Impressions of America.

Those of you who know me are aware that I'm no great fan of America. I dislike american foreign policy, and like most good Europeans, I'm not overly fond of many of the loud, obnoxious, stereotypical american tourists that we get over here.

Well, I'm just back from a trip to Texas, and I've got to say it wasn't really what I expected. Now, most of my American friends living over here are from northern states, and I get the impression that they don't hold Texas, or the South in general, in particularly high esteem. I'd been told before I went that I shouldn't base my impressions of America on what I saw in Texas. My yankee friends were afraid that I'd hate the place and that I'd never visit the US again. But I actually really enjoyed Texas, and it has made me want to see more of this odd country.

The people were nice, really nice. Everywhere we went we were greeted by friendly people, eager to help out. The sales people in the Malls and stores we visited were eager but not generally annoying the way eager sales people can be here. I didn't get the impression that they were keeping an eye on me 'cos I looked weird or anything (pink hair, it causes some incidents in shops here). They managed to subtly ask if we were finding everything we needed while walking by, seemingly on some unrelated errand, rather than having the air of suspicion that I've occasionally encountered in local shops (to be fair, I don't think I've had many such incidents in Ireland in recent times, and I've been in many more shops in Ireland and the few I visited in the States hardly form a representative sample).

Most of our waiters in restaurants were extremely pleasant too, no doubt concious of their below-minimum-wage pay and the need to supplement it with tips, but still.

I set out to try to see as much of the local culture as possible in the short time that I was there. To this end we visited the Fort Worth Stockyards to see some Texas Longhorn cattle and some genuine cowboys (we didn't make it to the rodeo though). I also managed to eat catfish, hush puppies, jambalaya, steak, cobbler, popcorn chicken, tex-mex, cajun chicken, twinkies, pancakes and watermelon and to drink copious quantities of iced tea. The food was all fantastic by the way.

We hired a car (a Dodge Neon, an american car, of course) and I was designated driver for the trip, a job that I relished. The roads were wonderful, lots of big multi-lane highways with impressive over- and under-passes. They were very easy to drive on, and fairly easy to navigate with plenty of signposts well in advance of most of the exits. We had a few wrong turns and unexpected detours, but for the most part we found our way around without any problems.

Driving on the right wasn't much of an issue (ok, there was that one time...) but I did find other aspects of the roads and the driving experience a bit odd. I was struck very quickly with how the roads resembled those you see in American road-trip movies. They were big, and the houses and shops tended to be set quite far back from the roads themselves, giving a real impression of space that I hadn't really expected. I mean, I knew the fact that american road movies were shot on these kinds of roads meant that these roads existed in the US, but I didn't really expect to be driving on them myself. An odd thing to find odd, I know, but it struck me; they really do look like that.

The road markings on some of the roads were odd too, instead of white lines they had cats-eye lights to mark out many of the lane markings, and some of these were a bit hard to see at times. There were other spots where there were both white lines and cats-eyes, but they didn't necessarily follow the same route, it looked like the white lines were obsolete but they'd never been properly cleaned off.

I also found the traffic lights weird, not the extra signal types such as the ones that turn to flashing amber or red at night to indicate right of way, or the fact that you could turn right on red, those were sensible and clever ways to use traffic lights. The thing that bothered me was that the traffic lights were almost always on the far side of the junction. This meant that when approaching a set of lights, I couldn't use their position as a guide for where I should stop, I had to spot the dim white line on the road which could be one, two or several lanes in front of the traffic lights, depending on how big the intersecting road was. That confused the begorrah out of me, and caused one light-skipping incident and a couple of brake-screeching stops.

The weirdest thing was probably driving an automatic car. It was, um, different. It was grand most of the time, but I found that the car wasn't terribly quick to do what I wanted it to sometimes and the lag between flooring the accellerator and actually seeing any increase in speed got a bit annoying. The car I had did seem to actually have some manual gearcontrol or the ability to manually downshift or something, but I figured that rather than try to master changing gear with my right hand I might as well tolerate the automatic's eccentricities.

Speaking of cars, I do understand why americans drive such monstrous vehicles, they do have to drive a lot, and after ferrying three people around in the back of a 'compact' (we'd probably consider it a mid-size saloon) Dodge for some 670 miles, I see the wisdom of having plenty of leg-room. However, I don't really see the need to have everything as spread-out as it is around Dallas (and probably many other american cities). Dublin is not considered a compact city by comparison with many other European cities, but it was not even remotely on a par with the huge, stretching Dallas-Fortworth Metropolitan Area where the locals think nothing of driving to the next city to shop.

The cities were clearly designed though, you could see that in the roads, the ubiquitous parking, the many greenbelts, and the good signage. It is certainly different from European cities which generally evolved over long periods of occupation, and hence have everything jumbled together in seeming chaos. I have a secret interest in urban design and have long felt that greenbelts should be incorporated into modern cities, and it was nice to see the effects of greenbelt areas in Lewisville and environs where we saw squirrels, crickets and lots of birds at home in quite urban settings.

One thing that my whole family were looking forward to was seeing some american birds and animals as we're fairly keen on bird watching and the likes. So one morning we got up early, before the worst of the heat kicked in, and went out to Fort Worth to visit a water treatment facility which is a haven for birds and bird-watchers. We saw a whole rake of species which we don't get in Ireland; Mourning Doves, Great Egrits, Cattle Egrits, Blue Herons, Red-winged Blackbirds, Shrikes, Killdeers, Black-bellied Whistling Ducks, several birds of prey that we weren't able to positively identify, and of course Grackles. The amount of attention we paid to the humble Grackle would have made any american ornithologist laugh, but dispite their ubiquity in the US we found them quite exotic. They've got really long tails and they're damned scruffy. Lovely wee birds. We also saw Coypu, which was cool.

We did a fair amount of shopping while there too, electronics stuff is cheaper, so we all bought some things. Aside from that I bought mostly food and souvenirs. In true Cassidy-family tradition we spent hours in bookshops; I was complimented by the clerk for my choice of purchases in one, apparently it was an "interesting selection" of reading materials. We also had fun in walmart, bought lots more food there, along with assorted crap.

I did see some hints of those aspects of the US that I find disturbing. There were US flags everywhere, sticking out of houses and cars, even painted on mailboxes. In Ireland there are two types of people who wave Irish flags; Football fans and Republicans (not the americans, the ones who shun democracy for violence and shoot people who disagree with them, oh wait...). The presence of so many flags was an unsubtle reminder that I was in a country that takes patriotism more seriously than I consider healthy.

There were also some strange queries to give name, address and phone number in order to buy something. A few places wanted such details for credit card purchases, one even tried to grab them for a non-credit card sale, which was just strange. In privacy-concious Europe people would baulk at such questions. As for mobile phones (or cellular as I had to call them over there to be understood), why the hell would someone hand out such details in order to get a pre-paid phone. And topping up was just painful, it's so much simpler in Ireland.

Oh, they all liked my hair, I got lots of admiring comments and sprogs seemed entralled by it altogether.

It was really quite fun, and I'd love to get back and see more of Texas (I've got to see Big Bend National Park some time), and other states. Of course, there are still plenty of places I want to go in Europe and other parts of the world, so the US may have to wait a wee while.

Some photos of the trip are up here and here. Birdwatching ones are here. Presentation is not yet good, no thumbnails, they're all huge, and many are out of focus. If you wait I'll probably clean them up some day.