I am currently facing a new travel challenge called 'Fifty States of Wigge'. That means I have to travel all 50 states in 50 days, while facing one challenge in each state.
My start was in Maine last week. And I am traveling by van. The result after seven days is pretty good. I have traveled to already to eleven states and drove 1,400 miles. Eleven states sounds way ahead of my schedule, but keep in mind that the New England states are smaller than the rest.
Two of the challenges were pretty funny I guess:
In Pennsylvania I visited to the town of Ronk, known as the hot spot of Amish culture in the entire universe. You go there and just see Amish farmers in horse buggies driving around, and you see a surrounding that rather reminds you to the 19th than 21st century. Since I am German, I had the challenge to speak German with the Amish farmers. They emigrated from the black forest in Germany a long time ago, so that their current language, Pennsylvania Dutch, is pretty close to modern German. But the challenge turned out to be tough since the Amish religious belief doesn't allow them to be filmed. And I do film the entire trip. So here the solution: I finally met Lash, a Mennonite-Amish mixture. Since he is half and half, he could accept my camera and spoke German like 'Guten Tag, wie geht es Dir' like 'Good afternoon, how are you?'
In Massachusetts I had to face a pronunciation challenge. Again, me being German makes it very difficult to pronounce this state. We somehow have a hard time to pronounce words with so many voles. Ma - su -sju - tzis? I tried all over again, but I am just unable to pronounce it. The problem was that I had to learn the pronunciation within ten minutes.
That was a tough challenge in the town of Southbridge. But finally I met Jennifer who was patient enough to teach me the right pronunciation:
Maaaa - suuuuu - tschjiu - tzis. Right, or maybe wrong again?
Here the video with pronounciation teaching details
All 50 blogs of this travel are coming up overhere on a daily basis
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Next week more, Greetings. Fifty States of Wigge