DStilled

Deep In The Heart Of Texas

June 26, 2007 on 2:34 am | In Blog |

After I left you on Friday, Christa took me to see the missions in San Antonio (which includes the less than impressive Alamo) and the Riverwalk. I really like San Antonio and part of the reason I do, is because it feel very non-white/middleclass/American. The city is somewhere between 1/2 - 2/3 hispanic with a large black population. A movie line that gets me is in “The Last Samurai” when Tom Cruise’s commander asks him, “What is it about your own people that you hate so much?” Cruise doesn’t answer. I don’t hate my own people, I just wish I were a part of something else much of the time. Or maybe it’s the culture of poverty that has made me hate the ethnic and societal barriers we erect and the innate way I bring them down is to cross them, ignore them completely. Anyway, I like the city of the reigning basketball champs. When we got back to the house, Christa and Willa Rose decided that camping would be extremely fun. I already have all the necessary camping supplies so we went out into the heart of Texas and car camped. We cooked a rice dish (Willa Rose is vegan), did some stargazing, and found out that Ryan’s tent I’m borrowing is indeed a three person tent; as long as you leave the
door open to not suffocate.

Saturday morning I woke up and cooked eggs and toast and we drove back into town. We went to the SA zoo and enjoyed all the great animals. For those of you in Ky, I recommend the Louisville zoo, for after seeing a supposed amazing zoo, I liked Louisville just as much, if not more. Something happened to the flash card in the camera so I don’t have any pictures of that. Don’t worry, I also brought my camera and it too has a CF card. Then Christa and I went to a Latin American restaurant that had awesome food I haven’t had since Guatemala. Christa’s going to Peru next year so eating at this place is extra special to her. Then we came back to the house, hung out, watched some Flying Circus on PBS and turned in.

Sunday morning I woke up and we went to Max Lucado’s Church of Christ her in San Antonio. It was good and from his books, felt very Lucado-like. The service was very music filled and lacked a traditional sermon. Max probably spoke for the same amount of time, it was just split up throughout the service. The theme was freedom. Christa aptly noted that the freedom Max was speaking of didn’t jive with her because it was soley focused on personal freedom in Christ where her past year in the Jesuit program has been about coorporate freedom of the people using our convictions as children of God to take socially responsible and active actions to free everyone. It’s not that she felt like Max’s message (oh, and they also only used the Message version of the Bibile - paraphrase, not a translation) was bad, only that she hadn’t thought really about her own freedom in Christ in quite a while. After lunch I left to go to Austin. Once again, another Texas city I really like and wouldn’t mind moving to, in the winter. It’s a college town of 600,000 people. The University of Texas’s campus is really cool (Garrett! you should look into going there!) and the live music scene is very happening. I was stealing internet from a motel and found the Austin paper’s site and on it had all the live bands playing. I had the choice of over 30 venues to choose from. So I went a downtown park to see the wind ensemble from the Austin Symphony and then to an authentic Irish pub. At the pub I was able to eat real shephard’s pie while listening to some great celtic music. The meal was sort of expensive but there was no cover for getting in.

Monday morning I woke up and drove to Waco. Cool little town with a massive Baptist college. Oh, and one other important thing: Dr Pepper. That’s right, DP are you with me? Oh yeah, I got two cases and I’m goin’ somewhere. You might have noticed there is no . after Dr in Dr Pepper. That’s becasue of an unusual font they used originally and just decided to keep it like that. Also, Dr Pepper is 23 different flavors and not one of them is prune. I also learned that Cadbury/Shweppes owns DP/7UP and they franchise the bottling rights out to Coke/Pepsi for each zone in the country. Which is why some places DP/7UP is with Coke and sometimes with Pepsi. Then I drove up to Dallas and saw the sites. By that I mean I drove around and saw the Cotton Bowl/State Fair grounds, the place the Mavericks play, and a bit more elusively, Texas Stadium, where the Cowboys play. Hurray for climbing skills.  Dallas, for those of you that have not been here, feels a lot like Atlanta, but with more hispanic influence and less hills.  Talk to you later.