Houston

One of my Dallas roomies hails from Houston. 1 more roomy and I visited her over the weekend.

Our trip started with running out of office early and going by the train to "karda kutra" bus service's terminal. Now Dallas has 4 train routes- Red, Orange, Green and Blue. Lesson 1:  dont assume that only the Red train comes to your station, check colour code before entering the train!

At the bus terminal - even the most crowded terminal in india is better organized and less smelly. There are 6 logical gates that serve arrivals and departures, but only 2 physical glass doors that open out from waiting room to terminal. Hence the mis-organization, long winding queues and overall confusion. Our roomy adviced to reach and form queue early. The bus was supposed to be there at 7.00 pm. Come 7.45 and the arrival is declared- at different gate than what was displayed on a rolling display. We hustle from the queue that we had formed to the bustle at the different gate. In the subsequent chaos and crowd, the bus left without us. There is no customer service, the customer call centre closes at 6 pm. Wow. We were told that 7 o'clock bus had broken down. The 7.45 bus left with few 7.00 bus folks who paid 5$ extra to get in. The next bus is at 10.45 pm. Some moments of "what-to-do-nows", without even a disembodied recorded message to vent your frustration at. The people in the queue stay put. Finally another bus arrived, and we left for Houston at 8.45 pm! Reached Houston around 2 in the night.

Inside Mission Control Centre

The day in Houston started early to get to NASA on time. We headed to tram tour, which took us around the mission control centres. To get to speak to an astronaut, to get to know about the roles of Flight Director and Comms astronaut; the badges for the 65 space shuttles- successful shuttles have their badges on LHS wall, to see a shuttle (Saturn) close up- mindblowing. 

Badges of successful shuttles

Then another tram tour to see the astronaut training facility. Each participating country in the International Space station has its own module. The Russian ones- sunrise(Zarya) and star(Zvezda) are coupled by a US module called Unity. This nomenclature especially strikes a chord when the guide told us- if you want to confirm that US really went to the moon..ask the Russians. (Russians had to keep syncing their locations so that they wont collide with Apollo.)

Next stop- Galveston beach- played frisbee in warm water, frolicked in ocean a whole year after Cummins trip to Konkan. A short jaunt to Kemah boardwalk, a bollywood movie and back to "karda kutra" terminal. The story literally is back to square 1. This time the bus left without us thanks to the overbooking. We again got into 8.30 am bus instead of the 7.15 am one. The bus driver is like, good morning ladies and gentlemen, today we are going to..a HUGE pause..I was sure he was impromptu assigned the bus and he had no clue what the destination was! But thankfully, he collected himself..and..to Dallas, TX :)