Don't Mess With Texas!

I like Texas. I didn't think I would, but Dallas looks positively radiant after the dank gloom of Chicago and the monotonty of the Midwest. It's 27 degrees outside and what's more our Texan friends have planned a stay for us that doesn't just involve walking round and round JC Penney. On the contrary we spent the first day in the Sixth Floor Museum, which allows you, for a mere $8, to walk around the Book Depositary and look out of the very window from which Lee Harvey Oswald did or didn't (depending on which side of the debate you sit on) shoot JFK. The museum is surprsingly informative, bordering on the obsessive, detailing all the conspiracy theories and their pitfalls, but, refreshingly, not giving you a definite answer either way. You can see for yourself all kinds of sombe nick-nacks, from the place set out of Kennedy for his Welcome Dinner that evening, complete with menu and place card, to the cinecamera that recorded the famous images of the shooting.

Downstairs, you can have your picture taken on the very spot where the shooting took place, which has been helpfully marked out by a white cross in the road, though you have to coincide with the traffic lights or you will get killed by the tourist cars zooming down Elm Street as though en route to Parkland hospital - Kennedy's last journey. Apparently until recently there existed such a thing as the "JFK Experience," where for $20 you were taken in an open-top car the whole route from Love Field to Elm Street, where sound effects of shots would ring out before you were whisked at breakneck speed under the bridge towards the hospital. This has now stopped as apparently it was considered tasteless.

Food in Texas is fabulous. America is notably meant to be one of the fattest nations on earth, but I can see why - TexMex. I could eat it every day for the rest of my life (which would probably be quite short if indeed I did do that.) But there's a scary side to Texas, too, though. This is one of the most religious states in the USA and also one of the richest, and dodgy churches makwe a fortune out here. We passed a church every hundred yards or so, about a quarter of which were "megachurches", with vast congregations which tithe huge proportions of their salaries to the businessmen who run them. Our friends work in local hospitals and have seen first-hand patients who have refused treatment or stopped taking medication because "God has healed them", or, worse, God has "told" them he will heal them if they prove their faith by stopping treatment. Many have died, but one told my friend as her life ebbed away that she would rather be dead and in heaven than alive having disobeyed God and condemned to Hell/ There's a Catholic counter-argument to this, of course, where the body is deemed sacred, a gift from God that we should take care of, and we are being wilfully negligent if we take a course of action we know will cause irreparable damage when an alternative is available. These people would say that this is simply the Devil convincing me to lose trust in God, but then, I'm condemned already - I'm unmarried and I support gay unions, which I doubt will ever even be an issue worth debating in Texas. Also worthy of comment was an unexpected reaction to a play we saw in Dallas's Pocket Sandwich Theatre. One character, an alien (I won't bother to explain, suffice to say the play required a certain suspension of disbelief) comments that next time he comes to earth he will coincide his journey to participate in the Civil War, "but I think it would be much more fun if the South wins next time". Whoops and cheers from the audience, I hope out of a lack of thought for what this would actually have meant. We sat in silence.

There's one thing I have failed to do in the States. My boss, with his pink not-to-scale model of San Pietro still gleaming on his desk, has come to expect a tacky souvenir from each place I visit, but it must be below a certain limit, in this case $4. I expected finding something tacky in the USA would not be a problem, and I was right, but the trouble is that where the likes of Rome aims its tack at middle-income pilgrims, the USA seems to think that it's tacky souvenirs, along with everything else produced in the USA, are worth their weight in gold. The best I would come up with would have been a plastic Armadillo with "Don't Mess With Texas" written on its back, a mere $4.99. When I looked underneath it turned out it was made in China.

Travels in the Happy Car

Woken up at 7.00 by the overly-chirpy announcement that "this station is Little Rock"! Actually we should have been in Little Rock almost four hours ago, so maybe he's just pleased we made it at all. I am on Amtrak, travelling across a part of America that makes Crown Point, Indiana look exciting: swathes of flat, colourless terrain interrupted only by the occasional trailer park. Only the St Louis skyline breaks the monotony - it's very beautiful, and the only big city we see until we pull into Dallas, six hours behind schedule.

We are in carriage 2130, room 2. I can tell you who was in ever other room of carriage 2130 too, if you ever feel the need to know, as our car attendant, in an attempt to find us a souvenir, autographed for us her list of her charges.

Phyllis, our attendant, has been working on Amtrak for 24 years but has apparently never met anyone from England before. Once she'd found out she told everyone who passed her in the corridor, as though we'd told her we'd flown straight out of Neverland, "they're from ENGLAND!" Some feigned interest, but most didn't bother. She greeted everyone in a style I haven't come across since I last visited Butlins, shouting down the corridor "I'M PHYLLIS AND I'M GONNA BE HERE TO GIVE Y'ALL A GOOD TIME! YOU'RE TRAVELLING IN CAR 2130! I CALL THIS THE HAPPY CAR! WHAT DO I CALL IT?" A few people shouted back, but we hadn't got the hang of it all yet.

Amtrak is a good place to meet new people, partly because there's nothing to do on board, not even look at the scenery, because in the case of the Midwest there's not much scenery to speak of, and anyway we spent more interminable hours sitting outside corrugated-iron-roofed stations waiting for freight to shift than we spent tearing through the countryside. Among others we met a guy who didn't give us his name (he looked like a Bob to me) but who wore a cowboy hat and told us he and his wife were in the oil business, swiftly followed by how he loved Our Mr Blair. F and I don't love Our Mr Blair so we tried to be non-committal. Fortunately the conversation came to an abrupt end when he asked "so, y'all married?" We're not. Oops.

