General Discussion

I worked in Houston for about a year and found it to be the strangest, weirdest, most fucked up place I have ever spent any time in.

I worked downtown at the Grand Opera and rented an apartment in the Montrose neighborhood. I should also mention that I took the bus back and forth.

The things that weirded me out, in no particular order.

The lack of zoning laws. In my neighborhood there were elegant single family homes right next door to a cement plant, another strip of million dollar homes interspersed with apartments that were identical to a Motel-6 that were thrown up during the previous oil boom. And hookers. I've never seen so many street hookers anywhere, and I've worked/lived in Manhattan and in the District in Washington. You had to run a gauntlet of hookers to get in the door of the 7-Eleven on my street.

I moved from DC to Houston and I was taken aback at the number of homeless people and in DC I had to traverse 14th Street on a daily basis.

I can't count the number of people I saw looking out the bus window at 8am who were driving a Mercedes or BMW, dressed in a suit, and drinking a tall-boy on the way to work.

The urban sprawl in hard to comprehend.

On the upside, some really great Tex-Mex and Vietnamese food.