Hello from Houston

[jethrien]

I'm in Houston for a conference.

I do not like Houston, I find.

Downtown is an office park in sky-scrapers. There's basically nothing at ground level. The few restaurants and bars? Closed on Sundays. The visitor center is closed on Sundays. There is nothing here. I went for a 45 minute walk, in which the only open place I found was a CVS and I saw maybe 30 people. Three quarters of which were homeless, and may have had fewer teeth combined than I have in total. I guess everyone lives in the suburbs and just drives in during the week, but this isn't a city. An abandoned handful of skyscrapers doesn't count. No one lives here. I ended up calling Chuckro in a vague existential crisis. Gah.

On the other hand, I had the very best ribs I've ever had in my life. I will defend to the death any Texan's claim that they do the best barbeque. Good lord, these people know their way around a smoker.

Comments

[firynze.livejournal.com]

And yet I've heard Houston trumpeted from the mountains as an AWESOME place for engaged, hip young people to go do startups and engage with the arts and whatnot.

Weird.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

I think it's just such a different style of city living that I don't quite know how to engage with it. There are definitely a ton of museums and theaters. It's just you need to completely set aside the notion of a walkable city. If you want to do something, you will get in a car. If you want to do something else now, you will get back in the car. Nothing's connected. So if you don't know the area, it's wasteland because you don't know where to go for the pockets of interesting things. There's just no street culture at all.

[firynze.livejournal.com]

That sounds a lot like LA, where EVERYTHING is a half-hour drive away. Totally different mentality than East Coast cities