Pittsburgh
I have never been to Pittsburgh before…well maybe I drove by on it the highway some decades ago but I have never stopped over in this city. Before coming here I had some vague impressions of some dirty, dusty, smoke belching industrial city spewing out pollutants into the river.
I was pleasantly surprised. Pittsburgh has got some old time class. Once a city of 800,000 with a booming steel business Pittsburgh was probably a very dirty city and the river was probably quite polluted since it was one of those cities in the infamous rust belt. Pittsburgh lost it leadership as being one of the key cities in the world to produce steel. Most of the steel factories went to Japan and Pittsburgh suffered and went from 800,000 to less than 350,000.
Today Pittsburgh seems to be moving up once again but not with steel. Pittsburgh is growing because of robotics and healthcare.
Pittsburgh even has its own English dialect called Pittsburghese. “In Pittsburghese, for example, "the car needs washed" instead of "needs to be washed", "needs washing", or "needs a wash". The dialect has some tonal similarities to other nearby regional dialects (e.g., Erie, Baltimore), but is noted for its somewhat staccato rhythms. The staccato qualities of the Pittsburgh dialect have been suggested to originate either from Welsh or from Eastern European immigrants. It has so many local peculiarities that the New York Times described Pittsburgh as, "the Galapagos Islands of
American dialect." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh
One of the cool things in Pittsburgh is the Duquesne Incline that goes up Mt. Washington and was completed in 1877 by Samuel Duquesne. It is inclined at a 30 degree angle and climbs 800 feet long. It used to be steamed power but is now electric and was originally designed to carry cargo but now transports people. The other incline in the city is called the Monongahela Incline.
Here is a video of the incline going up at night.
YWAM is hoping to work out of this monastery which is right on the south side of the city.
