Part 1: Got here

Saturday June 2, 2007

Houston, day 1.
6:30 am. Woke up to go to Houston. Got dressed and got my stuff in order. I was supposed to be there, ready, at 7:15am. And I was, if only I had gone to the right place... I was at campus, when I should have been at the School of Medicine (If you don't know Monterrey, those places are FAR away). I got there and I was kinda still on time. Got some other suitcases in the Van and got my stuff in Silvia's car.

If anyone told you "You'll be driving to Houston", you would open GoogleMaps, Yahoo!Maps, MapQuest or anything of the like, and you would find that to drive from Monterrey, MX to Houston, TX you should be spending somewhere around 7 - 8 hours. Oh how naive... When following a van full of people that need to go to the bathroom at every town, and being followed by a truck with slow people that wanted to buy stuff at every single gas station along the way; the whole trip was around 14 hours.

Finally, we got there. Tired as hell, we got out rooms (Husky Village section), went to WalMart (WalMart section) and finally unpacked and went to bed at around 2 am in the morning.

--- Husky Village section ---
Arrived and went inside the Community Center. Got a little introductory meeting led by some guy named Derek, who thinks I'm a nice guy. How do I know? because out of the blue he asked my name and said "Sergio, you are a nice guy." in front of everyone. We all stared at each other, but hey! I'm a nice guy and that's what matters. After that we paid and got our room keys. I got to my room, and to my surprise it was NOT a five-star hotel. More like a 2 star motel. I mean it's nice (enough)... it definetly would had been better if my key opened my door, if I could actually close my room, if my blinds opened and closed and if my smoke detector wasn't lying on my desk without a battery and with the power cables hanging from the ceiling. It's all good. I reported those little issues to the person in charge, later to find out that "I want to report something" in Houston means the same thing as "please ignore me, these rooms are great". One thing they did tell us: "This is a very unfriendly, unsafe zone. Don't go out late, and don't go driving places you don't know, and whenever you come to a stop, lock the doors and roll up your windows". This place sure makes me feel welcomed. Should I worry that I'm living in an unsafe area where I leave my palm, laptop, iPod and money at my room, which I can't lock?

--- WalMart section ---
I had never been to a WalMart of the like. It was THE worst WalMart I'd ever seen. When we finally found shopping carts (by taking them from between cars in the parking lot) we went inside. There was not a single aisle that didn't have boxes and stuff in the floor. I want to think that it was clean-up day, but that only would make sense if that WalMart was 24/7, but it wasn't, it actually closes at midnight. Items were opened, cans were dented, people were mean and everything was dirty. It was just as if someone had lived there and was moving out. We got there at 11:15 pm so we only had enough time to grab whatever stuff we needed to survive until we found another WalMart to go to. I ended up with a lot (a lot) of 50c tuna cans (had to open boxes to find the ones that weren't dented). Tasted awfully by the way.

First day over. At least we all survived.