Advertisement
Published: April 26th 2015
Edit Blog Post
Rodeo
Lawrence with a super massive corn dog! Hi everyone!
Sorry for being so slow with this, now I've needed to start prioritising what I do and I've completely forgotten to update this!
So lets start from the very beginning, it's a very good place to start!
A couple of weekends after my last blog post my friend Lawrence came to visit. I did Biochemistry with him a Warwick, and he's now doing a Post-Doc in Pittsburgh. The rodeo was still on - so we took a visit and bought tickets. I still haven't decided whether I liked it or not. Again the atmosphere was great, but the rodeo itself.. I'm not sure. I quite enjoyed the bits with the cowboys on horseback rounding up the cows. However, I felt really uncomfortable watching the bucking horses and bucking bulls. It just seemed so unnatural, like the horses/bulls were in so much pain. I just felt a little uncomfortable watching it. Lawrence felt the same, so we didn't really stay for the whole thing. We found a queue and being British we had to join it - turns out people were getting their photos taken with real-life cowboys. So
naturally I did. Even though most other people doing it were under the age of 12. Never mind!!
I'm not sure if I've mentioned it before, but everyone here drives MASSIVE cars. Or trucks. Joe (my flatmate) has a truck. it's ridiculous, I have to pull myself up to get into it! That day at the rodeo there was a display of new Ford truck models. Most required steps to get into!! And everyone loved it. I still haven't quite figured out why you'd need a massive truck in the middle of a city, but there you go.
Later that weekend we went for a trip to Galveston, which is a small beach town near to Houston. It was so nice to get away from the city!! It was great to just chill out and enjoy the weather. It very much reminded me of an English beach resort - all that it was lacking was donkeys!!
I haven't yet managed to get to a Baseball or Basketball game (and American football hasn't started yet), but I've managed to see the Houston Dynamos - the local
football team in the MLS. Naturally, I took my Town scarf. The entire thing was so American - the teams came out and a woman, who was apparently famous, sang the National Anthem, which as you can imagine went down well in Texas. Then some, again apparently famous, bloke took the "first kick" where he basically had to take a penalty into an open goal to start the game. Naturally he missed! Pretty much set the tone for the game, which was awful - 0-0, and no-one looked like scoring... And the Dynamos fans had one chant. One! Pathetic! .. At half time the tannoys started playing the song "deep in the heart of Texas".. Now if I thought people had been enthusiastic for the National Anthem, that was NOTHING to this! Texans love Texas, so so so much.
The next weekend I went to Hermann Park - a big park very close to where I live. It has the Museum of Natural Science there as well as Houston Zoo, a massive lake a golf course and train and all sorts. It's really nice. I just went as something to do and it turns out
the "Houston Kite Festival" was on. It was great! Music, food and just thousands upon thousands of kites! The sky was just full of them, it looked fantastic!
So Joe has been promising to show me Texas-y things, if I show him British-y things (which is pretty limited in the US). So the weekend before I went to see my family in Florida I cooked Joe a mini Sunday dinner - which was basically chicken and Yorkshire puddings. In response - Joe cooked me steak. You have never seen such big steaks in your life. They were MASSIVE - and required 3 meals for me to eat it all. Really good though. Mum and Dad say they're looking forward to getting one when they come to visit in June!
So then that brings us to Florida. I took a flight on the Wednesday night from Houston to Orlando. My taxi driver was a pretty old exceedingly right-wing Obama hating Bush loving man, lecturing me on how much he hates Obama. And how I must be so angry at how communist Europe has become. Needless to say, the 45 minute journey seemed to take 5
hours. The trip from the airport to Planet Hollywood was taken up by Ciaran telling me all about his holiday so far - sounded like he had a rubbish time. I could barely get a word in!
The first day of my visit we went to Islands of Adventure - also known as Harry Potter world with some other stuff. I was great! I was in my Hermione T-shirt that Laura bought me for Xmas, Ciaran in his Harry Potter dress up stuff that he had for world book day. He looked fab! Naturally, first stop was the Harry Potter bit of the park, Hogsmeade and Hogwarts looked amazing! It was brilliant. I sat next to Ciaran on "Flight of the Hippogriff" which he seemed to hate at the time but went on again later so mustn't have been too bad! Laura, Ciaran and I also went to Ollivanders to get Ciaran a wand which was pretty great - if you use it at certain parts of Hogsmeade it actually makes stuff move! The big Harry Potter ride was really good too - though I don't think any ride compares to Spiderman (who, just so you know
Mum and Dad, definitely spoke to me). We unfortunately had to also do the rest of the park too so left Harry Potter world and did all sorts of water rides (we got soaked on Popeye as usual!), and iaran was super-brave going on the Jurassic Park ride! After Spiderman spoke to me, Uncle Adam and I went on the Hulk ride, which I didn't nearly die on this time (long story involving my seatbelt coming undone). After going on the Dr. Suess rides we went home via the Hogwarts express, which was AWESOME! I loved it!!
The Friday we went ton an air-boat ride and we saw a load of alligators which was great! One was mahooosive... But Saturday we went to Busch Gardens in Tampa, which Ciaran enjoyed due to all the free chocolate cake he got all day! We all managed to get nicely wet again on the water rides as well as being on the bridge for Tidal Wave to get a thoroughly good soaking. Adam and I went on the big rides in the afternoon while everyone else saw the Madagascar show. I didn't need to see the show - I'd gotten
a kiss off King Julian earlier. Woo!
My last day was the Sunday, which was brilliant. We went to a new water park "Aquatica" and I spent the day with Ciaran going on every ride, which was fab. We had a really good last day together. He was super brave - went on a really fast ride in the dark that he was really scared about going on - and he did it twice! Did a good job! I flew back really early Monday morning which wasn't pleasant!
There isn't a lot else to report since! I've had issues with Social Security and banks, but they're all solved now thank goodness!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.072s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 8; qc: 52; dbt: 0.0403s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb