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Published: November 19th 2013
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Our Recent Visit to San Antonio & Houston Texas
San Antonio has The Alamo and claims to be ‘the most historic’ city in Texas. The Alamo was originally home to Spanish missionaries and their Native American converts to Catholicism. It played a crucial role in the Texas Revolution in 1835-6 to secure its independence from Mexico, when less than 200 volunteers held out for over 13 days against a Mexican army of thousands. Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett become heroes here and their martyrdom led to a populist uprising and the eventual ousting of the Mexicans (at least that is how I remember it from 10
th grade US History). The grounds of the Alamo are today the most visited historical site in Texas. The church where the final fighting took place has been renovated and is considered hallowed ground. People walk around it and the grounds of the former mission mostly in quiet contemplation and reverence.
A narrow river snakes through the downtown and below street level and has been imaginatively utilized by bordering it with a walkway and allowing many restaurants to be situated there. There are also canal rides on the river that make it seem like
a mini-Venice. We rambled along its length and Joan checked out the restaurant menus. At one end of the river walk there is a small collection of old houses called La Villita. There is a large Mexican population in San Antonio and nearly every other restaurant is a version of Tex-Mex. And many of the gift shops – including the entirety of the Market Square centre – is Mexican. The two main streets from it back to the River Walk area is mostly run-down or closed buildings. There is a wonderful old theatre that has a sign in its entrance way asking for help with funds for its renovation. San Antonio is a small city that has seen much better days and instead of going south to the four other former Spanish Missions south of town, we headed east on route 10 to Houston.
Houston wasn’t a planned stop – in other words it wasn’t one of the places we were looking forward to visiting – but as it was on the route between San Antonio and Lafayette, Louisiana we decided to check it out. And it was a pleasing surprise!
Houston is the 4
th largest city in
the United States with a population in excess of 2 million people, many of whom are fabulously wealthy from the oil beneath their lands. It was founded in swampland in 1836 and named after Texas hero Sam Houston and served as the capital of the Texas Republic until 1839. A huge and sprawling city of some 600 square miles (about 1550 square kilometres) , it was originally a centre for shipping cotton, we drove through seemingly endless acres of it while driving here. Now it is oil that finances and runs the city. It was discovered here in 1901 and created a number of vast private fortunes. During our drive we passed oil wells pumping and the experienced the thick reek of oil in the back of our throats.
We arrived in the early afternoon and spent the day in the Montrose district which was described as a lively-collection of counter-cultural flavoured galleries, nightclubs and shops, cafes and restaurants and was a walking neighbourhood. We found it a bit disappointing and not a bit pedestrian-friendly. We spent some time in a coffee shop catching up on emails and listening to a mutually abusive argument between a employee of the
coffee shop and a guy distributing the free local ‘what’s happening magazine’. We visited a wonderful used bookstore across the street, but other than that we had a hard time finding a decent place for dinner and retreated to Rudy V and Joan prepared lunch for us there instead.
The next day we drove the 5 mile shopping strip into the downtown. The largest of the big brand shopping malls is called The Galleria and has nearly 400 stores, all the major international brands you can name! We only noticed it because we drove as we drove by it seemed never-ending. And that is only one of the malls and strip shopping centres on the western entrance to downtown.
Houston’s downtown skyline is an architect’s dream. It is probably the most interesting skyline we have seen other than Dubai. It is a dramatic monument to capitalism, ambition and glitz. These are corporate offices, banks, the major brand hotels, two very large sporting arenas and some mega-churches that can draw upwards of 15,000 people to a Sunday service. It was the home of Enron. Most of these buildings are connected by a series of Tunnels and it is along
these tunnels where most of the people traverse, only coming up to ground level to visit a restaurant, of which there are quite a few. There is a huge convention centre just at the edge of the downtown and an international Automation conference was being held there. We were in the lobby of one of the hotels using the wifi and drinking a coffee when we overheard a local man telling a large group of mostly male conference attendees that when you come to Texas you must eat the smoked brisket and the best place to do that in downtown Houston was Pappas and it was out the door, turn right and across the street on the left. We duly packed up our computers and headed there and the man was spot on – the meat was succulent and juicy and nearly worth coming to Texas for on its own!
We walked around a bit more after lunch, admiring the many fine skyscrapers, and also took the Greenlink bus which was free and encircled the downtown: the entire trip took about 20 minutes. We thoroughly enjoyed our day and a half in Houston, much more than we had anticipated.
Texas overall, however, was much as I had expected it would be. The Texans are not a friendly people. Their motto is ‘Don’t Mess With Texas’ and that attitude holds true throughout all the places we stopped. I don’t recall once having even the briefest of conversations where someone asked us where we were from. (That happened very frequently and very quickly in the three previous states we had visited – and also in Louisiana and now in Mississippi.) It is hard to escape their sense of superiority and the born-again, self-righteous nature of that superiority. (Austin is the one city that is an exception to this generalisation.) It reminds me of that same kind of arrogance as demonstrated continually by the most hard-line and vocal of the Ulster Protestants of Northern Ireland. Joan, however, found the Texans more an aloof and distant people.
(Re-reading this I realize that I went to Texas looking to reinforce my preconceptions of the state and its people, and that there is more than ample evidence for that. Having strong preconceptions means that the instances and incidents reinforcing them are more easily recognized, but we have been trying to travel with an
open and inquiring mind as much as possible and to be available to any and all possibilities throughout our journey. Here in Texas, however, my brief and superficial contact with the people as well as the advertising on billboards and in local magazines and newspapers reinforces rather and make me re-evaluate these preconceptions. As a kid growing up in the northeast, Texas was more a foreign country than Canada. I always hated the sports teams from Texas; they were the enemy! – much the same way that in England there is an ‘Anybody But United’ feeling among soccer fans.)
Not to mention at all the fact that this state gave the world TWO George Bush’s – enough said about that!
For the most part, however, we enjoyed our drive through this vast state: the scenery is stunning if only for its immenseness. We drove for hours and sometimes we’d see only fields and then a dirt road turn-off with an overhanging sign saying something like ‘Bar L Ranch’ but we couldn’t see a ranch house and usually not even any cattle, just acres and acres of wheat or grassland or cotton and later a few oil pumps and
power-generating windmills in the distance.
Although vast and immense, Texas does eventually end and we drove into Louisiana with a different set of hopes and expectations!
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