I went to Melbourne for a shopping trip this weekend.  My sister overflowed her suitcase, but I only got a few pairs of shoes and a few tops.  Shopping isn’t really my thing.  Next time I go to Melbourne, I’ll spend a bit more time sightseeing.  Still, it was the first holiday/break I’ve had in several years, so it was good.

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This post wraps up my series on American culture.  I have already dealt with American food, shopping, and TV.  This post is mostly concerned with roads and driving.

One of the worst parts of the Auckland motorway system is Spaghetti Junction, and the worst feature of Spaghetti Junction is the Newmarket on/off ramps.  Southbound, traffic comes on at Kyhber Pass to find itself in an exit only lane that exits at Gillies Ave.  This traffic has to change lanes to get into a lane that continues south, meanwhile all the traffic on the motorway that wants to exit at Gillies has to change lanes to get into the exit only lane.    The same thing happens northbound as well.   This is one of the biggest bottlenecks in Auckland.

Intersections like Greenland and Ellerslie-Penrose are much better because all the exiting traffic leaves, thinning out the flow of cars before the entering traffic merges in to take their place.

A long time ago I read a letter to the editor in the Herald stating that the reason the Khyber Pass/Gillies intersections were so bad was that they were designed by Americans who thought we drove on the right-hand side of the road.   However, a moment of mental spatial manipulation should reveal that even if we did drive on the other side, these would still be badly designed.  So it wasn’t that the American’s didn’t know what side of the road we drive on.

Nope, it was that the Americans (or Californians at least) think this is good freeway design!   The freeway system in LA reminded me very very much of Auckland and the Newmarket section in particular.   Pretty much all onramps come into an Exit Only lane, often a fairly short one, making everyone rush to quickly switch lanes.  It’s a bit worse in LA because Americans do not seem to understand the principle of merging like a zip.  Nobody lets anybody in, ever.

Apart from the wrong side of the road thing, LA freeways were very much like our motorways.  The signage is the same.   The architecture (using the term loosely) of the freeways, overpasses, on and off ramps in LA also seems the same as here.   It would not surprise me in the least if we originally based all our motorway designs on California.

By contrast, Texas freeways are somehow much more attractive.  Part of the aesthetic value could be because they bother to paint the concrete rather than leaving it bare.  But there is something about the very form of their structures that is aesthetically pleasing in and of itself.  Perhaps they are better proportioned, I don’t know.  But they are certainly much more attractive.

Not only are they more attractive, but they are way more functional.   Every freeway has frontage roads – ordinary two lane roads that run parallel tothe freeway on each side.   Every few miles there is a set of on and off ramps, coupled with either a bridge over the freeway, or a tunnel under it.  At any point you can easily get off the freeway and access any of the businesses on either side of the freeway, and easily get back on again.   They are also very forgiving if you make a wrong turn, offering U-turn lanes so you can go back if you made a mistake.    And if you miss your exit, you can just take the next one and backtrack on the frontage road.

The architecture of American fast food restaurants also makes perfect sense in this context.  Distinctive building with huge sign up a pole so you can easily spot it from the freeway (in either direction).  Building is freestanding with lots of parking all around it, because space is just not an issue like it is in the much more densely populated areas.  Plus there’s a drive-thru if you are in a hurry.

I’ve also reconsidered my opinion of things like rubbish bins angled so you can use them from a car, or drive-though ATMs.  The initial opinion of most people from NZ to these things is to decry how hideously lazy Americans must be if they can’t even get out of their car for that.

But the thing you have to remember with America (and Texas in particular) is that it is huge.   We inherited an architecture based on density from our British heritage, who were accustomed to trying to squeeze as much as they could into London.  We consider the appropriate means of transport to be walking.   We use cars to travel longer distances to put ourselves in another area to traverse on foot.

It doesn’t work like that in Texas.  They have heaps of space.  Distances are huge and everything is much more spread out than it is here.  To get anything done, you have to go and do it by car – there is no other way.   A car is not a luxury, it is a necessity.  Their entire landscape pretty much co-evolved with their cars.     Because of the distances involved, people spend a lot of time in their car.  Given that this is the case, things like drive thru food, ATMs and rubbish bins are are simply trying to be efficient.   It isn’t being lazy and wasteful, it’s good usability.  Texas is optimised for driving.

Another example of this is all the rest areas.  In NZ, this means an area with a few picnic tables and maybe a grotty long drop.   In the US, it’s got picnic tables and toilets, but also vending machines and wireless internet. 

To me, America seems both progressive and curiously backwards.  They bleep the god out of goddamned on TV, but they provide free wireless internet in roadside rest stops in the middle of nowhere.

This post continues my series on American culture.  I have already dealt with American food and shopping, and this post is about TV.  I have a few random observations mostly concerning driving still to come.

