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  • » Name: Amanda Bassa
  • » Location: VA
  • » Member Since: 09/21/07
  • » Bio: student, future change maker, and everything you wouldn't expect me to be.
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The Undisputed Truth

Ain't No Love in the Heart of the City


December 31, 2007 | Tags: none

In what was probably brought on by the holiday boredom of everything being shut down on Christmas, this past Wednesday I had this insatiable urge to get into the city (the city being D.C. for any of you who still may not have figured that out yet…where the hell have you been?). I wanted a fresh pair of kicks, some good cheap food, and a more potent dose of smog and pollution in my lungs and I was not about to be denied.

Now let me start off by saying that I love being in the city, but I hate getting there. I only have to drive all of like 15 minutes to get in the district but once you get in there, driving around is a headache. Parking sucks, there’s always some huge pothole that you don’t anticipate waiting to fuck up your tires, and pedestrians are always so much more belligerent in urban settings. Normally there’s a solution to this – hit the Metro, but I wanted to hit up Georgetown to be a bit indulgent and for some reason the city’s urban planners never stopped to think that one of the city’s largest centers for shopping might need a Metro stop. Right.

So to make matters worse, right when I leave my house it starts raining. This means it’s cold, traffic sucks, and I’m getting rained on. I wasn’t really happy and feeling friendly. You would think everyone else would be a bit cranky and bitter too. But such was not the case.

A lot of people who live in the countryside claim that a good thing about being there is the hospitality of the people in the area, whereas in cities people tend to have that reputation of being too busy to talk or too caught up in their own lives and business to care about what’s going on around them. In the experiences of my life, I’ve come to find that this isn’t always the case. Perhaps it’s because most of the time I spend in countryside settings is in the North, and most of my city dwelling is done in the South where that “Southern hospitality” thing supposedly runs rampant, but I’m not so sure.

In the mere span of the four or so hours that I spent in the city, more people sparked up random conversations with me than I can remember happening in the past month of my time here in Northern VA. Now, I do live in an area where you can’t read the local business’ signs because they aren’t in English, so perhaps the language barrier is a factor, but damn. I was amazed at how many complete strangers would talk to me about any and everything from house cleaning to the internet. Suddenly the rain wasn’t bothering me. OK maybe it was, but not quite as much.

Plus, some wings and fries with mumbo sauce for $3 and a trip to Ben’s  Chili Bowl will make you forget about damn near any inconvenience you had to endure to get there anyway.

My point with this is that things aren’t always what they seem. Your surroundings may look rough, and the streets may be mean, but if you look hard enough you can damn near always find a beauty of some kind lying within it. And conversely, some of the friendliest looking places can be the most coldhearted. Go figure. But either way big ups to everybody who made it through that rainy day with a smile on their face, especially the guys holdin it down over at Major in G-town, the folks over at the Downtown Locker Room on 14th, and even moreso the random ass people out around Howard U that say hello to equally random ass people even despite the fact that they may not even look like they want to be approached in the first place. That’s true hospitality – the unconditional kind. And it’s surprising what it can do to brighten up a person’s day.

On that note…have a safe new years and all the festivities that come with it, and make sure you get your asses back from all those parties in one piece.


The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the writer and not necessarily those of HipHopDX.com or Cheri Media Group.

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