Vanessa: Are you ready
to go for a walk with me? I invite you to join me in my old neighborhood where I used to live,
and you can walk with me while I talk about what I see and hopefully you'll learn some useful
vocabulary along the way. Hi, I'm Vanessa from speakenglishwithvanessa.com. And like always I
invite you to download the free PDF worksheet with all of today's important vocabulary,
expressions, definitions, sample sentences, and at the bottom of the worksheet you can
answer Vanessa's challenge question so that you never forget what you've learned. You can click
on the link in the description to download that free PDF worksheet today. All right,
are you ready to get started to go on our walk? We're just going to go and see what happens.
So here we are. Well, we are here with my baby. We are here in a downtown neighborhood of Asheville,
North Carolina. And the only thing you can see right now is probably this gigantic retaining
wall. And on the other side are some grocery stores and on this side there are some houses.
It's kind of a busy area. Usually here people will park on the street. If you can see that here,
people park on the street because they might have a garage, but a lot of people just have
driveways. So you can see up here as we walk by, there are some driveways,
there's some obstacles in the road. My husband Dan is recording this and he is
trying to not fall over. So you can see here there are some driveways, but usually downtown
people don't have garages, so they park on the streets. We call this street parking.
Oh, look at this lovely mural. I love you. Yes, I think my city, Asheville is kind of known for art,
known for some other types of music on the street, these types of things. But where
we are is a neighborhood and not where people are playing music on the streets. So let's keep going
down this street. Actually, what I would like to do is I'd like to cut across the street in just
a moment, but let's keep going down here, the sidewalk is nice and big so Dan doesn't fall on
his face. These people over here, they were our old neighbors and they used to have... Talking
about music, they used to play music on their lawn out front and just the neighbors would come over
and listen. It's quite nice. Do you remember this house? They're always doing construction on it.
Dan: Always doing construction.
Vanessa: They painted it
like four different times and it looks like they're still painting it. I don't know if
anyone actually lives there, but certainly seems like an expensive endeavor. All right,
we are coming the end of the sidewalk. Let's see if we can cross the street. We'll go past
the old apartment building we used to live in and you will see one of the most exciting
houses in all of Asheville, in my opinion. So let's see if we can cross the street.
Dan: There she goes.
Vanessa: All right,
let's go over here. We're going to go down the street away from the grocery
stores and this is a lovely apartment complex. This is where we used to live.
Dan: Our old home.
Vanessa: We don't live there anymore. In the US a lot of
apartment buildings are new, as in they were built within the last 30 or 40 years. But this building
is over a hundred years old. I think the 1920s, which for the US is pretty old. All right, are you
ready for something very exciting? It is coming up right here. Some might call this an eclectic
house. This is where a guy named Jesse used to live When we lived in this apartment building. I'd
come down here and he was always sitting on his front porch around his most precious possessions.
Do you know what these lovely things are called? Wind chimes. So wind chimes have those little
metal poles and they clang and dangle in the wind. Well, when people heard that he liked wind chimes,
he started collecting so many of them that now the entire front is covered with wind
chimes. I think it's pretty exciting. It's not what I would want at my house,
but I think it's pretty exciting and it's kind of one of those things that gives your
city a little bit of excitement and flare, right, because as we walk, let's talk about it. Woohoo.
Vanessa: So I want to tell you about the two
different types of people that live in Asheville. One are the people who have lived here forever,
like Jesse. They have these older style houses. And the second are people like this who build
either a fancy gigantic new house and they've moved from somewhere else. And you know what,
for us, I haven't lived in Asheville forever, so I'm technically part of the second group. We
moved here. We are not Asheville natives, but you know what, it's something that is
our new home. This is where we live now. So there's still some empty lots. I guess nobody
lives here in this special lot at the moment, but there's other houses. These houses have
probably been here for a while and because it's the middle of winter, there's scraggly grass,
nothing's very green. Well there's some green grass I guess depending on your perspective.
