In the evenings we patronised a couple of awesome eateries with names like Hickery Hollow, where you sit at long tables with your fellow jolly diners, admire the decorating (antlers, buffalo heads, ballistic weaponry, flags etc) and eat platefuls of classic Texas fare (think meat, bread, BBQ sauce, potatoes, baked beans and ice tea or root beer) in quantities more usually associated with extinct reptilian monsters. Live bluegrass bands played songs with names like “Johnny ain’t comin’ home for to sing a-dyin’”.
---Brief Interlude--- in which I take a minute to mention one aspect of America that nobody talks about but which is the most phenomenal thing I’ve ever seen anywhere I’ve been in the world. Namely, the sky. Every day, at about 7-8pm and 4-5am, the world looks likes it is coming to a spectacular end. The clouds turn florescent pink or orange, and assume shapes like apocalyptical mountains. My jaw muscles give up in awe. Even when it’s not sunset, the cloud formations are so majestic that it’s all I can do to stop myself kneeling in the middle of the street and crying out for forgiveness. Imagine leaving a building or vehicle, stepping out onto the pavement and seeing this:
Actually, that is a picture of a deep-space nebula taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, but it’s really not far off what the sky looks like in America. Talking of nebulae, I found time while in Houston to visit the space centre (of “we have a problem” fame), and check out some incredible stuff about space. They did a thoroughly good job of making me want to be an astronaut, in fact. Did you know, for example, that NASA will be sending men to the moon again in 2020, in order to establish an actual proper base there, which, and this is the really cool part, will be used as a refueling point for the first mission to Mars in 2030. The first person to set foot on another planet is alive today.
From Mars to Austin, where I was hosted by a group of whacky University of Texas students in their awesome three-bedroom flat to the south of the city. I had fun chatting and living it up with them into the wee hours of the morning, as they were a uniformly interesting and hilarious bunch. One of them, Dani, was a DJ for UT’s renowned student radio station, so she took me to see the studio and watch her spin some discs. Indeed if you were listening to KVRX 91.7FM at about 10:45pm on Tuesday night you probably heard me give a brief live performance of a song by an Austin band (…And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead) on a piano that happened to be around.
Other cool things I saw in Austin included a massive cloud of bats that fly up from under a bridge every day at sunset, and also the Texas State Capitol, where I idly watched the State Senate pass a few bills. In California I had had two hours to kill in Sacramento changing buses, so I had given myself a quick tour of the State Capitol there, which looks identical to the Texas one and to the national one in DC (and presumably every state capitol in the country – they don’t seem to be very imaginative with this…). In California, however, there had been a cool protest by a large number of people from Laos, all wearing white shirts, who had apparently been concerned about a Supreme Court ruling about the legality of a Lao general who may or may not have been plotting to overthrow the government in Laos from America. There were news teams, riot police, camera crews and everything.
Anyhow, Austin was generally a cool place, certainly somewhere I’d love to spend my university years, though I didn’t have long there before I was off again, to New Orleans, or, in the local dialect, “Nawlins”.
No comments:
Post a Comment