More thoughts

Two weeks have passed since our arrival and this place continues to amaze me. Everyday I’m learning something knew, and more importantly, new things that i wouldn’t have learned in Argentina. Each day that passes has its own style. Some days I visit cool places, some days I found out things about American society that I didn’t know, every day I meet different people and get to know amazing features about different cultures. So if up to this point you didn’t get the idea: this trip is awesome! I need to get back to the objective of this blog: sharing thoughts and experiences.

On Saturday we did a trip to Houston. We departed at 7:00 a.m. (that was the bad part) and traveled for 3 hours, but with lots of coffee and donuts which served as fuel for the rest of the day. Our first stop was at NASA, we visited the mission control, where the space mission and the International Space Stations are monitored and a lot of other cool things. The second stop was at the Houston’s Museum of Natural Science, where I was amazed by the dinosaurs, the mummies and especially the minerals and stones. The trip was awesome, but I want to reflect about something that caught my eye.

While were travelling in the bus I looked a lot through the window and couldn’t believe the dominant infrastructure in Texas. I currently live in the capital of Argentina, an enormous city. But in a junction of two roads, where in Argentina we would have a flat roundabout, here in Texas they have huge bridges which separate the highway from the ground so that cars don’t need to stop at any point. These are really expensive and hard to build structures. There were not one or two of this, the pattern repeated all the way from Austin to Houston, even at small towns. It requires a level of investment, planning and long-term thinking which is amazing.

The second aspect of the infrastructure which caught my eye was the shops. Shops are HUGE, they all tend to be flat (just one or two floors) but very wide, with enormous parking lots and way to much cars for the amount of people you see walking in the street. Also, most of them tend to have the same architectonic style, flat roofs and brownish painting. Shops are mostly multifunction; it’s extremely rare to find a small shop which specializes on one good. Here you don`t have a small “panadería”, a tiny “verdulería” and a “ferretería” each two or three blocks as we do in Argentina.

The way shops are designed obviously helps to increase the level of consumption of this society. You enter with the intention of buying a new shoes and end up leaving with 20 pairs of socks, 3 jeans, 5 shirts and an umbrella which you’ll never use, all because the products were on 70% off clearance. After buying all these things sometimes they don’t even ask you to sign after passing your credit card. Consumism is also encouraged by the facility to buy products online. Literally, only two clicks are needed to buy anything you can imagine in Amazon, my host family told me they even buy shampoo in Amazon. Its reasonable, why travelling when you have a perfectly coordinated system which delivers any product you want to your house by just moving one finger?