Downtown Dallas Views

Downtown dallas is one heck of a congested area with narrow roads, high rise buildings, very few parking facilities. Since all the major corporations, museums and galleries are located there lot of people travel to downtown for work and pleasure. Here are few pictures....

Wills Point - A Texas Village

Wills Point is a small town or rather I'd say a village in back country Texas. since this is sited on the way to Lake Tawakoni we stopped by for lunch here. Like most Indian villages this Texas rural hamlet is also a one-road town. In the sense that this city has one main road which is a highway running through its downtown/ commercial district. After lunch I just walked around few blocks to caputre some pictures of Wills Point.

Will Point's main square... doesn't it look familiar??? I have seen a similar square/ round gazebo-like intersection in almost every Indian village

Looks like the city's largest business house

Thanks to road infrastructure like this, there is no real village in the US

Wills Point even has a visitor information center... wonder why???

Houston: Downtown Aquarium

I have had this long backlog of blogging about what I saw in Houston that it seems to be taking me forever to complete it. But I will catch up slowly. Well on October 3, 2008 we decided to checkout downtown Houston and since we had bought a city pass we wanted to visit the Downtown Aquarium, a place for children and lovers of aquatic life. For veggies like me the Aquarium offers a rare insight into the myriad varieties of aquatic life. And for foodies who love eating fish and other aquatic life, the restaurants in the same building offer tantalizing tastes. Choose your pick.

Old blends with New at downtown

Well before we got to the aquarium there were several interesting spots in Downtown Houston which I felt I must post and share with all of you. The streets are narrow and the buildings seem to reach up to sky, parking is scarce and the few lots where it is available one has to fork out $5 minimum. There is a certain amount of charm to downtowns in the US, they blend history and modernity seamlessly and one can tall glass skyscrapers rubbing shoulders with quaint brick buildings. I wish Indian cities had downtowns and residential areas separate and not the masala that is going on out there. Anyway that can be a separate post... now let us see what Downtown Houston had to offer us... in terms of sights.

One of the large buildings in Downtown Houston

Downtown Sights

Giant cement sculpture in front of an office building

Road signs are impressive looking too

A large church in downtown Houston

Waterbody in front of the city hall plaza

Mural inside the Houston city hall

Another view of the mural

Another view of the Mural

Entry to a walkway along the river

River Brazos which passes through Houston downtown... dirty as ever

Old and new buildings in downtown

Downtown Aquarium

Giant Ferris wheel in the downtown Aquarium complex

Facade of the downtown aquarium building

Main entrance to the Aquarium

Beautiful fountain in front of the Aquarium

Entry to the downtown Aquarium

There is a white tiger inside the Aquarium

Catfish.. visitors can touch and feel them

Dallas Asian Festival 2008

Last weekend (May 3, 2008) the Greater Dallas Asian American Chamber of Commerice (GDACC) organised its annual Asian Festival. The event aimed at showcasing Asian-American culture, food and business was staged at the Dallas City Hall Plaza in downtown. According to the GDAACC website the mission of Asian Festival is to "introduce Asian Cultures to the North Texas population" and was part of the celebration of the month of May as the Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. This unique and colourful festival has been organised every year since the past sixteen years.



The entire City Hall area was abuzz with activities and the atmosphere was thick with the aromas of Asian food. Large crowds of Chinese, Indians, Koreans, Bangladeshis, Indonesians and of course Texans milled around the venue visiting stalls selling indigenous products, food etc. But the maximum crowd concentration seemed to be around the super-high dias/ stage where all the cultural programmes were performed. I guess this was the biggest mistake of the organisers, to erect such a high stage. It was so high that people sitting among the audience had to crane their necks to see the performances.

And there were these pesky press photographers and other camera weilding people who seemed to be glued to the stage and obstructed the view of the audience. During one of the performances I got so irritated with the press photographer I had to walk to up to the organisers and complain. One of the reasons I couldn't get any good pictures of the event.

The event featured a slew of myriad performances including and not limited to traditional Indian dance of Bharatnatyam, Bollywood funk dancing, Hawaiian dance, Indonesian music, Tae Kwondo, Shaolin Kung fu and other martial performance and of course my favourite The Chinese Lion/ Dragon Dance. Till saturday I had seen the Lion dance only in Jackie Chan movies and I must say that this is what motivated me to attend the festival. The lion dancers swirled around, jumped and danced just like a cat would do. It was thrilling to watch the live performance.

