Virginia Beach—The Best Place To Visit in the US

After my month-long stay with @ghostlightning in Manila, my dad told him he was free to come stay with us in the States any time. At first, I found this proposition funny because if you were gonna visit the US, would you really waste the trip on Virginia Beach? Wouldn’t you want to go to New York or L.A. or someplace happenin’ like that? But over time, it’s occurred to me that Virginia Beach is actually the perfect place to visit on a US trip.

My original reasoning behind this was similar to the reasoning behind why it was perfect for me to stay in Manila on my Philippines trip—I’d never been to a big city. Everything that I saw in Manila blew me away. Some of the Filipino anime bloggers said that I should go outside the city, since they saw it as a dirty hellhole, and go to a beach or something. What they didn’t realize was that I *literally live at the beach* and am fucking sick of the beach. 

So the inverse would be interesting for ghostlightning. What I’d really love to do is take him for an all-day drive down one of our open highways that seem to be straight lines leading to absolutely fucking nowhere. The endless highways, the weird shit on the sides of them, and the overwhelming sense of mystery that lies across America’s backyard is interesting even to me, and I’d imagine would be moreso to someone who lives in a country where a road couldn’t stretch for anything remotely close to the length of one of ours without hitting a mountain. 

But thinking beyond ghosty, there’s really a lot to offer here no matter where you’re flying in from. Don’t have beaches at home? I’m fifteen minutes from the largest pleasure beach *in the world.* That place is a spectacle, so once I’ve taken you there, I’ll then take you to a more quiet, local beach. Want to go party? You can party your motherfucking ass off all up and down the beach strip. We have famous clubs and shit, and nice restaurants, including one with one of the top-10 highest-rated bathrooms in the US (I shit you not). Want peace and quiet? The rest of the city is suburbs, as well as a gigantic rural area that everyone forgets exists.

Which brings me to the next thing: why visit Virginia Beach if you were trying to learn about the US? Because we were recently called the “best-run city in the US” by 24/7 Wall St. This is the real meat of coming here: if you wanted to come for gonzo “what’s the US like” reasons, this is the place where you can see how the country operates at its *very best.*

The exciting thing about this is that just because we’re the best-run city in the country doesn’t make us some kind of shining city dystopia—we still have our fair share of ugly ghettos and crime-ridden streets. Just yesterday my mom told me how a friend of hers stayed at a hotel in the Lynnhaven area where a guy was fucking a prostitute on the hood of his car in the parking lot and the service desk had a bullet-proof shield, so we’ve got that going on; and then a couple roads over, BEST-RUN CITY IN AMERICA suburbs with big rich houses. You can literally see it all. 

The best part that because I’m a NEET, I can just drive visitors around all day every day that they’re here, until they get burned out. And even if that happens, you won’t be bored. I live in a fucking castle, and the pool’s being built as we speak. CLEARLY I AM THE BEST PERSON IN THE US TO STAY WITH.