I guess I’d have to call today Pat Conroy day. Pat Conroy is one of my favorite authors (OK, some readers don’t like him at all -- it’s either love or hate and not much in-between with his writing style). In his book South of Broad, he describes in detail the houses along the paper route of the main character as a boy. So we went back to the book and marked the paper route on a city map and drove the route. The houses are gorgeous. The book The Lords of Discipline is about a military academy in the south, based on The Citadel, which Pat Conroy unhappily attended. So we drove to The Citadel and slowly drove around the parade ground (the school buildings and dormitories are built around the central parade ground). The school is painted grey and looks like a combination castle and fort -- it looks something like San Quentin prison, if you ask me. Interestingly, the hotel we are staying in (Embassy Suites) is in the original Citadel building -- the academy moved to its present location in 1920. But the hotel building is painted salmon, so it doesn’t seem so formidable.
We took a tour of Charleston and learned a few interesting things. It turns out that Spanish moss isn’t Spanish and it isn’t moss. It is an air plant -- not a parasite -- so it doesn’t hurt the host plant. We also learned that when Charleston was first settled as a city, the founding fathers felt quite strongly about religious freedom and the need to protect it. Whenever seven or more people gathered to worship, they could claim to be a church. Consequently, Charleston has always had the greatest variety of houses of worship in the colonies and in the south, and still does, and because of this it is often called “the holy city.”
Charleston is also known for its wonderful iron work -- gates, fences, balconies. What an amazing variety of beautiful iron work we saw (although Savannah also has similarly impressive iron work). Oh, and I can’t forget about the sideways houses. You know how most houses face the street so that the front door directly faces the street? Well, many houses in Charleston are turned 90 degrees so that the front door faces the side of the property. The front of the house (the front that faces the side of the property) has a covered porch that runs the length of the property. From the street, you see the side of the house and a door. The street door opens to the front porch. So to get to the front door, you go in the street door and walk along the porch to the front door.
Oh, and we did a bit of shopping at a huge market that is much like Pike Street market in Seattle. There were several stalls selling sweet grass baskets, which are a specialty of the Gullah people. Sweet grass is a long, salt water marsh grass and the baskets are high quality and gorgeous. We had to buy one, of course. And then I spied a t-shirt that just called to me. It says on the front “Here in the south we don’t hide crazy….We parade it out on the porch and give it a cocktail!” That is oh so true!
You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned food yet. So far, the food in Charleston has been fine but not notable, although we did do another sample of freshly-made lemonade, which got a very high grade. I’ll get back to the food tomorrow. And so far, still NO hush puppies!
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