Back in The Happy Car Phyllis has been looking for sounvenirs and has come up with some Amtrak-branded cutlery ("Don't tell anyone I took it!"), some soap of a brand I've never heard of and a jar of instant coffee ("you just add water!" she added, in apparent disbelief of the miracles of science. Then she repeated this information in case we couldn't believe it either, and pointed excitedly to the instructions.) In return she would like us to send her a postcard of Princess Diana and another of Westminster Abbey. She gets rather emotional when I tell her I've met the queen (briefly), but tells us she doesn't like Prince Charles, whom she's sure murdered Diana. She asks where I met the Queen and is even more excited when I tell her I went to her church, because apparently she thought we were all heathens. This opinion is confirmed when we tell her that we teach evolution in our schools without much of a hint of protest from anybody.

We finally arrive in Dallas at 4pm, the only consolation being we got a free lunch we didn't have to pay for. We have left Phyllis with a pound coin and twenty-pence piece, with which she is delighted because they have the queen on them. She leaves us with some teabags, soap, napkins and cutlery bearing the Amtrak logo, a signed list of Happy Car passengers and a plastic jar of instant coffee ("you just add water!")

The Land of the Free, They Said

American immigration officials sure make you feel welcome. They're the first people you speak to upon arrival and they ask you when you intend to go home again. F and I clearly look dodgy as hell: we've already been hauled out of the line and made to take our shoes off and had our bags search in front of the prying eyes of the rest of Flight 50's passengers. We'd halved everything between us in case either bag went missing, and the guy who searched F's bag, having asked "did you pack this yourself?" looked decidely uncomfortable when the first thing he found in there was a bra and matching knickers, and he gave up looking for a bomb and hurriedly handed it back. As for the Department for Homeland Security, they wanted to know what we were doing in America, who we were staying with, why we were staying with them, where we knew them from and what they did now. This wasn't going very well at all - he clearly didn't believe that someone my partner had met on a Masters course at UCL (which he hadn't heard of and therefore didn't believe it was a real institution) was now flogging shoes in Crown Point, Indiana, and, perhaps more reasonably, he didn't understand why we wanted to come all this way in order to visit Crown Point, Indiana. Our friends in Dallas saved the day - they are both doctors, and Kristin had studied at UCLA. My payslip confirmed that I had no reason why I would want to disappear into the Midwest and become a carpark attendant - the current exchange rate means that once I had I translated my salary into dollars for him he thought I was loaded.

Our friend told us she lives "basically in Chicago". Untrue. She lives basically in small-town Indiana, in a land of water towers and telegraph poles and potholed roads that have to be resurfaced every year because the ice expands into the gaps and damages them. Everyone in the area has a pick-up truck and most of them seem to play in a bowling league (if I can figure out how to put photos on this blog I'll show you the 60-lane alley we visited.) This is because there isn't very much to do in Crown Point. You can look at the prison from which Dillinger escaped with a bar of soap (not, as I thought, by some kind of Houdiniesque trickery but by moulding it into the shape of a gun and threatening his way out) but this is now a craft centre; you can have brunch in the local diner (highly recommended); then you can go to the Mall, which isn't even in Crown Point, but just outside it, and which looks like one of those faceless factory outlets somewhere off the M6. Or you can drive 20 miles to the nearest train station and catch the once-an-hour train on its forty-minute trip into Chicago.

Crown Point, my friend told me brightly, is the second largest town in Indiana after Indioanapolis, and the county capital. It is, by Indiana standards, a hub of activity. I find this inordinately depressing. My friend now works as a customer service respresentative. She works 8-hour days and once she's been there a year she will be grudgingly granted ten days' holiday. She spends what little free time she has in a wooden hut that's inexplicably allowed to call itself an "Irish Bar" on the basis that it's green and sells Guinness, even though they play country music on the loop and serve what has (I hope through ignorance rather than malice) been called a "Black and Tan Brownie".

I was told I would like Chicago, and it is admittedly something of an oasis after the bleak monotony of the likes of Hammnod and Gary which we passed through on the train. It's also extremely chilly thanks to the breeze coming off Lake Michigan, and the mist is so low you can't see to the top of the Hancock Tower. Went to Gino's East for pizza pie, which is an excuse to make something that would otherwise be quite nice unneccessarily large and twice as bad for you. Chicago redeemed itself only by its Art Institute, which is one of the best galleries I've ever visited, outstripping even the National in both size (just) and variety of content. Here you can see various American masterpieces as well as Frank Lloyd Wright furniture and my new favourite painting, The Door by Ivan Alright, the bloke who painted Dorian Gray for the film. According to all Chicago conossieurs it's accepted wisdom that you should ignore Sears Tower and go up the Hancock instead, which has a view over the lake and a bar at the top, but the weather made this impossible. We eventually took the opportunity to go up Sears Tower on our third day as we waited for our train as it was only two blocks from Union Station. At 1,454 feet it's now only the third tallest building in the world, dwarfed by the Taipei 101 tower at 1,670 feet and narrowly beaten by the Petronas Towers in Malaysia at 1,384 feet. But, our guide tells us reproachfully, their satellite antennae make it still the tallest, it's just that you can't count those unless they are worked into the structure of the building, and that's what they did in Taipei, the cheating bastards!

Onwards - at 3.30 tomorrow I'll be in Little Rock.