Trip to the lone star

This story unfolds as all the usual ones with parents coming to visit their child/ren in America. And yeah the first trip was to Niagara by default. Since I have already qualified to be a "desi" by visiting Niagara twice ( once with friends, other with parents), now I should only look for a girl whose parents have already visited Niagara. Anyway I expressed my astonishment at the gigantic waterfall, "again", and condemned myself never to go back there. Definitely not from the US side.

Luckily that was not the only trip this fall. After much deliberation, I decided to go ahead with the Texas trip. There was a certain anxiety about landing in an airport named after George Bush, probably because of all the viewings of the "Daily Show" when he was the president. You have to concede that the show was a lot funnier under his presidential term.

Now you would expect a detailed account of all the hot spots in Texas. Let me hamper your hopes already. We are only going to talk about social and political differences, somewhat shocking, between north (NJ) and the south (Texas). Given the democratic values (the party ones) instilled in every NJ resident, it was really hard not to be surprised at the stark contrast between two states. So here goes the list.

The first thing "you get tired of" is how frequently you hear "god bless Texas". It seems impossible even for all the innumerable gods of our religion to give away blessings at that rate. Probably I landed at religious/political places most of the time there, but my ears have never heard "god bless New Jersey" from someone in NJ, although occasional "god bless New York" can definitely be heard.

I was equally amazed to see monuments for Southern Confederacy in the Capitol Building at Austin. It made me go back to history books again and read about the civil war. This was my first visit to any Confederacy state and never thought of their perspective on the civil war. There should be a discussion about there reasons for going to the war, but wait, that will be the topic of another blog entry:P.

Lets not talk about only the controversial political topics and shift the focus to a delicious point. Yeah, that is food ... fried food. Luckily we were able to sneak into one of the county fairs. That earned me an opportunity to see all the celebrated food stuff which I had only heard about. Fried butter, fried cheese and fried ice cream were still palatable, but the cherry on the cake was
fried coke. As it turned out later, fried coke had won the "most creative" food in one of the state fairs.

To conclude, the trip was entertaining to say the least. The malls were really big and saw hockey game inside a mall for the first time. The vegetables and fruits were XXL too. But was unluckily enough so as not to go on those long highways with no cars, or to meet our ex-president, whose name was given to so many of the public places (It helps to have the same name as your father).