Back from Houston (2)

Yet again I am back in the UK following a visit to the great State of Texas. Despite Jacqui Smith's expenses claims, along with those of many other MPs, it's a nicer place than Texas. 

The journey each way does not improve though. BA meals are beginning to bug me more and more as they are always the same on the way out and the way back. On the way back, at 01.30 in the morning UK time you get duck salad followed by braised texas short rib. Or something creamy in the pasta line or, worse, mahi mahi in creamy sauce. Or chicken and duck galantine with salad. I had that last time. And it's weird having duck salad after a duck salad starter. It gets weirder when you realise that those strange thin green slices on the salad are in fact raw marinaded potatoes. Why would anyone who claims to know about menus do that?

Of the last 4 flights, three have been on a 747 with a failed auxiliary power unit. No air-conditioning on stand, endless marching of engineers in and out of the flight deck followed by various explanations from gate staff and the Captain. On the way back this time, the excuse was "last minute security checks" from the gate staff and "a minor technical glitch meaning we have to start an engine on stand before we can turn on the air-conditioning" according to the senior first officer. Senior? There's only one of them in the cabin, I can see that as the door is still open to allow for the parade of engineering types. So why call yourself "senior" on the tannoy? By the way, only one of those engineers sports a stetson. He didn't fix anything either, by the way. 

It also takes a very long time to start the engine.  I still am not sure why. 

so, back to the food. I was left wondering for the fourth time in 6 weeks, why would you want duck then beef? I know, I know, inherently there's nothing wrong with that, it's just that late at night it's way over the top. And quite indigestible just before trying to sleep.....

Back from Houston

A small selection of sides. That's what the man said. Hash brown - a small field of potatoes shredded, pressed into a dinner plate size cake 6 inches thick and fried. Mashed potatoes - two large serving dishes with mash, with cheese and butter and cream and chopped cilantro (coriander to much of the rest of the world). Asparagus with bearnaise. Brussels sprout salad. Shredded sprouts, warm red wine vinaigrette and bacon bits. Green beans, times two. Lobster risotto. Fries times two on huge platters, dusted in salt and parmijan (parmesan to you and me). Warm cheese bread and butter. Spinach. 

That apparently is a small selection in Houston. Well, you say. If  you are feeding 40 maybe that's ok. NO, we were 9 in total. We all had entrees of monster proportions, we had all had starters again of gargantuan proportions. The beans and the fries would have been fine. As it was it took a lot of effort to send most of it back. It took a lot of persuasion of the servers that we didn't want it all put into nice neat doggy bags.

So, back to the land of the normal portion size and, maybe, just maybe, the cheese free meal.

No zoning laws

More foreign language. Houston has no zoning laws. Try driving down the I610 South towards Galveston. I did today. It's a big, wide road.  Along each side of it there is a random mixture of oil refineries, churches, houses, "gentlemens' clubs", video shops, Taco takeaways, "Chicken and biscuit parlors, schools, hotels, hospitals, scrubland, railway marshalling yards and more. Randomly dropped all over the place with no logic or order. None, I promise you. Like some child's toy box upturned and shaken over the floor to see what is there.

No zoning means no planning controls. You can put what you like where you like apparently. And people do, clearly. NASA Johnson Space Centre is opposite a block or two of new condominiums "now renting" on the seafront.  To an English ear "now renting" sounds like the condo has found itself somewhere to live but I suspect means that there are apartments available to rent.

Oh, answer this one- why is Mission Control for the shuttle in Houston, Texas, when it launches from Cape Canaveral, Florida?

Because that's where President Johnson wanted it to be, in Texas, his home state (he was a senator at the time, not president).  So there.

Houston, Texas

It's a very large place. 40km from the airport to my hotel. Downtown Houston can be seen from my office window when it's not too hazy, in the middle distance. 

The food is also large. Very large. Covered in cheese.

The restaurant I ate in last night has, as its smallest steak, a 12oz fillet. Sorry, fill-ay meegnon. It's coming momentarily with a special red wine Au Jus sauce. Funny, I thought the noun was Jus not Au Jus.  Oh Jzhooo, of course, is the correct pronunciation. If you were vaguely hungry you could have a 72oz t-bone, all to yourself. If you were seriously hungry you could have surf and turf. 48oz sirloin and 32oz freshwater lobster tail. With fries and slaw.

So, the waiter kept trying to persuade me to order the house special, fill-ay meegnon redwine Oh Jzhooo sauce, side of arugula and eggplant  with a chipotle wine vinegar dressing covered in melted swiss. Well I didn't, despite his best attempts to persuade me how good it was.  I can't eat dairy produce and swiss is cheese, an archetypal dairy product. No, feeling decisive, I ordered a plain fillet, blue, with fried onions and plain spinach, no cheese, so I thought. Vegetable chosen from the traditional vegetable section of the menu.  Traditional and simple food apparently, from the old world. I turned down the cheese bread and creamed butter. I turned down the olives stuffed with tuna and mozzarella. I smugly sat and waited for my delicious USDA aged plain fillet shown to a searingly hot grill, meltingly bloody inside accompanied by my plain traditional vegetables.

