Today has been a pretty good day. We started off by heading to The Heights, which if our rental application is successful will be our neighbourhood. It's a lovely place. It's one of the few places I've seen in Houston with lots of people out and about on foot, and it's also pretty green and has a funny mix of funky, upscale and run-down houses and shops. We get the impression people actually talk to their neighbours there, which was confirmed by a visit to Yale St Gifts & Grill - a diner/antique shop (funny combination, I know!) where a few of the staff introduced themselves to us by name and chatted to us for ages, and also seemed to chat to all the regulars too. When you're in a city with a grand total of two friends (bless you, Scott & Maggie!) strangers' willingness to talk to you as a friend is a gift that almost brought tears to my eyes this morning. So we assured our new friends Barbara on the checkout, and Tom and Linda in the antiques store, that we will hopefully be some of their new regulars! Linda loves my Australian accent, which is nice, coz many people here don't understand me. I have a feeling I will be losing my accent just to be understood.
Anyway, after that we dropped in to Maggie's place to use her scanner for some paperwork things we need for the rental application and borrowed some maps to head off on our day trip. We went to Galveston, about an hour away, on a little peninsula (or maybe island...anyway, there's a big bridge). It's a funny place. For starters, it's so on the coast it's practically in the water. The water is on the same level as many people's houses, and in fact some houses are on stilts in the water. Understandably hurricanes are a big worry here. Many people talk about Hurricane Ike in 1900, not that anyone alive today remembers it, but it's kind of woven into the local memory, even if you're not a born and bred Texan. Apparently it changed the landscape a lot. Thousands of people died in Galveston, with craploads of property damage, etc., and it affected Houston quite a bit as well I think. So now the kerbs in Galveston are about a foot and a half high and have little steps or ramps leading up to them, to lessen the impact of flooding. Some buildings have "Ike Survivor" plaques on them. [Some of these details are a load of crap - see "Editor's Comment [Day 12]]
Secondly, Galveston is weird because in some ways it kind of feels like a ghost town. Today was a public holiday (Memorial Day - the military is a much stronger presence here and they take it much more seriously than we take ANZAC or Remembrance Days) and so maybe that contributed to the feeling that there was a low level of activity in Galveston. In the 1890s it was the Riviera of this region and the hub for wealthy holidaymakers, shipping businesses and white-collar gangsters. Four out of every five buildings in downtown are incredibly impressive, more-than-one-hundred-year-old heritage-listed places. The streets are made of brick. Horse and carriage tours operate. It feels a little like Sovereign Hill. But aside from the touristiness, the area seems quite run-down. We had lunch, walked around, discovered a secondhand bookstore. Need I say more? It was a good day.
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