I spent two days in Houston with Ken and Rocky, two great hosts who showed me all around the city and gave me a good glimpse of Houston in my limited time there. Houston is the 4th largest city of the USA and especially known for the NASA Space Center, the oil and gas industry as well as a large number of excellent hospitals.
I arrived in the late afternoon hitchhiking from Austin and got picked up by Ken, my host for the first two nights in Houston. He welcomed me to his home with a delicious dinner before we went on a little nocturnal city tour. We passed through the medical neighbourhood which seemed like an endless succession of hospitals. The Texas Medical Center (TMC) is with an area of more than two-square-miles the largest medical complex in the world. Over 100,000 people are employed here, 10 million patients are treated annually. More than 20 hospitals, numerous specialty institutions, academic and research institutions, medical schools, nursing schools, public health organizations, pharmacy schools and a dental school form part of the complex. All of these institutions are non-profit. Amongst these are the world's largest children's hospital (Texas Children's Hospital) as well as the world's largest cancer hospital (MD Anderson Cancer Center).
Even more important than the medical sector is the oil and gas industry. Houston is one of the most important ports in the south of the USA and is known above all for the handling of oil and oil products. It is home to some very large refineries in or near the city. Several nationally or even globally known companies have their headquarters in Houston including Phillips 66 or ConocoPhillips. Hundreds of thousands of employees work in this business, in the oil-extraction directly or in services, machinery and fabrication of metals for pipelines and equipment. Houston can be seen as the world capital of the oil industry.
I spent the whole Saturday going around Houston with Ken and shooting photos at different points of interest. One of our first stops was Rice University, a private university which regularly ranks among the top 20 universities in the country. Approximately 7,000 students are enrolled at Rice University. Next spot was the Chapel of St. Basil, a chapel on the campus of the University of St. Thomas, designed in the late 1990s. Third halt was at Houston Graffiti Park, an area of old industrial buildings in Downtown Houston which have been painted colourful. Many people come here to pose and take pictures.
In between we took two young dogs for a walk every couple of hours as friends of Ken's son were on vacation in these days and the puppies could not be left alone in the house for too long. In the evening we went to a Jazz concert at the Miller Outdoor Theatre in Hermann Park. During summer there are free events for the public displayed each weekend, sponsored amongst others by some oil and gas companies of Houston.
The next morning I changed my location and left Ken's house to stay for another night with Rocky who spent the Sunday showing me around to places I haven't seen so far. We started our tour at the Buffalo Bayou Park which offers great views of the skyline of Houston. The aftermath of the floods caused by the tropical storm, which had hit Houston only a few days earlier, was noticeable here. The rivers in the city had already returned to their normal level after one day, but the masses of water had washed one or the other thing to the shore. So it came that we found a little turtle which was almost dried out and was already eaten by ants. We took it back to the river where it became active again and immediately buried itself in the mud.
We visited a variety of other interesting spots with monuments, statues and artworks. Amongst these was the American Statesmanship Park a.k.a. Mount Rush Hour, the small Texan version of the heads of the presidents / founding fathers of Texas (Stephen F. Austin, Sam Houston, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington) in contrary to the sculptures of Mount Rushmore National Memorial (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln). Furthermore we stopped at the George Bush Monument, the H-bean / "Cloud Column" and at Lunch at Sam's to take a picture with the monumental plastic burger outside the restaurant.
Houston is a very young city, founded very late by land speculators on August 30, 1836. The city is named after former General Sam Houston, who was president of the Republic of Texas and had won the Texas' independence from Mexico at the Battle of San Jacinto 40 km east of Houston. I got to see several Sam Houston monuments during my stay.
We had lunch at "Rudy’s Country Store and Bar-B-Q", a barbecue restaurant chain with a few dozen locations. Rudy's was originally a combination of a gas station, car repair shop and grocery store. Today it is primarily a self-service restaurant which sells a lot of barbecued meat. A thing which I found extremely strange was that they sell bottled Texan rain water, nicely packaged in a bottle and apparently well marketed. What the big advantage should be compared to the free tap water that is available in restaurants all over the USA is not yet clear to me. In any case, someone had an inventive business idea and hopefully makes a lot of money with it.
Afterwards we visited two microbreweries where we enjoyed a few freshly brewed artesanal beers before heading home and letting the evening fade away with thoughful conversations.
Houston is a very automobile-dependent city, public transport systems are hardly available. I therefore had the great advantage of spending a weekend here and the luck that my two hosts made it possible for me to take a private city tour with them, which is hardly possible without a car.
Nevertheless, companies and the city work together to provide a bus system for all employees who have to travel to work. Many people therefore have the chance to go to work for free without being stuck in traffic jams and spending money on gas if they take one of the buses which pass different sections of Houston.
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