Some hope. Boy did they get me. 

Blue=bleu=cheese(blue cheese), melted all over the fill-ay; onions were a field of large onions, chopped into 2" high rings and deep fried in a delicious parmigan (pronounced "parmij-jan") batter and the plain spinach was sauteed in butter with a couple of pounds of delicious crumbly feta (cows milk not goats milk or sheeps milk) mixed in for effect.

I got the Oh Jzhooo sauce in a jug. I didn't order it but they thought I might want it anyway. I stopped a veritable procession of waiters from pouring it on my steak for me. I had managed to scrape off  nearly all the cheese and didn't want to cover the only edible part of the meal with boiled redwine and cream thickened with butter. Until I took my eye off the table for a microsecond to talk to someone on my left and the head waiter pounced from the right to pour my sauce for me........

Misnomers (3)

The congestion charge. Well, actually this is the first misnomer that arguably is correctly if literally named. The congestion charge is now a charge to allow you to drive from congested roads choked with traffic trying to avoid the charge to roads choked with the traffic that has either paid, is exempt or gets a special low rate. What it is not, of course, is a charge designed to discourage you from driving into London

In driving in town of course you now have to brave bendy buses, the odd cyclist who confuses you by actually stopping at a red traffic light and idiot pedestrians walking in the road or crossing in front of you, their noses in a magazine, ipod headphones in their ears oblivious to all and sundry. More than occasionally now, motor cyclists and motor scooter riders join in with the blithe law-breaking watched by our wonderful force of community support officers (police look-alikes with little training and few powers).

Road traffic law is rapidly and irredeemably falling into disrepute as people ignore it. Cyclists are jumping red lights, riding the wrong way up one way streets or the wrong way round roundabouts, ignoring cycle lanes and riding in the middle of the road, riding on the pavement, having no lights or high visibility clothing not even arm-bands at night. No care at all. Why have laws if the only people they are enforced against are the owners of cars because they are an easy target of cameras? 

Road rage nowadays is all too often some righteously angry cyclist banging his fist on your car without warning complaining about some trivial slight often imagined or the increasing number of people who assume they have the right to hoot and then scream abuse at you to stop you doing things they don't like, like reversing into a parking place when they want to drive past, like not letting them turn right in front of you rather than pass safely behind. I could go on and on but will finish here.

All of this is bound to lead to an increasingly angry, frustrated environment and I think it is only a matter of time before some uber-gridlock finally causes a car drivers' riot....

Gatwick North Terminal

Misnomers (2). Gatwick North Terminal. It's not one terminal at all. It's two.

Why do I say that? Well, going to the new gates, numbers 101 et seq in the North Terminal is not a light hearted last minute undertaking. It gets in the way of using all of BAA's lovingly fitted shops and restaurants. If you have lots of stuff to carry and arthritis of the knee, forget it. It's 10 minutes walk. 

So often, transport utilities define a 10 minute walk as one which would take an arthritic tortoise 10 minutes provided it didn't get lost en route.  This walk however is a real 10 minutes up hill and down dale. It's a bridge between terminals, the old North and the new North. You have to walk as the travelators don't always seem to be willing to travelate (if that is the correct new verb) and the man driving the battery powered cart won't give you a lift even though he has 6 seats spare as "you didn't book and you're not disabled".  Interesting judgement, the latter. To be disabled you clearly need outward signs of disablement, stick, dark glasses, hearing aid or similar. I don't consider myself disabled but I do have a bad knee and find it hard to walk far. Don't think that does it though for cart drivers.

So, the new gates are miles away in a new building. Its not the North terminal except for one thing. It's only got loos and gates. 

No shops. 

The fast bag drop

I am starting a new theme. misnomers of major proportions. The fast bag drop, a term unique to BA, I think, is number one. 

The miracle that is the internet allows you to check in on-line, print off your boarding pass and go to the airport to drop your bag off at the fast bag drop. It sounds wonderful. No queueing, no hassle while the people in front try to blag an upgrade only to discover their ticket is for yesterday or they've left their (expired) passports at home or their bag weighs 100 kilos and the don't want to pay the excess. 

No sirree, the system seductively offers you the chance to drop your bag off quickly and go painlessly through security to swoon in delight at all the wonderful shops BAA have provided to part you from your money.

Well, it's not true. The check in queue is now the fast bag drop queue. Check in staff are (largely) no more. Fewer people man fast bag drops (they are fast after all) and so the queues are longer. Cheaper for the airline in labour costs, but longer. Add to that the length of the security queues and the inevitable person in front who thinks the tiny bottles in one plastic bag rule only applies to others and its easier than ever to miss out on all that lovely shopping. Or the coffee in the lounge to prove you have a gold card or the flight.........