Houston
is a weird city for tourists like us. It is the fourth largest city in the USA yet we could not find a
tourist information booth or shop on any map or walking about. There is no red site-seeing double-decker bus trawling round like in every other cities we’ve been to. No
one is on street corners offering discount vouchers to visit their
shop/event/service. In fact, no one is on a street corner at all.
Today we took the tram into the city but there were hardly any people, on the tram or on the streets. There seemed to be no shops really either. It is nothing like New York or even Sydney or heaven forbid Canberra. No bustle, no feeling, no culture, no nothing. So that's why all our pictures were taken at the park. It was the only thing worth photographing.
Back at the hotel I did some reading and it appears that the city has more than six 'centres'. The 'centre' we were trying to visit today has a system of tunnels and linked buildings which allow citizens to navigate and shop without getting too hot or wet. We did not find these, so our experience was that it is a really dead city, reminding me of Zurich on the Swiss National day, but without the public holiday. Even on other outings to other city centres we felt the lack of people on the streets. There is infrastructure just no people......
The area we are staying in is pretty much a whole suburb dedicated to a hospital. Consequently many of the guests at the hotel are recovering from some sort of surgery, here as outpatients or seeing sick relatives. There is not even a booth or board of pamphlets showing tourist attractions. The free shuttle from here takes you, not to the airport or to a central destination, but round the many hospital buildings towering over the area.
Apparently they have only just started running the light rail and it is still being built. So people have a complex network of buses to get round, but, in our experience, these don’t seem to be heavily used. There is also no one round to tell you how to catch it, few maps up to tell you how to navigate the system.... It seems that people use cars. Apparently each business/operation legally has to provide car parking spaces for users/employees. The roads are full and there are loads of intersections which remind me of spaghetti with layers of three or four roads high.
Today we took the tram into the city but there were hardly any people, on the tram or on the streets. There seemed to be no shops really either. It is nothing like New York or even Sydney or heaven forbid Canberra. No bustle, no feeling, no culture, no nothing. So that's why all our pictures were taken at the park. It was the only thing worth photographing.
Back at the hotel I did some reading and it appears that the city has more than six 'centres'. The 'centre' we were trying to visit today has a system of tunnels and linked buildings which allow citizens to navigate and shop without getting too hot or wet. We did not find these, so our experience was that it is a really dead city, reminding me of Zurich on the Swiss National day, but without the public holiday. Even on other outings to other city centres we felt the lack of people on the streets. There is infrastructure just no people......
The area we are staying in is pretty much a whole suburb dedicated to a hospital. Consequently many of the guests at the hotel are recovering from some sort of surgery, here as outpatients or seeing sick relatives. There is not even a booth or board of pamphlets showing tourist attractions. The free shuttle from here takes you, not to the airport or to a central destination, but round the many hospital buildings towering over the area.
Apparently they have only just started running the light rail and it is still being built. So people have a complex network of buses to get round, but, in our experience, these don’t seem to be heavily used. There is also no one round to tell you how to catch it, few maps up to tell you how to navigate the system.... It seems that people use cars. Apparently each business/operation legally has to provide car parking spaces for users/employees. The roads are full and there are loads of intersections which remind me of spaghetti with layers of three or four roads high.
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