From a Trans-Atlantic Nomad

I was very much looking forward to Memphis and it turned out to be a bit disappointing. It was still quite fun but very frustrating.

I got there on August 9th for Elvis week which is the annual commemoration of the death of Elvis. Well after 31 years of it it seems to have gotten a bit flat. I went to the opening night party on Beale street with a guy from the hostel called Justin and the place was completely empty. We’d already paid $20 for our tickets so we hung around and got chatting to a couple of very pleasant southern belle’s. They were regulars and managed to convince the barman to give us a free drink because of the ticket price. Then when the head chef came over and started chatting to us he felt bad and gave us a big plate of food each as the kitchen was super quiet. The restaurant there was quite and the food was excellent. The pork was worth the $20 alone so we left happy.

Aside from that the buses in Memphis were awful. From the hostel there was one bus an hour during the day and they stopped at about 6.30pm. This meant I had to spend quite a fair old chunk on taxi’s during my stay there.

I played a song-writers open mic in a coffee shop there which was fun, the owner asked if I would be around next weekend to play a longer set. It was nice to be asked but again disappointing to miss out on.

I went the annual music and movies night on the lawn at Graceland on my final night there. That was good. The band playing Elvis covers were excellent and we watched jailhouse rock afterwards. Apparently that is one of the better Elvis movies, I liked it but it makes me wonder what the less good ones are like. He was no actor! It is pretty cool though that the first time I saw an Elvis movie was on the lawn at Graceland.

As final note from Memphis the taxi driver that was dropping me at the Greyhound station was a really loud woman. She barked down her cell phone for most of the drive then she asked me where I was from. When I replied Scotland I thought that she didn’t seem too certain about where or what Scotland was. My fears were confirmed when she asked me if I was getting the Greyhound to Scotland.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 17th, 2008 at 9:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.