Mrs. Hippy

Sorry for the late update. Yesterday turned out to be crazy what with new counselors showing up and all so I didn't get a chance to write.

INDEPENDENCE DAY

This past weekend, we traveled to Mississippi for Independence Day. As usual, I slept in the car and when I woke, we were in Gulfport. Our hotel was about five miles from the beach which is the first place we stopped. The beach wasn't the cleanest I'd seen but it also wasn't the most crowded. We set up camp and lay out in the sun for a long while, reading, sleeping and getting burnt. When I woke, I was covered with sand (the wind had picked up) and so I went to the water to wash off. I thought to myself as I waded in that this was the first time I had set foot in the Gulf Coast since I had been to Florida as a little kid. That was at least ten years ago... probably longer. Sadly, the murky brown of the Mississippi coast wasn't comparable to the perfect blue of Florida's, but then again, there wasn't an oil spill on when I was younger. I saw a fair share of tar balls washed up on shore. If I have understood correctly, the hole spouting all that oil is only a few inches wide. Amazing that all the tar I saw up and down the beach came from there.

We packed up and checked into the hotel. Sapped of our energy by the sun, we stretched out on the beds and watched a movie on HBO. When it was done, we snapped back to reality and realized we had better eat before it got too late. We went to Sonic - my first time there - and I was pleasantly surprised. I had a BLT and a Coke with coconut flavoring. Not bad at all. Next, we staked out some real estate on the beach boardwalk near where we had been earlier in the day. I set up my tripod and began shooting. The shooting I was doing was nothing compared to the shooting everyone around me was doing. The south seems to either lack or disregard laws concerning fireworks. This is a change for me. In the Northwest, purchasing good fireworks is a hassle to do and setting them off must be done in private. In my experience, if a cop sees you launching things into the air, your humble July 4th operation will get shut down faster than you can say "missing fingers". Here though, anything goes. People shoot them off in public like its nothing. Cops stroll by as revelers blast all manner of high explosives into low-earth orbit. The ear-shattering airborne matériel seems safe compared to the handheld stuff. Pop its are thrown at people's faces, sparklers are jabbed like fencing rapiers and Black Cats are retained till the last second so that when thrown, they'll explode at eye level. No lie, I saw a guy get shot in the back with a Roman Candle and nobody batted an eye.

It was into this mess that I waded. I felt like I was living some strange version of D-Day in an alternate reality. I was heading towards the beach to from it, at night instead of day and I was armed with a camera not an M1 Garand. The beach was entirely filled with people going crazy with their arsenals and by some small miracle, I found an open area in which to set up my tripod. For what seemed like the next hour, I shoot (as best I could) the world-class fireworks show taking place at the end of the pier. When finished, I returned to my camp and the crew of us headed back to the hotel for the rest of the night.

The next day, we went to the outlet mall after checking out of our hotel. Not much to say other than Hurricane Alex continues to bring unrelenting rain despite being blown out for a few days. Our last stop on our way out of town was the Hooters near the freeway. We got some lunch and enjoyed ourselves. As we were leaving I snapped a couple pictures of the exterior on a hunch.

I slept in the car on the return journey. Updated the blog and went to bed.


COINCIDENCES

The next day, my hunch turned out to be founded. When we were leaving Hooters, I remembered that my roommate from last semester, a Frenchman, had visited the South on a previous visit to America. I couldn't remember which state he'd been in but on the off chance that it was Mississippi, I thought I'd take some pictures of the area. I also remembered that he'd been to a Hooters while visiting the South. Seeing as I had just visited a Hooters in the South, I thought I'd take a picture of the place to see if it jogged his memory. Turns out he had in fact visited Mississippi, just as I had. He too had been to Gulfport and we both had eaten at the same Hooters. Keep in mind that this was not previously planned. We ate there because it was close to the freeway. I am visiting the South - not even Gulfport, specifically - for 8 weeks and I traveled 1000 miles to do so. Guillaume spent a month here travelling all the way from France. Strange that we would have been to the same place.

Another coincidence arose just yesterday. New employees arrived and before we went out to grocery shop, I spoke with one of them. Turns out she went to Burlington-Edison High School. I went to Mark Morris. Both are in Washington. We both graduated in 2008. Our teams met in the state basketball tournament in the Tacoma Dome in 2007. She goes to WSU where many of my friends go. We have a mutual friend whom I went to high school with and who she played sports with. And as fortune would have it, we meet 1,000 miles from home and will be working together for the next six weeks. Truth is stranger than fiction.