American TV was an experience in its own right.  To my thinking, American TV is the source of ‘western culture’ typified by sleaze, sex and swearing.  I’m pretty sure most of my swearing vocabulary came from American TV and movies .  And so it was a shock to find American TV is extremely prudish.   They don’t just bleep out fuck and cunt, but they bleep shit & bloody hell and they bleep the god out of goddamn.  And this is not just on TV, but in songs on the radio as well.

Another notable feature of American TV is the number of channels.  Most of the hotels we stayed at had upwards of 50 channels.  Probably about 15-20 of them were in Spanish.  However, of the 30-35 channels remaining, they probably only have programming enough for 10.   And so almost all American TV is re-runs.  

Here, a re-run means that the channel has already showed the entire series (one program per night or week over some extended period) and is now repeating the entire thing a second time.  Sometimes a really popular series might be repeated even more times.  I think MASH was repeated at least 8 time.

In the US, a re-run means that the exact same episode is shown multiple times on the same channel.  Not just multiple times per week, multiple times per night!  On the same channel!   So you watch an episode of CSI at 8pm.  The very same episode will probably be on again at 11pm.  And 3am.   And 12pm the following day.  And 4pm.  And 7pm. And so on.

While we were in Vegas and LA, ESPN showed the 2006 final of the World Series of Poker at least eight times in six days that we saw.  And we only watched TV when we weren’t out at Disneyland or down in San Diego or otherwise checking out southern California.

Apart from that I also discovered that the discovery channel wasn’t quite as cool as I’d always thought.  I’d always thought you got truth on the discovery channel, but at various times I flicked on to it to see programs about a haunted house, the imminent end of the world according to various half-baked prophesies, UFO visits, and the "groundbreaking and extraordinary new theory" that the dinosaurs were wiped out because of a meteorite impact.  Yawn.

It wasn’t just the subject matter of the discovery channel shows was fairly bad, it was how they packaged it too.  They would literally repeat the same things over and over again within each show, then repeat the whole show several hours later.   Their only redeeming feature in my eyes was that they show Mythbusters …. six times a day.

This post continues my series on American culture.  I have already dealt with American food, this post is on shopping, and TV is still to come.

This was the part of American culture that I didn’t experience quite so much of.  Walmart was my first taste.  You can almost literally buy anything at Walmart.   Where else could you go in and come out with ALL the following items:

• An apple
• Dried pasta
• Shampoo
• A pair of jeans
• A 12 gauge shotgun
• A cordless drill
• Enough paint to paint your house
• A television
• A tyre

It was also very cool to walk around the malls and see shops that I’ve heard of on so many TV programs and on websites, even if I didn’t really do much (or any) shopping in them.

Now, I know this isn’t shopping exactly, but everywhere we went, we saw ads for lawyers saying things like this:  
"Serious injury accident?  You need a lawyer."  "Poisoned by benzene?  We’ll get you a cash settlement".    Every time I saw something like that I’d mentally scream ‘no, you don’t need a lawyer, you need a goddamn doctor’.

Steve has already posted a trip log covering Houston, San Antonio, Fort Worth and Las Vegas, so I won’t duplicate his effort here.  Instead, I just want to jot down some random observations and thoughts about American culture.   To me, American culture seems to have about three major components: food, shopping & TV.  This post will cover the food.

Firstly, restaurant portions really are huge.   I don’t think there was one single meal that I was able to finish in the whole time I was there.  And we pretty much only ever ordered just the main course.  We seldom had a starter, and never the soup, salad and dessert that the waiters constantly urged on us.   It seems pretty much standard to ask for a doggy bag, although when we were staying at a hotel we didn’t usually have that option since we had no way to reheat the meals. 

Every restaurant started with a free bread basket, unlike here where you usually have to order a bread platter separately if you want one.   Also, if you order a soft drink, they will come around and refill it for you for free.  And it’s generally a pretty large glass to start with.  This is quite a contrast to here where you pay $4 per refill of a 250ml glass.  Overall, you get excellent value food in the US. 

On my first night there, we cruised around Walmart giggling at the odd food items.

• Cheese whiz?   I can’t even stand the plastic cheese you get in slices at the supermarket here, never mind cheese sprayed from a can.
• Cookies.  Those poor Americans don’t have anything akin to toffee pops, timtams or real biscuits.  Instead, their cookies are more like our Farmbake biscuits except that they are chewy.  Apparently Americans like their bikkies chewy for some reason.
• Sticks of butter.  I was always a bit baffled by recipes that called for a stick of butter.  Apparently they buy their butter in 500g blocks that look the same as ours, but internally are divided lengthwise into four sticks.
• Sweet bread.  Stephen warned me of this but I didn’t actually experience it until later.  American bread is very very sweet.  Here, even the bread in chocolate chip easter buns isn’t anywhere near as sweet as ordinary American bread.  It was always a relief if a restaurant had fancy non-sweet bread in their bread basket.
• Sausage wrapped in chocolate chip pancakes on a stick.  I was disgusted and horrified by this.   Here we have hot dogs on a stick, but the sausage is enclosed in batter.  Savoury batter.  Not sweet chocolate chip pancakes.  It’s just so wrong.  (However, having subsequently eaten American bread and corn dogs, it probably isn’t such a big deal to Americans.  The corn dog batter is far sweeter than any batter you’d ever get here)

