This hotel is bigger than anything I’ve ever been inside

Originally uploaded by jwasserman.
There was a networking event/social, which was kind of fun for a little while. They had food and live music. Of course, the live music was of the country variety, which was great. Last time I was in Nashville I was 17 and didn’t want to hear thing one about country music, except for Hank Snow singing “Honeymoon on a Rocket Ship,” which I thought was great, and Alabama’s “Mountain Music,” which I remembered listening to at some cast party. When I was 17 I was a year away from discovering Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson, and Steve Earle. I can’t wait to get out tomorrow night and hear something a little more countryish than a bunch of English teachers throwing down for their peers.
We got a cab and went over to the Gaylord Opryland Hotel, which was enormous and extravagant and intimidating. They have an indoor jungle there, complete with a boat ride. Let me say that again. You can pay $9 to get on a boat and ride slowly around the courtyard/lobby/shopping district of this hotel. I think I would’ve felt horrible if we’d sprung for that. Most of the cabbies we’ve encountered in Nashville have been Somalis. The guy who drove us to the Opryland Hotel moved to the US three years ago. He was in Minneapolis but came down to Nashville, where he lives with his wife, drives a cab, goes to college, and saves up to get his four children out of Kenya and over to Tennessee. That is his dream. The guy who drove us back left Somalia over ten years ago, came here with pretty much nothing, and within a year of his arrival bought a three-bedroom house outside Nashville for about $70k. He thinks the place is worth around $200k now.
There’s a civil war in Somalia that’s been going on for years and seems to be getting worse now. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be in someplace safe like Nashville, going to school during the day and driving a cab at night, all the while working toward getting your loved ones out of an impoverished war zone. Those cab rides really put a lot of things in perspective for me. It was very similar to my first year teaching, when I got a new student who was a
Kosovar refugee. He’d seen so much, like his schoolmate’s entire family killed when their house was blown up. The other kids in the class thought that he was quiet because he didn’t speak English. The truth was that he spoke nearly perfect English. He was silent for another reason.