April 5 - El Paso (3 days worth)
Trip Start
Mar 14, 2000
1
14
24
Trip End
Apr 30, 2000
El Paso,
Texas,
United States
Wednesday, April 5, 2000
Very, very occasionally I get the urge to go for a run and this morning I did. I jogged around the city, up a hill for about 45 minutes but the 30C+ temperatures made running hard going so that was enough for me.
Back at the hostel, Lewis accosted me with one of his lengthy and painful conversations. This one was about microwave popcorn. Then he invited me to Mexico with him tomorrow to "show me around" and maybe see a movie. A movie? In Mexico? With Lewis? I made some hurried excuse that I had planned to see the museums tomorrow, but then Lewis invited himself along.
TUESDAY 4 APRIL - EL PASO. DAY 15
Woke up late and sneaked out, deliberately avoiding the unwanted social advances of Lewis. The El Paso Museum of Art isn't that bad actually, with a few good landscapes of the area, some old European stuff and some neat photos.
When I got back to the hostel, there was a new guy there, Haaken from Norway. The poor guy was subjected to both Antonio and Lewis in a short space of time. Antonio is an expert on everything and kindly imparted his obviously vast knowledge of photography on Haaken by telling him the way to get good photos of almost every square inch of Texas. Example: "Now, if you want a picture of the south-east corner of the junction of 3rd and Franklin, then, providing you are using a wide-angle 95mm Kodak X420I, you need to shoot between 7.42 and 8.01am with the sun over your left shoulder between your elbow and the lower part of your ear and crouch down so you are shooting at an angle of no more than 76 degrees . . ."
Haaken patiently sat through this pretending to listen for about 45 minutes before Antonio finished, then said ". . . er, thanks". It was a case of jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire as Lewis proceeded to try his Norweigan language skills out. He said something in Norweigan to which Haaken replied, also in Norweigan. Lewis, blatantly not understanding any of it, scowled and started complaining to me about how Norweigans don't speak their own language with an American accent. Then, perhaps inevitably, after a pause he said "so, do you have microwave popcorn in Norway?"
WEDNESDAY 5 APRIL - EL PASO. DAY 16
My Visa card had arrived today. Yay. I quickly nipped across the road to the bank and took out $200, then celebrated with dinner at Arby's (a fast food place) and hung out at the hostel where I even had a mildly interesting conversation with Lewis
Observation. American people aren't as friendly as they make themselves out to be. Sure, they're talkative, but not always in a nice way. And, strangely, the ordinary people on the street are more friendly than people in stores/shops who should be nice to you to get your money. Example: I went to a corner store, took a can of Diet Coke to the counter and placed it there. The woman looked at me for a while before realising I wasn't going to volunteer any money until I knew the price. "Sixty-five" she said brusquely. I said, "you mean 'Sixty-five please'". She stared at me blankly until I decided it wasn't worth the hassle and gave her a $1 bill. She gave me change as if it were the biggest hassle in the world to reach over to the cash register, and without a thank-you she returned to her conversation with another woman and they both looked daggers at me as I left.
Another example: I rang the Longpré Guest House/Hostel in New Orleans to make a reservation. The guy was extremely offhand and unhelpful. At the end of a very unfruitful conversation I said in my happiest sarcastic voice: "and thanks for being so very helpful and cheerful" and the guy hung up on me. Now is that very nice?
I had lost a bit of momentum during my enforced layover in El Paso, and I needed to think of Lewis to get the necessary motivation to leave.
