San Antonio

On January 2nd Stephanie, one of our new roommates, took Corrie and me to San Antonio. It was my first trip ever and Corrie's first trip in at least a dozen years. The main entertainment opportunity for us on that day was the availability of extra tickets for the Alamo Bowl, which was being played at the Alamodome.

Stephanie's brother lives virtually in the shadows of the Dome, on the southeast side of otherwise flat-and-ugly San Antonio. Other people were visiting her brother (more siblings and family friends) down from Lubbock, where they lived...Lubock is a college town, and it seemed like everyone at the House in the Shadow of the Dome went to the college in Lubbock, otherwise known as Texas Tech. (Stephanie is the only UT grad in her family.) You might imagine that one of the teams to play in this year's Alamo Bowl would be Texas Tech. The Red Raiders opponent were the Michigan State Spartans.

I mentioned earlier that San Antonio was flat and ugly, but that characterization disregards the sprawl. Austin is north of San Antonio by about ninety to a hundred miles, but, with the sprawl of both cities, the time it takes to get from the most southern point seen as southern Austin to the most northern point of San Antonio is about twenty-five minutes...

Plus, "flat and ugly" totally disregards the surprisingly beautiful tourist zone: The River Walk. San Antonio revitalized their river front area into a "river walk" zone of commercial interests and lax open container laws. It was quaint and bustling simultaneously, reminding me of New Orleans with a touch of Venice. We probably would have enjoyed it more had the walkways not been packed with competing red/black (Texas Tech) clad vs green/white (Mich. State) clad drunken yahoos and their kids, but, it was still mostly fun. We were still in Texas, obviously, so the backers of TT were in the majority, and during our walk along the river we'd here the clarion call: "RAIDER!" would come from one side, expectant of it's rejoinder and answer, coming from everywhere, "POWER!"




I thought the game itself would be nice--our first Bowl Game--and since we didn't really care about the teams (er, schools), we'd have no emotional attachments and enjoy a carefree game. The game, which Texas Tech eventually won, and covered even, was close for the first three quarters, even after the Tech head coach was fired the week before the game for locking a student in a closet. It took too damn long, though. American football is a game that counts-down fifteen minutes a quarter for four quarters...an hour of game clock, right? Fans understand that turns into about three hours of real time. This game started at 8 pm (we thought is started at 7), and the fourth quarter got started at about 11:25. It finished up around ten minutes after midnight. Yikes.



The first thing we did when we got to San Antone was check out the Mercado, where we took this weird picture.



The Mercado is the site of the old 19th century market where the latinos and the whiteys used to meet to sell their respective wares, and now a street fair and market live on the site, reviving the spirit.