Things I dislike about Texas
Saturday, October 6th, 2007
What’s with degrees Farenhieght — it sucks, i keep getting temparatures quoted to me in F, and it means nothing to me at all, at home they at least usually give both, but not here. I bought a 20FlOz bottle of sprite yesterday — what the hell? This country is officially metric, but noone cares. If they converted to metric properly, or at least to the level that the UK has, they would get on so much better.
On the topic of degrees Fahrenheit, the heat — you know when you walk past the back of a bus and get hit in the face with hot air — well, that’s what it felt like when I left the airport, and that was about 2130, well after sunset, for the record it was 28C. I’m getting the hang of it, and will likely get to like it before I leave. last year there were 117 days that went over 40C, If I’d have come during the summer, I’d have melted, literally.
Everyone uses cars, and there is no public transport here at all, I haven’t even seen a taxi since I got here, there aren’t even any decent sidewalks on most of the roads. Everyone drives everywhere, there is a walmart a few hundred meters away at the other side of the bypass, and there is no way to get there without a car, it’s not just difficult to get there by foot, but there is no safe/legal way to do it. In some ways I can see why, it’s not exactly pleasant walking outside in the sun, especially with frozen food, and distances are much greater over here because land is so cheap so there is much less in walking distance.
Gratuitous overuse of stop signs — seriously dude there are intersections over here with hundreds of meters of visibility in every direction, nothing unusual about them at all, with a stop sign at it. As far as I can tell, the standard of driving over here is so low that they have to stop people running into each other by telling them to stop at every junction. And what’s with the driving on the wrong side of the road thing?
I was expecting the people over here to be arrogant and unpleasant, but if you exclude a few bad drivers, everyone I have encountered has been really layed back and friendly, if anything more so than Edinburgh.