Houston, Texas

Last week, we went to the GSA Joint Annual Meeting 2008, a large geoscience conference in Houston, Texas. We both presented our projects from Taiwan for the first time in front of an international audience - and were not catcalled or booed! So we enjoyed this conference and had a glimpse of Houston. It has an impressive, almost menacing skyline, as the following pictures demonstrate. Apart from that, Houston's downtown district is the 100% opposite of Taipei downtown. It entirely lacks any shops or restaurants in the streets and the sidewalks are virtually empty. No bustling life, no crowds of young people, no shops that squeeze into the tiniest empty corner, no waves of different smells of food,... nothing! Coming from Taipei, that was an almost eerie sensation!!



Only later we found out that all shops and restaurants are hidden in shopping malls located behind those menacing skyscraper facades, which are connected by sky walks and tunnels. So no one has to expose himself to the mostly hot and humid climate of Houston.


In the northwest of downtown, we found a small park, which belongs to a heritage museum. It displays some old style Texan houses from the 19th and beginning of 20th century, which stand in sharp contrast to the skyline of this quarter.



Houston also offered us the great opportunity to visit Micha's maid of honour and long-time friend Chris, who lives with her family there. Their 1.5 year old lovely daughter Mary was especially enchanting Kamil and twisted him completly around her little finger!


Of course, we visited the Space Center to see "all the sophisticated requisites of the faked moon-landing", as Kamil was pointing out! ;-)
Here you can see him in the very command center, from which all the Apollo missions were commanded - please notice the RED telephone!


Kamil in front of a mock space shuttle, which is used to train the astronauts to life and work in the shuttle and repair it in case.


Mary, Chris and Micha in front of the famous Saturn V rocket that carried the Apollo spacecrafts. These things are quite long!


Here is Kamil in front of the upper part of the Saturn V. Only the tiny charred, brown cone at the frontal tip of the rocket that hosted the astronauts used to return to earth, the rest was sequentially discarded during the flight.


Here are Kamil, Mary and Chris standing next to the Apollo 9 crew who was the first to have made it to the surface of the moon. The poor fellows still didn't manage to take off their spacesuits, because persistent spacecraft fans continuosly ask them to stand for pictures since 1969...


Kamil demonstrates the effects of reduced gravity on the surface of the moon with a clumsy version of Michael Jackson's moonwalk.


Little Mary, who was very fond of pointing at the real moon at Houston's night sky during our visit, had of course particular fun to find this one. She immediately tried to carry it home...