I don’t know if a lot of people have a desire to visit Ohio, but I’ve been in Columbus the past week with Khanh (a brief departure over the weekend to Detroit with my siblings and mum to help our sister Kim move in, more on this later) and I’m having a swell time! While the major reactions I get from my friends as to my whereabouts these days has been some hybrid of scoffing, sympathy and a total lack of concept for life in this part of the States, I can’t get enough of the brick buildings, Gable roofs, freakishly large insects, abundance of trees and quirky boutiques. Coming from San Diego, I’m probably quite lucky to have found myself, if anywhere here, in the fourth largest city of the American Midwest. But I tend not have much of a capacity to feel boredom or overall discomfort anyway, and my sister has been the best host! 

I have visited:

- the Columbus Zoo

- Short North (home of one of four Columbus locations of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream!)

- Easton Mall, which is a mall

- areas of the Ohio State University campus, which is elegantly collegiate

- German Village (home of cobblestone roads and independently-owned The Book Loft, which has 32! Rooms! Of books!)

- a field of giant concrete corn ears

- a 12-foot tall monument at Scioto Park of the head of the Wyandot leader Shateyoranyah, or ”Chief Leather Lips.” He signed the Treaty of Greenville following the Northwest Indian War (1785-1795), ceding native territory to the United States. He was sentenced to death in 1810 by Shawnee leader Tenskwatawa for compliance with white settlers as Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh attempted to unite the Native Americans in a confederacy against US expansion. Kind of an ironic, if not morbid, sculpture upon further review since the Wyandot chief was executed with a tomahawk.