Guide to Texas, part 2

Weather.
Texas has three seasons. They are called Winter, Summer, and Holy Mother of God What State Have I Moved To. Winter has temperatures requiring the use of a light jacket and lasts two months. Summer is when it’s at least 90 degrees and is the entire rest of the year, with the exception of August, or HMoGWSHIMT, when even native Texans complain about the heat. During this month, temperatures remain well above 100 degrees every day. This is only while the sun is up, however. After nightfall, it is much more pleasant outside. For example, at 10 pm last night, it was a cool 97 degrees. There is rumored to be a rainy season here but I have not yet experienced it. The two times it’s rained in the past five months, it poured for five minutes and covered the streets in grease, or at least that’s what it felt like when trying to drive. I skidded out while pulling away from a stop sign. Going 1 mph.

Driving.
Driving in San Antonio is just about the opposite of driving in LA. Rush hour lasts about half an hour on some freeways, and 45 minutes on others. Traffic during rush hour actually moves, helping rush hour to end before you have been stuck reading bumper stickers for three hours straight. When road conditions worsen due to rain or poor visibility, drivers slow down. All of them. Every last driver. To about 10 mph. This is probably the only time, outside of the occasional bad accident, that there is actually traffic on the freeway. San Antonio has a love affair with speed bumps and has built about 50 of them in nearly every residential neighborhood. San Antonio drivers treat speed bumps as if they are stop signs, coming to a full and complete stop before proceeding over them. They also treat right turns as if there were a stop sign at the driveway they are pulling into. Merging into traffic and changing lanes is a delightful experience: to change lanes on the freeway, regardless of amount of traffic or time of day, simply turn on your blinker and within five seconds the driver of the car in the lane you are merging into will back off a bit, allowing you to complete your lane change. When two lanes merge together, such as at a freeway on-ramp, cars come together like a zipper, alternating one car at a time from each lane, in a smooth process that leads to minimal traffic backup. WARNING: driving with the standard California “defensive driving” technique, as in, “I am defending my right to get to where I’m going before you do, and nothing will get in my way!” is frowned upon here. Muttering “Not in front of me, you don’t!” and speeding up to avoid letting a car change lanes in front of you is impolite, and might get you shot.

A Californian’s guide to Texas/San Antonio

Texas is a beautiful place, and San Antonio is similar enough culturally to Los Angeles and San Diego that a native Californian shouldn’t feel TOO out of place. Still, there are a few things you’ll need to become familiar with to really settle in and feel at home:

Spanish.
Forget everything you learned in high school, it’ll do you no good at all. The Spanish here is pronounced so differently from the Spanish in southern California, it’s nearly unintelligible. Ls are apparently a rolled consonant, like Rs. Pretty much every other sound is blended together or omitted. Save yourself some time and a lot of name-butchering by asking everyone you meet to write their name for you; you’ll come off looking like a moron, but less of one than if you try to repeat what sounds like Swahili and turns out to be a simple name like Gutierrez.


Trees.
Trees are a mystery of Texas that I have not yet been able to solve. While San Antonio’s name evokes images of the Old West, the city has apparently been constructed in the middle of a vast forest. Unlike southern California, San Antonio was not constructed by leveling everything and then pouring concrete over it all. Instead, in between the areas where they built roads, neighborhoods, and shopping centers, they left all the trees alone. How these trees have managed to stay alive is beyond the scope of my comprehension. Texas is in the middle of a terrible drought. My lawn consists of patches of mostly-dead thorn grass interspersed throughout an area of hard-packed sand. When I mow the lawn, it appears I am running a vacuum in reverse over a dust field. No amount of watering seems to be able to revive my poor, dead thorns. Yet trees, five billion times the size of a blade of grass, are green and thriving even though they don’t seem to ever get any water either.

The Alamo.
No mention of San Antonio would be complete without talking about the Alamo. To Texans, the Alamo is the reason America is what it is today. I’m not kidding, it actually says that at the Alamo on a sign. What the Alamo actually is, however, is a mission. A small-ish one. Where a battle was fought. That was ultimately lost. If you’re a history buff and enjoy seeing old rifles and touring buildings so old you can’t touch the walls, you’ll probably want to stop by, but California has lots of missions and if you’ve seen a few of them, you really can skip the Alamo.


Texas.
No state has more pride in itself than Texas. Texans believe they live in the best place in the universe, and as such, fly the state flag all over the place—not just at government buildings, but at condos and hotels. They also like to decorate everything with the state flag or some star logo that is apparently the state symbol or something like that. And I mean EVERYTHING. Lawn furniture. Mailboxes. Blocks of cheese. Everywhere you look, there is something either shaped like Texas, labeled with a picture of Texas, painted to look like the state flag, or slapped with a great big star on it.

Freeways.
The freeways here are not called freeways. They are called interstates, and named by a number…and only a number. If you reference your drive along the 10, people will look at you strangely and know you are from somewhere else. Interstates have an IH- in front of them, so, the 10 is actually IH-10. The H, however, is silent, so you just say “I-10.” Do NOT, however, make the mistake of thinking 410 is an interstate. It has the red and blue interstate logo on its road signs, but it is not “I-410.” Nor is it “the 410.” It is technically “Loop 410,” because it goes around the city in a circle and does not actually take you anywhere except back where you started, but everyone just calls it “410.” 1604 is the same way, another big circle of a freeway, except this one actually has stop lights in some places and is a freeway in others. All freeways have access roads alongside them where traffic runs only in one direction, which makes getting to a business over on the left side of the freeway somewhat difficult. Which brings us to…


Turnarounds.
The turnaround is possibly the best concept any city/road planner has ever come up with since time began. It is a special lane devoted solely to U-turns at intersections following freeway exits…with NO STOPLIGHT. Pass your exit? No problem…get off at the next exit, stay in the leftmost lane, and what looks like a left-turn lane will actually take you through a U-turn right before the stoplight. The only drawback to the turnaround is that if you aren’t used to this concept, you will get into what you think is a go-straight lane, the lane next to the leftmost lane, only to discover that what you thought was a left turn lane is a turnaround lane, and you are in the left turn lane and being forced onto a street you didn’t want to turn onto. The turnaround would never work in southern California, for obvious reasons, but it is definitely one of the best things about San Antonio. It also makes getting to all the stores and restaurants on the other side of the freeway much easier, since you don’t even have to wait at a stoplight to turn and go in the other direction.

More to come...

Howdy...or something like that.

It seems I’ve completely abandoned my blog since moving to Texas…it’s to the point where I’ve been considering closing this one down and starting over with a more Texified theme. But since that requires effort, something my extended hiatus would indicate I’m lacking, I guess I’ll just pick up where I left off.

This spring, California’s economy being what it is and my finances getting more dismal by the day, I decided to jump ship. Within a month of making the decision to go for it, I quit my job, packed up my house, and hit the road. After a rather nervewracking two months of unknowns, I landed a job (no longer teaching—now I’m in an office, working with grownups, which is exactly like working with children except the people are larger) and a house that, compared to my heaterless-for-three-winters shack in CA, is totally, like, A MANSION. The best part? I have somehow managed to convince my youngest sister to do the exact same thing! She’ll arrive today, with a carful of clothes and other belongings to squeeze into my house, and absolutely no idea what she is in for here.

So, to aid her in this transition, I’ve decided to write a handy reference guide to the things she’ll encounter here that threw me for a loop when I first arrived—like trees. Real trees, not palm trees planted down the center divider to distract you from the traffic you’re stuck in. My Texas friends will probably be laughing at me for this…but really, this is an entirely different world here. Stay tuned.