Houston: a million bizarre little pieces

Houston is admittedly an ugly place. From one end to another, it bristles with car dealerships and chain restaurants. People drive in big cars from neighborhoods without sidewalks to malls without sidewalks. They walk (some waddle) into thousands stores, under the lights of a hundred thousand branded signs—ok, enough. Houston is filled with strip malls. It's a picture no one needs to paint.

That said, for all the scorn poured on it, Houston is a surprisingly diverse city—more authentically diverse than, say, Austin. It's also a big food city. There might be strip malls, but a single one can have a Japanese, Vietnamese and Turkish restaurant—many of them really good. There is even a supermarket specializing in Middle Eastern cuisine, the first time I'd ever been in one. We had terrific Thai food and the best bowl of Vietnamese noodles since a hole in the wall in Hue. It was all tasty.

For tourism, we asked my sister for a trip to the National Museum of Funerary History, which was suggested by one of my Facebook friends. It currently has an exhibit of a working 1900-era coffin manufacturer. My sister thought it sounded ghoulish. She had a point (but no imagination).

Instead, she took us to something that is, in a way, even more strange: NASA and the Johnson Space Center. (Pop quiz: why is the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Answer: because then-VP Lyndon B. Johnson put it there.) It's part McDonalds-Playland, and part very serious and sober history of the US Space Program. There are many very cool things: big rockets, full scale models of Skylab, moon rocks, knowledgeable staff—I've never been to a museum where the curators knew so much.

But I have to say there's something very odd about it all. Every single staff member lives convinced that going into space is the apex of human ambition. There is nothing cooler, greater, or more impressive than climbing into a tin can, strapping yourself to a rocket, and blasting into space. I admit it's really cool, and I'd love to take the ride. But if I had to hang out with those people all day I'd never make it. They were so clean cut, so dedicated, so driven, and so thoroughly humorless and boring, that I'd have to shoot myself and several of them long before I made it through the program.

Even so, NASA comes well recommended from me.