Ev Star

I’m back on the road again!

This time, i’m in Texas…it’s pretty exciting to be here!

I’m staying with a friend of mine–his name is Carlos and he came on exchange to my highschool when we were in grade 11–we’ve stayed in touch since then, Carlos came up to Vacouver for a visit this past october & then now invited me to come down to check out Houston and then to drive down to Monterrey, Mexico!

Anyway, eventhough I just arrived yesterday evening…we’ve done a lot already!

Carlos picked me up at the airport which was very kind of him.  After dropping off my bags at his place we headed out to the museum of fine arts to see an exhibit on Latin American artists.  It was very interesting…a lot of exhibtits of things that would never cross my mind as ways of making art.  There was one display where, from up close it looked like several images made of sugar cubes coloured a variety of shades of brown (sugar cubes were tinted with coffee)…sort of random…but when you walked back you could see that each image was actually the face of a person who was murdered.  the piece was created by a columbian artist and was touching on political violence.

Another piece was in its own room or was really composed of a series of rooms.  Each room was lit up by a single colour. There was yellow/green, orange/red and blue/purple.  You would walk from one room to the next, each room saturated in its own colour.  It was very interesting to see the effect and the change of your perception of the colours when you moved from room to room.  The colours would seem either way more intense or way paler depending on what room you had been in before.  Also, because of the way the rooms were arranged, there was one sort of corridor wall where you could see a complete progression of the colours.

After our visit at the museum, we went to meet a few of Carlos’ friends for dinner.  I met Juan, he is a doctor and is doing an internship at the medical centre here in Houston, Hector, he works with computers–some sort of programming that generates the prices for airplane tickets and Betty, she is also a chemical engineer and works with Carlos at Worley Parsons.  After dinner we went to a bar where there was an 80s cover band playing.  It was a lot of fun!

Today we did a couple of errands, then we went to check out a holocaust museum.  Interesting to see was outside the museum there was a large old boat which had been used to help jewish people get from Denmark to Sweden.    After that we met up with some other friends of Carlos for lunch.  We had Monika, also from Monterrey, Helmut from Austria and James who is originally from Jersey.  They are all financial consultants at Ernst & Young.  To get lunch, we first met up with the friends inside of their office building, we then travelled up to the 3rd floor and then all the way down to what is called “the tunnels”.  It is essentially an underground food court/mall –more restaurants than anything else–that networks all the way underneath the downtown core of Houston.  It is only open on weekdays and only from mid-morning until mid afternoon as it is designed to cater to the business people working in the office buildings above.  I am surprised that all those franchises can be successful with such short hours, but apparently at peak lunchtime the whole tunnle network gets packed with people, so I guess it must work out.

After that we went for a bit of a walk in downtown.  It is SO hot and humid here…we ended up running through a water park we happened to come across which was pretty fun.  After that we drove out to a GIANT shopping mall –everything really is bigger in Texas!  It was called the Galleria and it had a lot of very up-scale shops in it.

We then came back to the apartment & watched Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind.  Well actually Carlos left about half way through because he is seeing the band Incubus tonight.   Currently I am preparing to do a bit of reading

Hopefully there will be another update soon!  On tomorrow’s agenda:  Trip to Austin!

xoEv