Fun in Houston

Let me preface this by stating that I do not know the city of Houston. At all.

So its the weekend, and I decided to do something crazy. Why? Just because I needed to get out. Since I don't know anyone I decided just to kinda go at it by myself. So I found a concert in this park near downtown and for some reason or another just decided to go Saturday night. Well... My plans went bad basically as soon as I started. The "highway" that I had planned to take straight to it was in fact a toll way that you could only use if you had an ez-pass, which I do not have. So i had to take backroads all the way there. With the high way it would have been an hour drive, on the backroads it took me an hour and a half, and somehow, with my magical sense of direction, I found it. Wow... its crazy. I kinda can't believe I did that.

Anyways, so I made it to the concert and it was really really cool. There were like 5000 people watching this mo-town concert. So finally I saw these three guys and one of them had a hat that was from a frat, so i knew they were college kids. So I went up to them and just said "hey, i'm from wisconsin". So we hung out for a few hours. It was fun. They were good kids, but i didn't get their number so I can't hang in touch with them which is too bad.

Also, me and my roommate Miguel went to a columbian restaurant (he's from columbia). The food was really really good. Lots of it too. So I was happy. Fried plantains! The beans were really cool too because they take beans and the mix in avocado right in the beans to make like a baked bean avocado thingy. Its cool.

I'll keep ya'lls posted. I'm playing ultimate frisbee tonight with some random people and I hope it doesn't rain. Otherwise work starts on Tuesday! I'm excited.

Arriving in Houston

Let me preface this by stating that Houston is a HUGE city. It is a central city that has three concentric circles of highways. Each time the city has expanded to reach the outside of these highways. And they are HUGE. I've never driven on an 18 lane highway until I came to Houston, and yup, there is. Thats crazy. If there is no traffic then it would still take you 45 minutes to drive from top to bottom, or east to west of the city.

We boxxy'd into Houston down around noon. I moved into my apartment, which is very nice. Its not huge, but

its nice and I have my own room and there is a nice kitchen. After that we met for lunch with this friend of my moms. One crazy thing I should note about him is that when my mom asked what he was driving so we could follow his car to the restaurant, well, he was driving a Black Ferrari if that is any indication of his personality. Pretty awesome. Good guy to know thats for sure.

I don't start work until Tuesday, which means that I have a week to "chill". Things are kinda rough because I don't feel spending gobs of money atm, but since I haven't started work I haven't met anyone in houston yet, and my roommate will be working, so I don't really have anything to do. We'll see what I feel like doing. I guess I'm getting a tan and hanging at the beach. Not too bad I suppose. Eating a lot too. Cha cha folks.

Thanks,

Guthrie

Houston Day 3

Let me preface this by stating that this trip has officially became long. We awoke today and headed out after a quick breakfast towards Jackson MS.

We stopped briefly to tour the historic city, and it really is pretty cool. It was very quiet but it is a very cool city. It seems very very nice.

After that we got on the road. We stopped at a little sandwich shop off the highway for lunch and started the long mostly painful trek to Louisiana. Wow. That was a long sad journey through Arkansas, there is NOTHING there. It was amazing. The radio was the best part. There was this ad that w

as like a public service ad to "keep arkansas beautiful" and it was this role-play about how a big littering problem in Arkansas is litter blowing out the bed of pickup trucks. Wow.

http://www.keeparkansasbeautiful.com/litter_prevention/

Finally we made it to Louisiana. It is a cool state. Just a lot of interesting wetlands as you get near New Orleans. Well, we made it down and visited the french quarter and bourbon street for a while. It is a truly amazing place. Its just so weird, and old, yet really really huge. Feels very European. Sadly there is a touch of "touristyness" a bit but you can still find pockets of authentic-ness away from bourbon st.

We stopped to grab a bowl of gumbo at a nice little restaurant. It was not what I expected it to be, but it as still pretty good. I mean... its gumbo in New Orleans, can you really go wrong?

So after a quick jaunt we headed out and finally settled in a hotel in the middle of the state. Fun.

Houston Day 2

So we woke up and decided to get to St. Louis as soon as we could. So we got in the car and gotta' driving. At around noon we got OUT OF ILLINOIS! What a crappy state. Its really long too. So we crossed the Mississippi River.

