This may be the beginning of a beautiful frienship…

Between me and my brand new blog! That’s right, folks! I decided to take a leaf out of many other’s books and write a weblog to maintain everyone who is interested informed of my life here in the other end of the world (a.k.a., USA). Of course, it’ll have to be in English, otherwise I would receive angry emails from my non-portuguese friends, so… This is the beginning.
I’ve been in the US for two weeks, now, more specifically in the wonderful city of Houston, state of Texas. My first impressions match completely the famous saying that everything in Texas is BIG. From cars, to streets, to houses, advertisements, malls, and the campus of Rice University, where I’m doing my second master thesis, everything is really huge. And they have space for that and much more, and still have immense national parks, where Nature is barely touched. So you can imagine, coming from the spatially challenged country that is the Netherlands, I felt quite relieved at the beginning to finally be able to see wide open space, huge trees, and most of all, the SUN!!!!!! 21 degrees Celsius welcomed me to Houston. What else could I want?!
Only 5 days later, however, my feelings towards the excess of space that exists here were a bit different. Given the difficulty that arises with going from point A to point B without a car (and by car I mean of course at least a station wagon, nothing small, please…), I started to consider the distances abusive and personally insulting. Why the hell did I leave the Netherlands, where I could easily get on my bike and cycle for forty minutes under rain and wind to get to my university, to come here where I have to WALK for forty minutes under the steaming sun to get to a minimally interesting place, intellectually-wise???? Hmmm. It gives me something to think about, that’s for sure…
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. I even bought a second-hand bike to keep the tradition, but the truth is it will not get me further than the university, because going anywhere further than that involves a serious risk of being run over by a speeding Land Rover. There are no special ways for bikes, and there is no special respect for people on them… It is a battlefield out there, ladies and gentlemen, so don’t forget your helmets and always give way to the big fast car coming towards you! Luckily (?), the buses here are less dangerous than in the Netherlands, but that is only due to the fact that there are so few of them. They go by at least every half an hour, which is great if you are time constrained, as you can imagine…
As for the question you have all been dying to ask: are Texans really as stupid as they are depicted? Well, I’m afraid I can’t help you there. In my lab, only one guy speaks with this terrible Texan accent, and while I’m always expecting to hear extremely daft things from his mouth (hey, he even looks the part: big, blond, muscled, typical jock!), he keeps disappointing me by saying quite intelligent things… :( So that’s one myth down the drain. The rest of the people here are from all sorts of places in the US. Plus, in my lab there is only one republican, as my supervisor was quick in telling me, as soon as I got out of the plane. That means the chance of finding stupid people is even smaller… Oh, well. I’ll keep you posted, though, as my search for the true Texan proceeds.
For those who are wondering, I’ll let you know more about where I live, how I live, with whom I live, etc, in further posts. For now, I think I’ll rest my case. Ana versus the USA, the verdict is… not guilty. There is reasonable doubt, for now…