Texas - Bubbas and Pick-up Trucks

In Texas we stayed with my husband’s sister and her husband. They have a very nice house in a place called the Woodlands. The Woodlands is a quite beautiful place, lush trees line every street so that you feel like you are driving down a lonely country road no matter which avenue it is. It’s the dumbest idea ever.

You can never find what you are looking for because every street looks the same, plus the trees are hiding EVERY building! To continue with this Eco-friendly trend, businesses in the Woodlands area are not allowed to mar the landscape with gaudy, in-your-face signs. The signs are discreetly placed among the foliage. Oh-my-god, the ideas just kept getting better and better.

But despite all that, it’s a very pleasing to the eye so I guess they achieved their objective. Perhaps we are so in tuned with the billboards and the flashing lights that quite nature can no longer please us, I don't know.

For us, Texas was all about the shopping, we had a lot of stuff to buy for our 2 year stint in Nigeria. My sister-in-Law was really great, she took us everywhere and helped us to make sensible decisions. If it were left to me I would have just shopped at Barnes & Noble and Borders! In fact we finally did get to go there (it was not a priority) and Lisa said to me, you are the first person I've every seen using a shopping cart in a bookstore. Well we all have the things that are important to us.

My husband's Sister is a very neat person. Oh boy did we have fun there. We were cleaner than we ever have been. We are not untidy people, but we are not the tidiest either, we have a comfortable degree of living-in-ness, lol. But surprisingly she did pretty OK with us, she had her rules and it was only fair. She is a generous person with a big heart, (She even called around at hair salons and asked if they did hair locking. They though she was speaking a foreign language but it was a very thoughtful thing to do) So I did great for In-laws!

I got stared at a lot in Texas. I think I was the only black person in the Woodlands. My husband said to me, now you know how I felt in Barbados. He doesn't know what he's talking about, there are tons of white people in Barbados, why if you go to a car rally you'll see them all!

The few black people I saw nodded to me as if to say "struggle on sista!" I think some of them when the saw I was with my husband gave me a look that said "what the hell are you doing?! Can't you see they already out number us??(or something like that)"

We went to a place called a Mongolian grill, it's a cool idea. You get a bowl and select all the things you want and they stir-fry right there for you. So each customer has a unique dish. You can mix seafood with red meats or you could just have vegetarian stuff. But you know what I found, I found out where all the most overweight people in America are. They are at the Mongolian grill, with bowls piled sky-high. And boy did they stare at me. I thought it was funny. They were more of a spectacle that I.

We also went to an restaurant called Cracker Barrel. Man that was deep Texas country. There all kinds of pick-up trucks outside. The building was done in an old style with a huge veranda (porch for Americans) and lots of white rocking chairs outside. We went to get a table and discovered that it was jam packed inside. It was about 10:30 in the morning, don't these people work? We had to wait until a table was free. We finally got seated and I saw the crowd and smiled to myself. It was as typical as I expected Texans to be, there were cowboys, without the hats, granddaddy types with huge stomachs and suspenders and guys who's names could only be Bubba!. And the menu! I just knew that I had to have grits! It's exactly as the name describes, a gritty cereal. There were also biscuits and gravy (the gravy looked like white cement, I did not have any).

Texas was far quieter than I thought it would be, I guess that had more to do with the area we were in than Texas itself. It has a slow pace of life, so slow in fact that the people operated on a different time zone than the rest of the world, they speak slowly and do every thing slowly, it made Anthony's blood boil. There were so many foul-ups, mix-ups and blunders that Anthony said, my god I now understand why the president is so stupid! (Bush is a Texas man)

Well we finally left Texas, we were there for a month, did not get to go to a hoe-down, I kept asking my sister-in-law but she couldn't help me, they were from Florida originally.

So next on the list is Amsterdam - land of pot and prostitutes!