Other performances that were notable were the superb Tae Kwondo performance by the Arlington club. The group delivered an excellent performance to the racy beat of the background music. The theme of war was effectively portrayed through their dance perforance. The dances by children of Indonesia, India and Hawaii were interesting too. Here are some pictures of the festival.

Tai Chi Performance, of course you can see the photographer's backs better than the performers

Chinese Lion Dance

Chinese Lion Dance, another picture

Traditional Indian dance

Hawaiian dance by kids

Hawaiian dance by adults

Vistas of Downtown Dallas

Yesterday after visiting the Meyersons Center I walked around downtown area, even as the cold winds pierced through my skin threatening to break it. One feature of these down town concept strikes me. The downtown area of most big cities is full of tall buildings which rise up 80-90 storeys. Suns rays hardly penetrate to road levels being effectively shielded by buildings and reflected off by their glassy facades. But travel 1o km away and it is difficult to find a building rising above ground and first and maximum second floor. While tall buidings are built of concrete, the smaller buildings are essentially built of wood with a brick exterior. Including our apartment most buildings around are of wood. Sometime while walking I feel strange and wonder if I jump around our apartment whether the floor will give away and I will find myself in the living room of our downstairs neighbour.

Here are some pictures of downtown Dallas and of some houses in suburban Dallas... I mean the city of Carrollton.

Roaming in Dallas

Have been leading quite a stagnant life since the past nearly two weeks. In Dallas, the flat-as-pancake state of US. Have been browsing about various places around here and visiting the city's main and interesting localities. There are hoardes of Spanish speaking people here. Many a time I have been mistaken to be Hispanic and addressed to in Spanish :).


One thing in the cities I have visited, I haven't seen any newspaper shops. The little shop selling odds and ends along with newspapers and magazines which is so common in Indian towns and cities is absent here. Magazines sell in all super markets while daily newspapers are sold through machines. Yes machines sell newspapers, much like the coin telephones in India. There are machines to sell water, coke and newspaper too. Here is the picture of couple of vending machines installed on pavement in a strategic location in downtown Dallas.



Last week my good friend George Dailey took me aroud downtown Dallas showing me how spaces have changed and are being managed by the city administration. George also treated me to a nice Tex-Mex lunch of cheese enchilada and rice at a cool restaurant in downtown known as Meanies. After the meal we made a beeline to Dallas downtown. Among the several landmarks we breezed past was the Dallas Museum of Art.



For the first time since entering US, I saw a railway level crossing where a train was passing through. Surprising thing is that though there is no gates like in India, fast cars, super fast bikes and even walkers and cyclists waited patiently for about 15 minutes before the train actually arrived and crossed over after it had passed. And another surprise, the train didn't blow any whistle. This was a great experience of the discipline that is followed here.




George showed me the major landmarks of Dallas including the place where former US president the flamboyant Kennedy was assasinated, the old museum, the 6th floor museum, the neighbourhood where Dick Cheney lived etc etc. One thing I noticed in US which is very similar to India, polluting creeks and rivers with drainage. There is this water stream known as Turtle Creek which flows right through the town. Authorities have made the surrounding landscape beautiful by planting lawns and builiding walkaways on either sides of the creek but then there are places where I saw huge drain pipes emptying all kinds of water into the creek. I expected better here. At leasts the water should have been treated before being let into the creek....

Anyway a unique feature of this creek is the round dam.. what is this? George said that he would show me a dam that I would have never seen anything similar in my life. I was intrigued and curious. Then he pulled over and showed me this unique well-like round shaped dam. What they have done is to make the creek accumulate at one point and then flow under a bridge they have built a wall and made a lake kind of feature. Then in the middle is a round well like contruction which leads across the bridge into the creek. A unique dam never seen such a feature anywhere during my travels.


Then we went back to downtown where we visited the giant cowboy sculpture. In the middle of a park near the Dallas Convention Center, is installed a life size bronze sculpture series of a herd of cattle being herded by two horse borne cowboys. The sculptures are so well executed and life like it makes a pleasant picture of how life in Texas was before development and industry came into fore.


Here are some pictures of the cowboy memorial.