I find myself in Houston for longer than what I expected. I arrived 5 weeks ago, to keep my sister company while she received treatments for a Lymphoblactic Lymphoma. My original plan was to remain in Texas for a month, and here I am, 5 weeks later and without any specific day booked for my return home. With all the comes and goes of chemotherapy sessions, blood tests, other medial procedures and so, I've been fairly busy until the past weekend, when my neice arrived to visit her mother. On having to show the lovely young one around and not being familiar with Houston, I of course ran to the laptop and googled "Houston". I started with general information about the city. And the first thing I came across was a description of transportation. "Public transportation: Have a car. That's all I'll say about that."
Amen! is what I uttered, on agreeing wholeheartedly. Public transportation are just two words that might as well belong to a foreign language when it comes to go from one place to another in Houston, a city with some ineffable sprawl: it is spread out like nothing else imaginable, I swear! I thought I had been to several places where traffic was bad; however, the worst traffic that I have EVER seen is in Houston. Not even the crazy traffic of Guayaquil holds a candle to the traffic nightmares of Houston, where exits aren't clearl marked, or are located exactly to the opposite side of where they announced them 1 mile ago, forcing people to change five lanes to get to where they need to go because you are given little to no notice about the upcoming exit. I do thank the goddesses from the bottom of my heart because the black Mercedes I have been driving for the past 5 weeks remains intact in spite of the number of hours I spend in the packed highway, on daily basis.
My next search brought me the weather information. "Houston, Texas is full of excitement and surprises and unpredictable rainstorms. If you live in Houston, Texas, you can't be surprised at flooding in the city."
Well yeah, thanks for having told me in advance (not!). The past week, we had two days in which it simply poured and poured to no end. Interstate 10 was closed in various periods of times, traffic was interrupted by crashes due to the rains, a lightning stroke a house in the neighborhood destroying the roof and we had enough water as for people to take out their boats to try to cross the intersections under the freeway. If that is what they meant by surprises, then yes! they are right! Houston is full of surprises!
Then, I stumbled onto this article on culobrids; here the quote that caught my attention. "The majority of snakes are harmless. However, all snakes will bite. The snakes come out a lot after heavy rainstorms. (...) Snake bites, in general, last longer than raindrops, and the spaces between snake bites are generally longer than the spaces between raindrops"
Why thanks! it sure made me feel good to find out I had also gotten my dose of the above promised Houston excitement, when we found two snakes coiling outside at the backyard, after the last severe rainstorm! I was not game for finding out about how lingering snake bites might be and worse to go into a double blind survey on the width between two raindrops versus that of the separation between two snake fangs, thank you! The picture above shows the place where the texan snakes were found, right outside of the my sister's bedroom window, which I now found to be too close to the grass of the backyard!
It is not that I am complaining, no. Not at all. There is a lot of fun things to do in Houston. The Kennedy Space Center is definitely something to check out if you are visiting. In the pic illustrating this blog, my sister (with the scarf) and her daughter during our visit to the Space Center. The Richmond strip is loaded with clubs and bars to check out, all of them with long happy hours! Houston is also a shopping paradise. The Galleria, Katy Mills, Memorial City Mall among many others, are shopping centers that are beautiful and wonderful to check out.
Houston does have a ton of restaurants to check out as well. And it has numerous museums to check out too! I have heard that the Houston Rodeo is awesome and probably one of the best in the country.
But above all, Houston has given me a sense of having been of help to my beloved sister. That alone, makes up for all the above mentioned little inconveniences and makes of Houston a city I shall always remember.
~ March 19, 2007 ~
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