Houston, Texas

Austin for me was somewhat of a mixed bag. For the first time during my trip I'd felt a little alone and lost, and although I had a brilliant night celebrating Halloween American style, I was kind of relieved to be leaving the place.

I attribute a lot of this to the crowd that frequented the hostel that I was staying in. The Firehouse Hostel had excellent reviews, but due to a film festival taking place in Austin at the time, lacked young travelers as the majority of beds were taken up by people attending the festival. I did meet a few cool people but didn't really form any bonds that I had in the previous cities I had visited. 

So I jumped aboard the Greyhound bus and headed to another Texas city, Houston. 

Firstly a little about the Greyhound bus. This bus company runs cheap buses connecting many cities throughout the USA and perfectly represents the social enormity of the country's society. My Greyhound experience featured all kinds of wacky characters from various ethnicities and some of the things you overhear in conversation on the bus go along way to explaining why the US is so socially unique.

I arrived in Houston having already established a friend who offered to show me around Friday night and I was kindly taken for a run and then transported to a reasonably priced Thai restaurant for a much needed feed.

Having spent much of the past few weeks staying in noisy party hostels, it came as a massive relief when I discovered that my hostel in Houston was situated in a leafy neighbourhood, away from the downtown area and I have since enjoyed a relatively relaxing and quiet weekend. 

Houston itself reminds me a lot of LA, a vast area (not far off the size of London) with no real centre. The downtown area is primarily business focused and when we visited over the weekend it was near enough deserted, and I was half expecting the imminent arrival of tumbleweed. 

Although I resisted, pockets of nightlife and other activity exist around the city but most not within commuting distances of each other. Houston is so big that for natives, driving is essential and as a result public transport doesn't connect many parts of the city and when a friend and I caught the wrong bus, we ended up on the freeway and it took us over an hour to get back to our hostel.

Houston isn't the kind of place that you can take in the majority of sites in a day, nor does it feature a variety of famous landmarks, but it is a clean city where various areas offer differing attractions.

Over the weekend I've managed to take in some beautiful suburban neighbourhoods, visit the downtown area which is home of some stunningly gigantic buildings and take in a (real) football match, more on which to follow.  

I've also met a couple of great people and for the weekend, Houston certainly felt like home.

Tomorrow I'm off to New Orleans which promises to be an interesting chapter in my trip. A city that nature pretty much razed to the ground, but from what I hear has recovered to be one of America's most electrically vibrant areas. It should be an interesting few days!