In the US we have these big trash bins that we use to collect trash and recycling. And on certain
days the trash collector will come and you wheel them. We use that verb to wheel. We wheel the
bin to the road and the trash collector comes and dumps it into the back of the trash or recycling
bin. We never sort recycling in North Carolina. It's just everything in one recycling bin, glass,
paper, anything like that. It's all just in one spot. Oh, you have to look over here and see this
amazing tree. Isn't this tree so cool? Has this giant bulbous? I think it's probably not healthy
of that giant bulb, I'm not sure. But this tree is so magnificent, especially in the springtime
with all of the leaves. And I love that it's on the hillside. So cool. I love those little
things in a city. All right, let's go down here. We are actually going to cross the street here.
Now there's no street crossing, so we're going to have to just be careful. Maybe technically
it's jaywalking, but in the US people don't care. I just have to be careful that nobody
hits my baby. Let's take a look. No one's coming. Let's go. So here we are going to
go down the street and cross what's called Five Points. This is the Five Points neighborhood in
Asheville. And that means there's five different roads going into it and we are going to attempt
to cross the street without Dan smashing himself and recording at the same time. Let's-
Dan: Appreciate how hard this is.
Vanessa: Let's give
it a try. Going to push the button. I don't actually know which one goes where. I think
this one is for here. I just pushed both of them and we're going to cross the street,
but we have to wait for the hand to turn green or the little man, a little walking
man to be over there. All right. I always try to look, even though the signal says it's okay.
In the US we always do right, left, right. At least that's what I was taught as a kid,
right, left, right. Right now we're walking along Broadway, which is one of the main streets. Wow,
do you hear that hawk? I love hearing Falcons, birds of prey. It's always so exciting. So we
are headed towards the greenway and the greenway is an area that has no houses on either side.
It's just a public, almost like a park, but it's just a sidewalk going straight through
a natural area. So we are walking down one of the main streets in order to get
to that greenway. Let's go. All right, before we cross the street and go into the greenway,
I wanted to show you this lovely iron fence. Back here is a little creek and the neighborhood
behind me is called Montford. It's one of the historic neighborhoods of Asheville.
There's a lot of big older houses. And when I say older, I mean older for the
US. If you're from Europe and there's houses from the 1300s, well it's not that old here,
but for the US it's old and I feel like the US doesn't really do a good job of preserving
historical places. So when there are historical places to see in the US, it's kind of special.
All right, let's cross the street and go to the greenway. There is indeed a little crosswalk here,
so hopefully it's okay. And this area, a lot of people jog here. I used to go for a run
here when we lived in this neighborhood. It is really popular for walking dogs,
just for going for a walk. But there is one thing that probably I wouldn't go here after dark still.
That might just be my own personal preference, but it does feel a little bit like there might
be sketchiness after dark so I generally try to just do those types of things, especially where
you're not near other people. This is somewhat isolated, especially other parts of the greenway.
You're kind of isolated from the neighborhoods and whatnot. I don't really want to be there
after dark alone or with my baby, but in the daytime, this is a great place to go for a walk.
Well, thanks so much for going on this quick walk with me through a little bit of a neighborhood in
Asheville and also a little bit on the greenway, some urban areas, some more natural areas. And I
want to know for you, do you live in the city or do you live in the country? We used to live in the
city now we live a little bit more in the country, but it's always nice to visit both. So thank you
so much for learning English with me. And don't forget to download the free PDF worksheet with
all of this wonderful going for a walk vocabulary. These natural phrases that come up along the way
as you're having a conversation. You can click on the link in the description to download that
free PDF worksheet today. Well, thanks so much for learning English with me and thanks for
going for a walk with me, Matilda. Thanks Dan for risking your life walking backwards to film this.
Dan: You're welcome.
Vanessa: And I hope to see
you again next Friday for a new lesson here on my YouTube channel. Bye. But wait, do you want
more? I recommend watching this video next where you will join me in the garden. Some more natural
space outside, and you'll learn some important expressions for talking about vegetables and
flowers that are doing well and some that aren't doing so well. I hope to see you in that video.