Spending Time in Houston

(Spending Time in Houston)



Guest Reviewer OUR SISTER HESTER says:

I should have know that selling my soul to an oil company a few years ago would have ugly consequences; embarrassment when meeting new people and trying to answer the "so what do you do?" question, constantly trying to justify the company's latest decision to drill in a site of outstanding natural beauty to myself in order to sleep at night and so on.

One of the things I stupidly had not foreseen was the ridiculous amount of time I would have to spend in Houston, Texas. "The Lone Star State".

Now, to some people this may not sound so bad; steaks the size of a newborn baby, sunshine, living in a hotel with swimming pool where someone else washes your pants. However, when you get your 2nd confirmation in one month for 12 nights at the Holiday Inn, dreadful images of Alan Partridge float in front of your eyes. Well a very fat and pasty Alan Partridge; the diet of steak, bbq ribs and burritos coupled with a complete lack of sunlight (air conditioned hotel to car to air conditioned office to car...day in day out) is not great for the complexion and figure. For me, personally, it is the TV ads every other minute, complete lack of marmite and tea made with "creamer" that get to me the most.

Also Houston itself is pretty crumby, spread out over an area bigger than London with about 100th of the population. Space is not wasted though: every man, woman and child does own at least one filthy great SUV - vehicles that are bigger than a bungalow and use about as much petrol as concord mile-for-mile.

Still, the people are great and they honestly do wear cowboy boots.

4/10

Brussels

(City)



JAMES says:

How to love a city with such stupid traffic rules? If you have to wait for a pedestrian crossing to turn green, it is only common sense that when you then cross, there should be no chance of cars venturing across your path. Not be worried by left turning motorists attempting to nudge themselves across your path. This is not a difficult concept to comprehend, or indeed to implement. We manage it here, apart from some jokers. It’s right, and it’s the sane way of doing things, so how can the Brusselian powers that be not realise this? I accept that other places, such as Sydney, indulge in similar madness, but they’re miles away. Belgium is so close to England, it takes about half an hour to fly between them, so why can’t they make the minimal investment into making crossing the road at the designated areas less of a struggle with death? It boggles the mind. And don’t get me started on the bikes.

2.3/10

The Earth

(Planet)



JAMES says:

Mostly Harmless

5/10

Ueno Park

(Park)



JAMES says:

If Ueno Park was a newspaper, it would be the News of the World. Not because it’s full of rabid white wing idiots (it might’ve been, I just don’t know), but because it contains lots of cheerful bits but none of what you’d actually expect to be there, eg news in my tortuous metaphor, grass in Ueno. It houses a bumper roster of attractions. There is the national museum, the art gallery, the science museum, other museums, and a zoo. There are also assorted old buildings and shrines, including the civic shrine of Tokyo. It is a fantastic place to go, and if you’re in Tokyo, I would recommend setting aside at least a day there. There is even a fantastic reedy duck pond surrounding the Benten shrine. There are the full public space requirement of groups of damn punk kids looking surly and men making arses of themselves for lose change, and the arrangement is such that you never know what new surprise is going to be around the corner. A giant Buddha face, a pagoda, crazy homeless Japanese people drinking. But that’s the point, though. It’s a park! Parks don’t have corners around which mystery and adventure await you. Parks have big stretches of grass where people have picnics and play football. I think Ueno could be greatly improved by calling it ‘Ueno Site of Fun!’ Or even better, ‘the James Cameron Site of Fun!’ I don’t know, maybe it’s a problem with the translation.

6.3/10

Electric Town

(Tokyo District)



NEILL says:

Akihabara, or Electric Town as it is rather magnificently known, is a labyrinthine cluster of shops and markets. It is the technological consumerist capital of Tokyo, which pretty much makes it the technological consumerist capital of the world. Wandering around its narrow streets and bustling market stalls the vibe is reminiscent of the Barras, the legendarily dodgy market in Glasgow's east end. The stallholders seem to embody much the same combination of enthusiastic enterpeneurship and flagrant criminality. The one slight difference being that instead of selling knocked-off cigarettes and Celtic sports socks, the tables are piled high with motherboards, processors, flatbed scanners and wireless mouses. (Mouses? Mice?) Not particularly my bag, but I know at least one chap who would have soiled his frilly delicates in excitement (note for our readers named Kenny Ritch - yes, you).

Amongst all the geekery were such diverse wonders as a shop that proudly had on display every single Transformers toy ever made (yeah, I lingered there), loads of shops selling fantastically cool video games (I got my first play on the new Zelda - pretty!), and of course about sixteen thousand vending machines crammed into every availble square inch of public space. Although I completely failed to spot any of the oft-discussed used-schoolgirls-pants vending machines. They pretty much seemed to just sell Coke. Maybe the Japanese aren't really as perverted as popular unexamined latent racism would have us believe. Although having said that, there was another shop that had three entire floors of schoolgirl porn anime CD-Roms. Or something. I wasn't really looking.

8/10

Canberra

(City)



JAMES says:

Nice country, shame about the capital. For those of you who don’t know about the politics of Australian Federalisation (and why should you), when neither Sydney nor Melbourne could decide who should be the newly formed country’s capital, they just invented a new city roughly half way between them. And like all good compromises this one has left everyone disappointed, including me. My Canberra experience consisted mainly of trudging along busy motorways, through identikit modern office blocks, before arriving at frankly underwhelming ‘attractions’. The town is centred around Parliament House, basically a building in a hill with a big flag at the top. Inside it’s as soulless as a politician, but there is brief amusement in the portraits of all Australia’s Prime Ministers, shifty looking galahs, to a man. Other features were a big water spout, a national gallery that was less impressive than the art gallery in Ballarat, and a newly installed Australian museum, dedicated entirely to saying how great Australians are, especially Aboriginals (a view sadly not shared by most of the population). The town itself was similarly underwhelming, possessing nothing identifiable as a nightlife. It doesn’t even have a McDonalds, for Howard’s Sake! I may be being a bit hard on the place, as the crippling bushfires raging at the time meant the sweeping vistas that seemed to be the basis of the town planning were reduced to hazy shimmers. However, Australia is a country hardly lacking in magnificent views naturally, so building your own, which are never really going to compete, seems a bit redundant. My advice? Just pretend Sydney and/or Melbourne are the capital, and repeat after me ‘There’s no such place as Canberra, there’s no such place as Canberra.’

3/10


NEILL says:

...not much, having personally decided to pass on the delights of Canberra. Merely wanted to mention that my brother's comments above should not be taken as in any way intended to slight the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, which in fact has a commendably varied, distinguished and well-tended collection. Which is all the more impressive for being located in a bone-dry one-horse mentalist shitkicker town in the arse end of Victoria.

Ballarat Fine Art Gallery: 8/10