The food isn’t the only strange part – the drinks were also an experience.  Firstly, tea.  Every restaurant and fast food place has tea as one of the options for cold drinks.  I suspect if you asked for hot tea you’d get some very funny looks, because they only kind of tea they seem to know about is iced tea.   I always thought it was a little strange that my Spanish books (designed for the American market) gave you instructions on how to order tea with or without lemon.  I always wondered why they didn’t tell you how to ask for tea with milk and sugar, but now I know.

As far as coffee goes, the standard addition to an ordinary filter coffee here is milk and sugar.  Not so in the US.  Instead of milk, you have a choice of "cream" (actually half-and-half – half milk and half cream) or creamer (non-dairy white stuff made from god-knows-what).  Instead of sugar, you have packets.  Every table has an assortment of colour-coded packets.  White is for sugar, pink for Sweet n Low, blue for Equal and yellow for Splenda.  Some Americans seem not to even know what each type of packet actually is - they just know they like "two pinks and a blue".

Anyone who’s tried Starbucks knows that Americans like their coffee very burnt.  That’s what the coffee was like everywhere we went.  In fact we eventually found Starbucks to be actually fairly palatable as American coffee goes.    And we found that Starbucks sells a fantastic bottled iced coffee.  It is far nicer than anything you can get Starbucks to make for you.    Still, I’m glad I’m back in New Zealand where I can go to Esquires.

Pretty much everywhere we went we had great food, but the highlight for me was the BBQ Baby Back Ribs from Saltgrass.   You must try this if you ever go to Texas.

This page lists and links to my favourite photos from my US trip.  These don’t necessarily correspond to the places I enjoyed the most.

In rough chronological order, here they are:

Kemah Boardwalk at night.  This boardwalk area on Galveston Bay had rides and attractions and beautiful themed shops, as well as many lovely restaurants.  This is a photo of Pappadeaux Seafood Restaurant across the water.

San Jacinto monument.  This monument to Texas independence is the tallest monument tower in the world, larger than the Washington monument.   There is a museum inside the base, and you can take an elevator to a viewing deck at the top of the tower.

San Jacinto monument (other side).  This angle shows more detail of the monument, including the 220 ton lone star on top.  It marks the site of Sam Houston’s successful battle against Mexico that resulted in Texas independence.

Battleship USS Texas.  The worlds oldest remaining dreadnought, Texas was commissioned in 1914 and served in World War II (earning five battle stars) before being decommissioned in 1948.  It is actually in the water (of course), but from this angle throught the trees, it looks like it’s in the middle of dry land.

San Antonio Riverwalk by day.  The San Antonio river winds through the centre of the city one level below ground, and the Riverwalk (Paseo del Rio) is a network of walkways and bridges that follows the river through the centre loop.  The riverwalk links all the major tourist destinations in the centre of San Antonio, as well as being a destination in its own right.

San Antonio Riverwalk by night.  At christmas time, the trees above the riverwalk are strung with hundreds of thousands of coloured lights.  This is from almost the same angle as the daytime shot above.  You can see a boat under the trees.  This is either a tour boat, which does a half hour guided tour of the whole riverwalk, or a water taxi which you can take directly from one point on the Riverwalk to another.

Mission San Jose.  This is one of the line of five missions stretching south of San Antonio (of which the Alamo is the northern-most).  Being south of the city itself, Mission San Jose still has the entire mission compound intact.  This photo is taken throught the window of what probably would have been servant’s quarters, looking across the grape arbor and up at the church itself.

Grand Canyon.  No photo can capture the true immense scale of the grand canyon, but this one with one of the lookout points in the foreground does give some sense of perspective.

Red Rock Canyon.  This shot shows the rocks of Red Rock Canyon in the background, with a Joshua tree and high desert landscape in the foreground. 

Red Rock Canyon.   Another shot of the red rocks from higher up inside the canyon, with Steve displaying his tendency to stand directly in front of me when I’m taking photos.  This was taken later in the day with the last rays of sunlight lighting up the red rocks.

Sunset at San Diego.  The first sunset I’ve seen over the Pacific ocean.   We were driving through Coronado and quickly detoured to the beach to watch this beautiful sunset.

Sunset at Santa Monica.  We sat on the end of the Santa Monica pier and watched the sun go down.  It was a beautiful clear cold day and produced a specacular fiery sunset. 

