The capital of Maryland is still, after all these years, M

One of my projects in Centro de Estudios, when there aren´t students with English homework (or other things that I can help with), is putting together a presentation about the fifty states of the United States, giving a little basic information (capital, major cities, population, products/industries, and of course, state nicknames awkwardly translated into Spanish - have YOU ever had to translate "The Tarheel State" and make it NOT sound really weird?), a map, and a couple of nice pictures of the state.

This is harder than you´d think. No, not getting the information - my U.S. geography is pretty good, and for the things I don´t know ("umm, what are the major products of Nevada other than casinos and prostitution?"), there´s always Wikipedia. The hard part - pictures. I´ve done a decent job of keeping personal biases about certain states out of the mix, but sometimes, it´s hard to present certain states in a nice, pretty "gee, if I ever go to the United States I have to go there" sort of way. You have not truly been challenged until you´ve had to find attractive photos of, for example, New Jersey on the internet. For real - YOU try to make Bayonne look nice. I dare you. Other states have surprised me. It was not hard to find, go figure, nice shots of Kansas, which had pretty much defined "flat, boring fly-over state" in my mind since childhood.

I´m almost dreading the photo hunt for Texas. How can you boil a state that is more than 5 times the physical size of Uruguay, with almost twice as many people living in Greater Houston alone as in the entirety of Uruguay, into some basic facts, a map, and two photos? The photos will be hard - what do I show? A sweeping (and stereotypical) desert scene? Mountains, just to prove that yes, we do have them? The hill country, because it's the land of my soul? The gulf coast, because I grew up there? A cityscape since 3 Texas cities rank in the top 10 largest in the country? Cows? An armadillo, possibly with a yellow rose in its mouth and a Willie Nelson and/or Kinky Friedman bumper sticker slapped on its shell? Bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes? Chuck Norris, since everyone here watches "Walker, Texas Ranger" dubbed in Spanish? On a sidenote, one of the drivers of the 112 bus looks freakishly like Chuck Norris - my friend Fede has photo evidence to prove this.

It's also helped me become even more aware of the sweepingly huge country which I call home. I've been to over 30 states; I've seen first-hand a lot of the diversity. However, it really begins to hit home when you try explaining the regions of the U.S. to someone from a country where everything is pretty much the same. THAT'S a challenge. Add to that the ethnic diversity, religion diversity, political viewpoint diversity, and for that matter, the fact that we can´t even make chili the same way from state-to-state (and we all know who does it best..), and the fact that the United States even exists as a single, functional state becomes almost miraculous. It´s not, of course - this could become a springboard for a great historical discussion about modernization and its uniting effect on U.S. society after the Civil War...but I'll spare you. Ask one of the people who came to my S.I. sessions at TLU instead!

I´m even thinking of making this a true multimedia extravangaza, Uncle Sam style, and adding a song (or at least a snippet of a song) about each state...also easier said than done. If YOU know any good songs about, say, Connecticut or Delaware, please feel free to fill me in.