FOREIGN ASHEVILLE
It is spring in Asheville which after the bitter cold of Helsinki and Tallin and even the bundling up cold winds of Winsen and Haarlem is a relief. The dogwoods are blossoming, the front yard has become a bright green meadow and the yellow green shades of the hills around me feel warm in the sunshine.
When Phil Diehn stopped on the road when driving back from early breakfast at Waffle House, he said, “Can you imagine any place more beautiful?” I had just been to a lot of beautiful places and I couldn’t.
Every place I visited on this trip, except maybe Virampur, a village in Gujurat, was a tourist town and every one of them was filled with visitors. And Asheville, too, is a tourist town with the same complaints that Amsterdam and Paris have about the glut of tourists, of which I was one there but a complainer here.
So the question is why I felt so alive in all of these towns and why after fitting back in again, Asheville doesn’t touch me as intensely as these places did. It is probably directly connected with the rise in airfares and Airbnb prices and restaurant costs this summer after the pandemic. People yearn to break loose from their ordinary conventional life and to open up to the stimulation of being in new places. At first, as pandemic fears (not the pandemic) receded we were only able to leave confinement in our homes to be able to sit in outdoor cafes near us. But after being vaccinated and revaccinated with the fear of hospitalization and death diminishing we want to break out and escape confinement not only in our homes but in our towns and even in our country. So people are flocking to Asheville from all over the world just as they are flocking to the beautiful old town of Celle.
If you are from China or India or Germany or the Netherlands, Asheville, especially in springtime, must bring you fully to life. Even the little houses that we pass by on our walk form Todd and Susie’s apartments to Owl Bakery must seem fascinating, simply because they are so different from houses in those countries. And the Owl Bakery with it’s $5 croissants, $3.50 coffee and $9 loaves of bread must seem an escape worth making on a Sunday morning.
The answer to why I am not as stimulated here as in Haarlem has nothing to do with Asheville and everything to do with me, with my simply being used to Asheville that I barely notice how interesting it can be.
So how do I recover the delight in my home town that outsiders feel, how can Asheville be as stimulating to me as Haarlem? How do I wake myself up to my hometown?
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 