This weekend I managed to tick off another State by taking a
girls trip up to the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina. Home to the annual
electronic-music festival ‘Moogfest’, Asheville is set in the heart of the
Smoky Mountains and prides itself on a thriving arts and music scene all year round.
Some of the other international students managed to visit this quirky town in
the Fall and whilst some went for the fresh mountain air, others visited for
the ‘vibe’. Apparently the town is most commonly portrayed as having a ‘funky’
ambience and even after strolling around for just one day you can definitely
see why. Maybe it has something to do with the small fact that pretty much nobody
in Asheville is actually from Asheville, so this Southern town feels a little
misplaced. Or perhaps it’s the mixture of breweries, secret cafes, dozens of
art galleries and variety of street performers. After recently having a bit of
a cold spell in South Carolina, the sunshine made a welcomed appearance and nearly
every street corner was lined with musicians playing their hearts out whilst
basking in the sun. We even sat outside for lunch!
One of my favourite things about the city were the
individual and unique cafes and shops.
We stopped for a coffee break in a double decker red bus (supposedly all
the way from Trafalgar Square!) that had been converted into a one off café – I
thought it was pretty cool anyway. Some of the breweries had bizarre names;
including ‘Wicked Weed’ and we somehow stumbled into a book shop/bar which was
definitely not a place to find shabby paperbacks. The English Lit student in me
was thrilled that such a place existed where two of my favourite pastimes
(reading and drinking wine) could co-exist in perfect matrimony. Never-read
leather-bound volumes of Dickens ($435 for a set!), an edition of ‘The Catcher
in the Rye’ with the carousel horse cover ($200), and a glass of fizzy
Heidsieck & Co. Monopole ($15) would go down a treat! The bookshelves were piled
high and you could easily get yourself lost in a maze of book-lined nooks and
crannies whilst kicking back in mission-style sofas and leather armchairs
hidden amongst your favourite authors. A literature student’s heaven!
Apart from wandering the streets of downtown Asheville, we also
took a trip to the Looking Glass Falls in the Pisgah National Forest, which was
absolutely beautiful. I felt like I could have been Katniss Everdeen from ‘The
Hunger Games’, which was shot in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville.
No comments:
Post a Comment