Another day, another greyhound bus. There were a few intimidating looking men, sporting tear-drop tattoos and suchlike on their faces. Everyone generally kept to the unofficial bus rule of keeping to themselves or just their close friends. I slept through most of the journey. Then we were in Houston.
We arrived at our hostel a couple of hours early. The Houston hostel, the cheapest accommodation we could find, was more of a glorified house. There was no-one there to check us in when we arrived. So we lay down on the couch and waited a couple of hours before the hostel workers returned from their break.
What we eventually did in Houston amounted to very little. It is a very boring city if you don't have a car. However, the characters we met were very interesting. First there were three pretty Czech girls on their way to Florida to sell toys. They generally kept to themselves. Then there was Patrick. A military man who offered to drive us out to get some proper Texas style ribs. He had some interesting stories having been a driver for an alcoholic colonel. When we saw the restaurant from the car, we were in the far left lane and the restaurant was on the far right. We had to go past it. Then there was no turn for miles. We ended up being taken to eat at a Subway. While Patrick went to a smoke shop to buy a legal marijuana substitute. He couldn't smoke the real thing because the army drug tested him every so often. It smelt like the real thing though, whatever it was. He drove us back to the hostel and then went out on his own to find a pool bar somewhere.
Then there was the guy that worked at the hostel in an official capacity as the internet guy. His job seemed to consist of signing people online after they had paid the internet fee, then just sitting around chatting and hoping his "eye-candy", the Czech girls would come down. He told us a sad story about some 15 year old Eastern-European girl that had come with an older bloke who had paid for their room. He said he found her crying in a corner one day because the man had taken her passport. He told her to go to the police and that was the last he heard of the girl or her captor.
We went out to go to a few bars. Until it became painfully obvious that the closes thing to a bar we could reach by walking was a 7-11 store. Ed got himself a slushy. I had an alcopop which I had to sneak back inside because the hostel didn't allow alcoholic beverages on its property. I was practically 14 again.
