Charlotte

In Charlotte, the so called "Queen City" there's a church in every corner -this is indeed the Bible Belt. Maybe there's more churches than gas stations, and as we don't really have a public transportation system, I'll say that's a hell of a lot of churches.

People here go to church in Sunday morning. They get their best dresses and suits, put on some perfume, and head for the church to shake hands and be greeted by tons of smiley faces. Once the service is over and everybody feels closer to God and with one feet in heaven, is time to take care of one of their favorite wordly hobbies: eating.

Restaurants get packed right after church is over. All those buffets where you can eat till you sweat always have lines of people waiting to fill the void with gallons of sweet ice tea, and tons of fried chicken, fried pickles, fried oysters, fried rice, fried corn and just fried anything. Also with the good-old Southern BBQ, a mix of several parts of a pig blended together and served with corn bread and beans -and more sweet tea of course. After that some fried ice cream, or some key lime pie, or pecan pie or a nice size piece of cheese cake for dessert, and just to make sure, just add a few extra scoops of sugar in your already sweet ice tea to top things off.

Once you have your belly full beyond capacity and salvation at harm's length, is just time to go and hit the mall in order to take advantage of all those sales of items that you don't need and that maybe you already have, but that promise you to "save" a hell of a lot of money. But hurry up, because by the time you get there maybe everything is gone.

Then you might want to head back home and indulge yourself in reading our local newspaper, The Charlotte Observer, beginning of course with the weekly section of "Faith and Values". There you'll read how things are in wonderland, how great this town and Jesus Christ is and if you're lucky you'll have some reprints of articles from the NYTimes and the WPost. You'll find first page articles on buying only American products and how bad Walmart is; you'll also see how great things are going in Iraq and of course you'll get your daily doses of heart rending stories. In other words, that newspaper is good only to wrap dead fish.

Once you finish with the newspaper you might want to listen to some music on some of the local stations, just to have updates almost every other song on traffic and the weather. You'll also get your Billboard Hip Hop played over and over again, Ashley Simpson non-stop, and the good old "oldies" playing more often than the number one song on the charts. Do you remember Eurythmics? They get more air time today, in the 21st century than they did back in the eighties when they were kicking ass.

At the end of the day I always ask myself the same question. . . How in hell did I end up here?