Life in the South

As we drove down towards Clemson, South Carolina we tried to catch up on pass events since my brother left home.We did stop by a Mcdonalds for my introduction to the world of big mac and french fries. We arrived Clemson safetly and drove to a little town called Pendleton which was where our apartment was located. As we entered the apartment I was taken aback at how small the place was.It was an efficiency no doubt but the place was smaller than where I was living before moving to the US.There was one bed and a couch that could be easily transform into a sleeping bed. That was where I was going to be sleeping for the next three to six months. I sensed things must not have been moving smoothly with my brother as we all had thought back home. There had been earlier warning signs before I came. The first was that earlier arrangements that we had made for me to come over were squashed when he suddenly relocated from the Virgina area to South Carolina. Secondly the school that I got admitted into was a community college instead of a four year institution as earlier planned. Enough about earlier problems though. The Pendleton, Clemson area is what you call a college town. In otherwords the town really comes alive when students are in campus and dries up during school breaks. I happen to arrive during the summer when there were some students attending summer school.There were a few people that I was introduced to. A few Nigerians, they are everywhere in the planet. Most of them attended Clemson University on a soccer scholarship. There was a friend from Surinam called Melvin who help to show me around some places. He had an old car that could move around pretty well. There were three Cameroonians from the French speaking part of Cameroon(francophones as we call them back home). One of them was called Emmanuel, he was the boastful one, that is why I still remember his name. The elder brothers, one was studying for his masters and he had a white girlfriend and the eldiest one was doing a PHD program. He had an African-American fiance.He was the more focused of them all.My elder brother had enrolled in a masters degree program to try and improve on his chances of getting into medical school which he could not get into after undergraduate studies. He was getting an aid from the university while he did research. His girlfriend was called Shirley and she had recently travelled to Southern Africa for some research work.I was to meet her latter.We lived on the aid that my brother was getting from the university. It was enough for us to get bye for the moment and I did not have many complaints at all since I was pretty much happy to be in the US.Throughout my life I had never really been an active person when it came to exercising. But than was to change. I found out that because just about everybody owned an automobile, you had to allocate some time for exercising or working out as it is popularly known here. So each day after my brother returns from summer research it was on to the soccer field to try and get back into playing form.I had and still possess pretty good soccer skills that was developed during my days in primary and secondary school. So it did not take long for the skills to resurface. We played manly pickup games. There was always a crowd around the many soccer fields ready to go at anytime. I bean to gradually introduce jogging into my daily playing routine and I found out that the jogging improve a lot on my stamina in the soccer field. Some of my brother's friends had suggested to him that I could be able to get a soccer scholarship in one of the local four years colleges. But for reasons that was obvious to me and him that was not an option for me.We prepared most of our food, my brother did most of the cooking. We did occassionally ate out which I liked. We were invited to many parties. People had money to spend so there were parties going on all over the place.Weekend nightlife consisted mostly of going to a local nightclub or drinking beer in any of the Travens around town.