few different things you can do which I’d greatly appreciate and which would really ensure Malcolm continues to have a life beyond his first quarter year. You can still buy the book of course. Ideally you can order from your local independent book store or order from Amazon US here http://amzn.com/1909718319 or Amazon UK here http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1909718319 If you’ve read the book and would consider leaving a short review on Amazon or even Tweeting under the hashtag malcolmorangedisappears that would also be amazing. (My Twitter handle is @jancarson7280 if you want to follow me). You can also ask your local library to stock the book. (I’ve just found out that Bob Dylan’s old High School, Hibbing High have ordered Malcolm for their school library and I couldn’t be more chuffed). If you work for a blog, newspaper or magazine and would like an article or would like to review the novel that would be very much appreciated. Finally, I’m going to be looking for more places to read in the next few months so if you would like me to read at your literary event, book store, library or university, don’t be shy, get in touch and I’ll see what I can do.

A massive thank you to all those wonderful, supportive individuals who’ve given Malcolm and I a hand along the road so far. We are both grateful and a little overwhelmed.

Minnesota Nice

I’ve been on the road for over a month now and every stop on the journey has felt just a little too short. Four days is not enough time to explore a city properly. By the time you’ve got your bearings and tracked down a decent cup of coffee you’re back on the Greyhound crossing the city limits. I’ve found myself muttering, “I wish I could stay just a little bit longer” every time I board a bus, a plane or train and most often I mean it. There’s not been a single negative experience on this whole trip and I have really good things to say about every city I’ve visited. However, in Duluth, I actually felt tempted to throw my passport into the murky waters of Lake Superior, buy a pair of all-purpose moccasins, and never go home.

I’m not exactly sure why I loved Duluth so much. It’s not the biggest or most exciting city I’ve been in and I feel like I spent most of the week wandering up and down the same little mile and a half strip of coffee shops and stores. It’s not exactly the Dylan connection, though I have to admit that the time I got to spend with the wonderful Dylan fans of Duluth and my visits to both Hibbing and Bob’s Duluth home, will undoubtedly remain as my favourite memories of this whole two month adventure. It wasn’t even the food, (though I can definitely vouch for the superiority of the Minnesotan pancake/French Toast/chocolate Malt and I have to say that you haven’t lived til you’ve sat in a log cabin off Highway 61 and eaten Pho, made in front of you by a fantastic Thai cook). It most certainly wasn’t the weather, which, dependent on the fickle whims of Lake Superior, stormed through the entire spectrum of seasons, (like Belfast on a bad weekend), in just five short days. There’s something about Duluth, Minnesota, which just felt like home the second I stepped off the bus.

People had warned me about Minnesota nice before I arrived in Duluth. Their Wisconsin rivals on the other side of the lake told me not to trust it and I have to admit I was expecting to encounter something like a cross between Southern hospitality and a greeter at the Disney store. I think it’s testament to the lovely people of Duluth, Minnesota that, though I did not know a single soul in town when I arrived last Thursday night, I actually managed to run out of time for meeting with everyone I wanted to hang out with. The people of Duluth are the most genuinely kind breed of human this side of Buckna. I was fed and watered. I was driven to see every imaginable place of interest in a one hundred mile radius. I was given all manner of lovely gifts to bring home. A complete stranger in a coffee shop offered to take my postcards to the Post Office and post them for me. I became accidental friends with a very elderly lady who haunts the downtown coffee shops in a kaftan and Jesus sandals. I got a Highway 61 jumper from a gas station. I was drawn into more impromptu, and wonderful, conversations with strangers than I can recall and was, in short, made to feel most exceptionally welcome.

Duluth is such a liveable wee city. It’s not so big as to be intimidating but neither is it small enough to feel claustrophobic and after five weeks on the road I really relished the way this city did not overwhelm me with too many unnecessary choices. There’s one art house cinema, (but it’s a really good one). There’s one decent coffee house on the main strip, (but it’s a really good one). There are less eateries on offer than most of the cities I’ve visited so far but everywhere I ate had wonderful food and I actually prefer operating under the assumption, that should I so wish, I could feasibly sample almost every restaurant in town within a month’s stay. The beer is also locally brewed and very good and the rain, when it descends is similar in style and intention to a good Ulster downpour. It’s a no nonsense place much like Belfast, where people work hard, are practical and know how to laugh even when the weather outside is miserable. I’m determined to find an excuse to get back to Duluth as soon as I can. There are people I’ve met in the last few days who feel like the beginning of a lifelong connection.