Here’s some of the highlights of my trip:

Johnson Space Centre, Houston, Texas.  This is mission control, and you can take a tour and see the room from which they controlled the Apollo moon missions.   Normally you can also see the current control room, but there was a shuttle mission in progress when we were there, so we could only see it via TV rather than live.

East Beach, Galveston, Texas.  Beautiful beaches is not usually something that springs to mind when you think of Texas, but Galveston is a lovely barrier island in the Mexican Gulf with some gorgeous beaches.

Riverwalk, San Antonio, Texas.  If you ever get the chance to go to San Antonio, take it. The riverwalk runs in a rough circle around the centre of the city, below street level, and the river is shaded by trees, and bordered by lovely walkways that are flanked by restaurants, bars and cafes. San Antonio is also a great base to explore the old Spanish missions in the area.

Stockyards, Fort Worth, Texas.  For a taste of the rural life and a glimpse of the old west, the Fort Worth Stockyards are the place to go. They are a working stockyard, with frequent rodeos, plus a cattle drive through the streets every day. Sure, that’s not really "authentic", but when else do you even get to see longhorn steers these days?. Throw in country music at a beer garden, and the biggest honky tonk in the world and it’s a real experience.

Grand Canyon, Arizona.  You truly have to see this for yourself. No photo can come anywhere close to conveying how absolutely staggeringly immense and beautiful this place is. Created in one single flood 4,000 years ago my fucking ass. Somehow you can just feel how old this place is.

Las Vegas, Nevada.  I love Las Vegas. What could be better than a city entirely devoted to enjoyment? You don’t need to gamble, there’s much more to these hotels than the casino floor. There’s enough attractions, shows, exhibits, shops and restaurants to keep you busy for a year.

I’m baaaack!  Actually I’ve been back for a couple of weeks now but things have been so incredibly busy that I haven’t had a chance to post.

To make sure I get back and start posting again, I’m going to commit to these posts over the next few weeks:

• Trip details and photos
• Household security (why do I have so many pairs of earrings?)
• People I dream about
• Random thoughts about the US
• My favourite poem
• The End of Faith book review
• Climbing Mount Improbable book review

Well, I’m off to Texas for a few weeks.

Back in the days of the wild American west, "Gone To Texas" was slang to say that someone that gone west (often not even to Texas itself) and was never heard from again.  Official records would have G.T.T. next to a person’s name and that was usually the last official record of them in the States. 

Although I probably won’t post anything until I get back, I fully intend on returning to civilization, and when I do I promise to have plenty of pictures.

Merry Christmas y’all. 

My trip to Texas is all booked.   I leave here on the 9th of December at 9pm and arrive in Dallas three hours before that

Booking the flights was a little bit tricky.  I had hoped to use my Airpoints, since I was under the impression that the new Air New Zealand Airpoints Dollars scheme allows you to buy tickets with a combination of Airpoints Dollars and real dollars.  The site wouldn’t let me.  I initially though it was because my trip wasn’t a standard return but was a multi-city trip.  I spent hours fiddling around with itineraries but couldn’t get it to work. 

I eventually discovered that I was sadly mistaken about the Airpoints – you need enough Airpoints dollars to pay for the entire ticket and you can’t combine it with real dollars.  Good thing I finally stumbled on that gem of information buried in the help pages, because if you have to phone them to book for you rather than booking online, they charge you at least $50 per leg.

The tickets that I bought from the AirNZ website eventually cost me less than I was quoted by all the travel agents except Flight Centre.  Flight Centre’s deals were $4 cheaper, but I would have a 9 hour stopover in Tahiti each way.   I’m willing to pay $4 to avoid that length of stopover. 

I can see why many people would pay the fee to have the agent book everything though – it is a bit nerve-wracking to enter your credit card details and charge up over $2k of non-refundable tickets.  At least if the travel agent cocks up rather than you, you probably won’t be out of pocket.

So, my itinerary is as follows: 

The first 9 days we will spend checking out various parts of Texas (not too much though, Texas is biiiig).  Then we’ll spend 8 days in Las Vegas, staying in the pyramid at the Luxor.  I’ll be sleeping in a pyramid! YAY!  (Ahem, ok, sorry, I’m over it now)

My must-see attraction in Vegas is Penn & Teller, which is where we’ll be spending the evening on Christmas day.   I’d also like to see David Copperfield and either the Chippendales or Australia’s Thunder from Down Under.

After Vegas, it’s off for 6 days in LA, staying right outside the gates of Disneyland.  I plan on heading down to San Diego to visit SeaWorld, as well as checking out various places that I’ve heard about on TV, like Venice Beach, Rodeo drive and so on.

New Years won’t be a huge drunken party, because I have to fly out on the 1st in order to be home on the 3rd to start teaching summer school on the 4th.  Maybe.  If I still have a job.