Texas, the Lone Star State (part 2)

A&M, Longhorns, Alamo and H-Town

After Dallas, we drove down to College Station, most famous for the A&M University and the George H Bush Library. But our main reason to visit College Station was the wedding of our friends, Chris and Laura. Ward was an usher at the wedding, so we were able to experience everything upclose - from the rehearsal (a dry-run of the ceremony, followed by dinner) on Friday, to the ceremony and wedding reception on Saturday, finishing with brunch on Sunday. An American wedding is a lot different than a Belgian one: they last an entire weekend (mostly because the guests fly in from all over the country), the actual wedding party takes place in the afternoon and there are a lot of different traditions such as throwing the wedding bouquet, having a beautiful decorated wedding cake, etc. I can't judge about other American weddings, but Chris and Laura's wedding was simply perfect!

Our next stop in Texas was Austin. We have been asking every Texan we met last year what we should visit in Texas and their response was unanimous: Austin! Our lovely hosts, Mark and Sang, and our friends, Joey and Candice, showed us around in this "weird" city. In short, we had BBQ at the Salt Lick (a BYOB or Bring Your Own Beer BBQ institution), we floated the Guadalupe river in tubes, we had dinner at the Hula Hut at Lake Austin, went barhopping on 6th Street, walked around the entire University of Texas campus and browsed in the university co-op store (I'm aware that probably no one ever clicks on my links, but please humor me and at least click on this one - the merchandise sold at this store is amazing).

After an amazing weekend, we left Austin for a quick stop in San Antonio. We weren't really expecting much of this city so that's why we probably loved it so much! The Alamo reminded us of Andalucia in Spain and the Riverwalk of a modern Venice.

We spent our final days in Texas in the Houston area. Again, some amazing museums were on our program - we never expected to see so much art in Texas! The Museum of Fine Arts (both modern and ancient art, with a temporary collection of Alice Neel which caught our special attention) and the Menil Collection (private collection including a lot of Magritte, Ernst and Rothko) had wonderful collections in wonderful architectural buildings. We also quickly stopped at the Orange Show, a freakish building built by a former postman from found objects and junk.

Downtown Houston dissappointed us a little - everything was dead as of 6 pm (even Macy's was closed which is very shocking for a former New Yorker!). That's why we decided to spend the night in Galveston, at the Gulf of Mexico. We were just in time for a walk on the beach by sunset. This town has a very rich and also unfortunate history. It used to be one of the wealthiest cities in the Southeast but in 1900 it was hit by a huge storm killing more than 6000 people and destroying one third of the beautiful city. Two years ago, Hurricane Ike also did a lot of damage - still visible today. This made the city both fascinating and kinda depressing...

Our last stop in Texas before moving on to Louisiana, was the Space Center Houston.The tram tour through NASA's Johnson Space Center was very interesting. We saw the historic control room from where the first man on the moon was monitored, went to the training center of the astronauts which included realsize mock ups of the space shuttle and the International Space Station, and walked around the original Saturnus V rocket and the Apollo XVIII capsule that it was going to launch.

Next... New Orleans!