Nashville
Today’s our last full day in Nashville so it’s good time to share some of my impressions of the place before we fly off to Los Angeles tomorrow.
Firstly, Nashville is a very easy city to get around by road. They have an excellent system of concentric ring freeways with other freeways radiating out like spokes on a wheel. You can get anywhere in town fairly fast. Yesterday evening we headed out to visit Jen’s cousin at his house. On the map it looked like it was halfway across town, but it really didn’t take us long to get there at all. I’ve found driving here to be generally a fairly easy experience, once I got used to driving on the wrong side of the road.
One thing that’s impossible not to notice driving around Nashville is just how many churches there are. It’s not hard to see why they call this city the Protestant Vatican. It would not be an exagerration to say there is at least one church every mile along every major road in Nashville, and often two or three. And while some of these churches are small, most of them have impressive buildings that would dwarf the majority of churches back in Australia. From my perspective this is another positive aspect to Nashville, but we were talking to someone else who found it a bit of a negative point – if you’re not a church-goer then the fact that almost everyone here does go would be a bit intimidating I’d imagine. It makes you realise just how different the religious landscape is back in Australia, and makes the point of this post from Hamo even more vivid – we in Australia shouldn’t blindly follow American or any other models of doing church, since the religious millieu of the community is vastly different.
We’ve only been here a few days but I’ve really enjoyed Nashville. It’s a pretty city, a friendly city, with a really great atmosphere – a great mix of music and religion and good ole southern hospitality. In our case it’s been extra special because we’ve been visiting some wonderful people here, which all four of us have really valued. I can’t wait to get back to Nashville again.
