Texas is large & name change

Hello ladies and gents!

You may have noticed I changed the title of my blog and the url, this was done to protect my online anonymity in the off-chance an HR rep from work stumbles across this.  All should be well though :)

It's been a number of months since my last significant post, but I feel that perhaps my temporary residence in the foreign land of the United States would count as travelling.  As such, you are about to be blessed with another one of my delectably random rant-posts.

Raise your hand if you never expected me to take residence in a place typically viewed to be about as ass-backwards as the developped world can get? *Raises hand*  I desperately fought for other opportunities closer to home for the summer, but nothing significant ever materialized.  I was disappointed at being unable to spend the summer at home, which as many of you know is the the highlight of a long and mostly cold year in the city.  But fear not, they said Austin is fun, full of things to do and generally a liberal oasis amidst the most conservative state in the US.

Yes, I'm aware of how redneck this looks.

And boy were they right,  Austin truly is an oasis.  That's not to say its even close to what i associate with being a liberal, but they're a generally more accepting group of people here.  Their party district is on par with crescent/st-laurent in terms of madness, but man cops are dicks here.  I've only been here 4 weeks, and I've seen double digit arrests for public intoxication, most of whom weren't really doing anything wrong apart from stumbling a bit.  Not only that, but they were arrested with what could be construed as excessive force, they didn't resist but were brought to the ground and pinned by 3 cops whilst the other cuffed them.

The alcohol laws here are kind of bizarre, you can drink whilst floating down a river in an inner tube, but the moment you step onto land, theres police there to arrest everyone, and I mean EVERYONE seen with a container holding alcohol in it.  The tubing itself is fun, the water is a cool 20C all summer long, and you just float down it lazily for a couple of hours and pack a cooler full of drinks to keep yourselves entertained.

Oh I forgot to mention its hot here, dry and ridiculously hot.  This is my first experience with dry heat, and although I can say that I prefer this over humid hot, the absolute temperatures it hits here (think consecutive days over 40C) are enough to literally kill you if you find yourself outside somewhere without shade.  On a more amusing note, it's been four weeks since I arrived, and it was only a day ago that I witnessed rainfall for the first time.  Never thought I'd miss rain, but damn the heat to hell, I have no idea why some european colonists would choose to settle in a place with rattlesnakes, a summer that can cook human flesh in a couple of minutes, and virtually no water.  No wonder the spanish empire failed at establishing some useful territories.

Ok, onwards to the fun part, AKA my observations about this place and subsequent negative commentary:

My god, les gens sont gros. From a distance you could mistake them for slow moving tumbleweeds.  Thats not to say there aren't thin people, but I believe Texas is one of the top 10 fattest states in america, thereby making it one of the top 10 fattest places in the world.  Their lifestyle habits here are just not conducive to being healthy at all.

Allow me to elaborate, the population of Greater Austin is just under 2million, from my observations, the highway network here consists of THREE north-south 4-lane highways, two east-west highways, and a ring road to bypass the city.  You can't exist here without a car, everyone drives, even if its to go to the store that's literally one block away.  Fuel prices are under $1/litre so no one really bats an eye at the cost of fuel.  I dont think I've seen a single city bus yet, so public transit is non existent.  And to imagine that I live about as far from downtown as i do back in montreal, where the buses come frequently and only take 45m-1h to reach the downtown core.

Then theres the food, Every week we have meetings with our mentors and go out to eat lunch somewhere nearby.  EVERY destination is a chain or a franchise of some sort.  The amount of fastfood-derivatives is astounding.  I've asked local interns on whether the concept of small non-franchised restaurants exist and they were hard pressed to name more than a few.  Portion sizes are the equivalent of a newborn texan baby.  You could feed yourself for an entire day on 10$ worth of fast food from this place.

Back home, when you go to a grocery store, the fresh produce, boucherie and poissonerie sections account for about 1/2 the floor space.  At our local grocery store in Austin, about 1/4 is for fresh produce, the rest is pre-prepared meals, frozen meals, you name it.  It's no wonder people aren't healthy when you give them options like that.

Well, that sums up some of my first impressions of Texas.  Next time, I'll talk about canadians and mexicans.