I have seen Columbia!!!

Not bad.

Well, you know how it is when you build something up to epic proportions in your head and then you finally see it and it's fine, average, almost dull. Believe me, I wasn't bored at all checking stuff out on the micro-tour we got from Les's sis, Jade; I'm still completely stoked about the move. But it has the feel of late Christmas morning to it now that we're home.

Still, I'd rather be there.

We had lunch and walked through Five Points and saw the Forest Acres/Fort Jackson area a bit, where Jade lives. Then drove through downtown, through the USC campus, which was a slice of heaven in my book, saw the state capital from a distance, grabbed iced mocha at Cool Beans, then drove to Irmo to scope out neighborhoods and see where she works. Then we looped back downtown to see the theater company where she puts a hand in—I recognized that area because it's right near the Amtrak station—and cruised back to her place.

There's lots of red brick to the buildings, mixed with modern edifices like the Richland County library, which is an exercise in glass. The campus is something out of my junior high dreams about college; Cool Beans is right down the street from a grassy area that should be on every recruitment poster for the place (I think it's the Horseshoe—couldn't find a decent pic online), a huge expanse of grass with large trees between a U of buildings, where people were sitting, studying, enjoying the weather...really looking forward to the next oh, half a dozen visits; I ache to explore that campus more.

There's plenty of ethnic diversity, but it doesn't have quite the desperate feel that downtown Jacksonville does, that level of poverty that people wear. Apparently they have their share of homeless but the crime stats are average, and it seems pretty easy to delineate where the "good" neighborhoods are, the ones that are cool to live in without destroying your budget.

Even though its land mass is decent—it takes probably a half hour to traverse the interstate from the Fort Jackson area to Lexington—it doesn't overwhelm at all like Charlotte does. There's construction, and the suburbs are expanding with evil Wal-Marts and Targets, but there's only 2 malls of any substance I think, and there's plenty of areas in the suburbs where we were driving through nothing but green, or at least had to go for a stretch before we'd encounter a gas station or a McD's. Lots of nice walk-and-shop neighborhoods downtown—eclectic clothing and coffee shops abound.

It was far too short a visit, I can't look at a map yet and really know the place, but it was a good start. I'll do some thinking this weekend about the different areas (especially the ones I want to investigate more closely for house prospects, livability, etc.), do some surfing for more info, and dig out what I have so I can update it. We both definitely want this to happen, but our credit being what it is scares me into thinking that we won't be able to make it happen by next April, so it's definitely time to get our noses to the grindstone.