Couple of weeks ago my friend Daniel let me know that he was flying into Dallas and invited me to meet him there. It would be a fleeting flight (ho ho ho) and a bit pricey but the opportunity was tempting. I eventually accepted and on Saturday November 14th flew out to the Lone Star State.

Right now I am writing a retrospective on the plane returning to San Jose. While I did not spend a lot of time there and am unlikely to return there in the immediate future, I thought that I would write some thoughts.

6 Things I Think I Think About Texas Y’all

1) Texas has the biggest sprawl I’ve ever seen.

I had thought that the Taiwanese countryside had a lot of space in between buildings but Texas and Dallas really takes the cake. I took this picture from the airplane, marveling just how much countryside and meadow there is to see.

You can start with the airport, which is huge with rolling hills that stretch for miles. The rental car area feels miles away from the actual terminals (necessitating some sweating in the end as Daniel and I rushed to make my early flight after returning the car), with buses taking people from one part of the airport to another. For comparison, when we dropped off the car rental at the Philadelphia airport, we rushed to the terminals by crossing a street and cutting through a parking lot.

Everything is far away from everything else, forcing people to drive everywhere - almost everyone here drives a massive truck. Huge trucks = huge parking lots, which lead me to my next point.

2) There’s just so much land here

There is just so much space and land here that as a San Francisco based urbanist, it feels like an embarrassment of riches. You would be driving through the city a few miles away from the presumably expensive downtown area (which doesn’t feel bustling at all) and you come across these random empty lots of land. And then even when they are landscaped, you just have these immense voids of trees, shrubs and sidewalk that feel almost disgusting …

These huge tracts of land - while they may certainly feel ordinary and right to a native Texan - so violate my norms of urban living that I feel this urge to purchase them hand over fist. I want to break out my wallet and buy all the land I can, like one of those contestants on Supermarket Sweep, hefting deeds off the shelf and tossing them into my cart.

Why? Because after looking at San Francisco and NYC, this near-shameful plenty of land can’t last. It can’t right? Land is a scarce resource and Texas is the second biggest state in the country. It has to get used up some time in the future, right??? Then who will be laughing then because at that point I will be the biggest land owner in the state! MUHAHA!!

3) The houses are also BIG

I wasn’t able to get a whole lot of pictures but here is one semi-obscured example of the type of house that you can expect to see in Dallas:

After seeing a number of these houses, I feel like each of them are about the size of the billionaire mansions that I saw with Daniel whilst we were driving through the New Jersey and Pennsylvania countryside. Each of them are boxy shaped with windows and balconies with immense front, side, and back lawns quipping perfectly manicured grass. Such a house would be an anathema in New York City or San Francisco, torn down in an instant because it would be against code. Here, they seem to stretch as far as the eye can see (and the car can drive).

I saw a number of these for sale but couldn’t grab a flyer or some sort to look for a quoted price. San Francisco homes a tenth of the size of these places go for about $800,000 (and rising) if you are lucky. I have heard prices of $400,000 (and daresay … $300,000??) but I simply cannot believe it. It’s like they’re giving it to you for FREE.

4) Dallas has a lot more greenery than I expected

You might have noticed from the two earlier photos that I have published above but there is a whole lot of greenery here in the state. So I have no idea where I got the idea - maybe all the Western movies I watched as a kid - but the mental image I had of Texas was of a dry desert like area. Kind of like Southern California but even more so and with more cactuses.

This does not seem to be the case as there is plenty of plants, grass and greenery here. The air today (and it might just be the effects of winter) felt cool and moist like as if a mist had rolled through just before my plane landed in the city.

Where is this water coming from? Isn’t Texas supposed to be a desert state? How did they find the water to make things like what you see below …

Does it come from the Rio Grande? From underneath the soil? Is it from the Gulf of Mexico? Are they taking it out of the sky? Is the state at risk of a drought? I didn’t see any rivers. Would they be taking it from the rivers? Is it fair to the river otters that play in those rivers? I ponder these questions as I sit here writing on my plane to San Jose.

5) Asians are rarer here.

This is the first place I have traveled to where I felt like a legitimate minority. Taiwan, I felt lost in a sea of Asians. NYC, there are plenty of us to go around. Even Vegas has a bunch of us hanging about - making weekend trips from the Bay Area. Keep in mind I was here for 5 hours, but I clearly noticed a lot less of my type hanging about - so much that when I saw an Asian girl crossing the street near the Dallas Art Museum I pointed to her with an exclamation.

Not like people treated me any differently or anything. If I were to travel to some place like Budapest or Poland, I think I might be a true curiosity there. Texas, there are Asians of course, so I didn’t get oogled or anything but we appear to be significantly less represented. It takes longer for me to see a kin on the street. Most of the people here are Latino, white or black. And yes they got awesome mustaches.

6) BBQ is good … but it is also affordable.

I live in San Francisco, the best culinary place in the country, but when you talk about spendthrift value and taste, Texas gets pretty good going. I went to a BBQ ribs place in SF with my friend Audrey and shelled out $25 for a meat plate without blinking an eye. The same meat plate here costs about half of that.

(Above is a picture of me taking a picture of the BBQ place, which apparently has been in business since 1910. That’s a damn long time)

I got this awesome meat plate below which tasted excellent albeit was a little cold.

The beans did taste a bit too sharp and sour for my preference, but it can be acquired over time. The onion rings were HUGE, as big as my fist, but I definitely should have tried something else like the coleslaw. With all that being said and also the fact that I am no connoisseur, but I gave that plate five out of five. For sure would go back.

Conclusion

I am happy that I got to spend time here. Dallas might seem like just another part of the US of A but I really enjoyed pondering and noticing the differences even between these two mega cities in the country. Would I go back? Maybe, but definitely with a car. You cannot live here without driving. It is just too big, too sprawling, and too far.

Thanks to Daniel for the impetus to come out of the San Francisco bubble.

It being a day after the horrible things that happened in Paris, I thought that this was a nice gesture.

Next week, I am on the plane again, heading to two cities in Asia. Stay tuned.