There was TONS of flooding, but we crossed without much fanfare. After some rough in-city traffic we parked and stretched the legs at the Jefferson Memorial Park (the one w/the arch). St. Louis is a cool town. Its very big

and stretched out, but lots of cute little brick houses for as far as the eye can see. The brewers happened to be playing the cards in town, but we obviously didn't stop because we needed to get a move-on. I got some nice footage of the Arch. Its a very impressive statue that will be around forever. The rest of the city was... ok.

I did a little background research and found out that even though the city is very old, it got ravaged by a fire a

nd a tornado and so most of the great old historic buildings from the 1700's are gone. :-(

As it turns out, it used to be the 4th largest city in the US! Not any

more. The arch really kicks ass though. It makes you kinda proud to be a human.

So we moved on and gotta driving in MO. After St. Louis the landscape changes. The trees all of a sudden become the southern conifers and everything is really flat. Lots of X-stan radio stations too. Our destination was Memphis, and after a 50 mile jaunt into Arkansas (never go, I'm telling you...

I-55 through Arkansas has nothing in it. Nothing. for miles) we reached Memphis in TN. Well, they have kinda like a "state street" where B. B. King

got his start. That one street was hopping, but the rest of the city is falling apart. It looked really really bad. About half the build

ings we saw were abandoned and falling apart. We did find an awesome little barbecue joint and got some more cholesterol. I told you, i'm going for death before TX. I'll make it too. It had the best baked beans I've ever had bar none.

We felt like we should keep going to make the trip to

New Orleans tomorrow a little nicer so we drove about an hour south of Memphis into Mississippi and are chilling at a hotel in Batesville MS. Fun. I've never been to the south before so this will be interesting.

Driving on highways instead of backroads is twice as fun.

I'll give ya'll an update tomorrow as well.

Journey to Houston

Let me preface this by stating that the point of this trip is to get down to Houston for my internship with BP.

So I'll need a car down there so me and my mom are driving to Houston together. Fun. Its a long long drive from Madison (which I do miss terribly). Regardless... it will take us three days to get down there.

Yesterday we started in Madison WI and woke up at my mom's friend Katie's house. We got on the road at about 8, and started driving. Well... we got down to where we were supposed to hook up with I-55 going south and wouldn't you know? HUGE storms were coming. So we were trying to get to St. Louis that day so we decided to go west instead of south for a while. So there we were in Illinois driving around on rural highways during a downpour. The funner part was the driving through the washed out road behind the cop car. There was massive flooding. I will forever be haunted by this one mental image I have. We were driving on highway 76 heading south and i look out the window and its a huge lake for as far as the eye can see of brown murky water. All of a sudden my highway has an intersection and a road and power lines run off into the deep. All you can see are the tops of the power lines running off into the dark flooded abis for miles. It was a truly traumatic sight. There was some major major flooding down there.

There were also 6 tornados which we managed to avoid and we got to Davenport IL right before that system of storms came in (literally, i ran into the hotel just as the downpour started). So. We stayed the night in Davenport with the hopes of making it to Memphis in the morning.

For eating... we stopped at this little mom and pop joint and I grabbed a burger. Simple. Filling. Cheap. My goal is to die of high cholesterol before I finish this trip. I figure I'm well on my way.

Rice.

Let me preface this by stating that I have nothing against chop sticks.

Nothing at all... But... Lets face, its really hard to get those last couple grains of rice out of the bottom of the bowl. Man... if you ate with a spoon you could grab those last 15 grains of rice in the bowl. So naturally this idea came to mind, so I decided to run some numbers --

#1. According to http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-27637-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html

a grain of rice weights in at .28 grams

#2 we can assume there are 15 grams of rice left over in an empty bowl.

#3 we can assume people eat three meals a day.

#4 We can assume half of the world eats rice everyday (this means that if someone in africa eats rice today, then someone in china can have noodles, so I think it evens out).

Lets run the numbers!

.28 grams x 15 grains = 4.2 grams

4.2 grams x 3 meals a day = 12.6 grams per day

12.6 grams x 3 billion meals per day = 37.8 billion grams

37.8 billion x 365 days = 13,797 billion grams a year

13.8 billion kg a year.

From what I could gather... a 20 kg bag of rice is going for about $20 on average around the world. That means a $1 a kg... which means that the global price is about 13.8 billion dollars a year. That is slightly more than the GDP of Bolivia, or about a billion more than Uruguay, Turkmenistan, and Honduras.T

Lol, economics is so fun! And thats just rice at the bottom of a bowl. I haven't even started thinking about the effect of disposable chopsticks.

Thanks,

Guthrie