Amelia Lester

Just behind you.

Just behind me.

Anyway, what's America like at the moment?

It was interesting.

There was kind of two Americas that I saw because at first I was in Washington, D.C.,

Which is where I used to live.

And Mia texted me while I was there and she said, give me three words to describe it.

And I thought about it and I wrote back, snow, despair, grit.

A lot of snow, like a lot of snow.

Like we're talking like walls of snow, which people in DC are not very used to.

So for a start, everyone's feeling a little bit cold and a little bit miserable.

And then a lot of people in D.C.

are feeling despair because a lot of people in the nation's capital have lost their jobs thanks to Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

And people are quite worried about the demolition of the White House East Wing and the upcoming demolition of potential demolition of the Kennedy Center, which is this beautiful building, which is in recognition of John F. Kennedy.

Oh, look, the snow was the only thing stopping them.

But then I added grit because I felt like a lot of the Americans that I was talking to in Washington who are kind of like either in government or adjacent to government, a lot of them are journalists, there's a sense that, yeah, we're going through this very tumultuous time right now, but also we're

Life has to go on and people are trying to think about the future and what sort of lessons might be learned from this period of American history.

And there is this sense of resolve amongst a lot of the Americans that I spoke to there.

And then the second part of my trip was a girl's trip.

I went to the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee and they are famous for being the birthplace of Dolly Parton.