Sunday, November 11, 2007

Travelling

Since we last "spoke" I have been to Dallas again, then to Paris and back to Dallas. Now I am home for a couple of days before I am off to Paris and then London. What an exiting life. Not.

I have no pictures of the first two trips. We broke every law regulating labour time that exists to meet the deadline set by Paris. There was no time for sightseeing or pictures. But the last trip to Dallas was different. Whereas the first two had been "disaster operations", unscheduled and with only a day's notice, this had been planned well in advance and comprised a workload that fit into the legal framework. Plus I wasn't on my own, but traveled with a group of 4.

The day we arrived we were immediately whisked off to see the
Dallas Mavericks play against the Houston Rockets at the AA Centre:



Yao Ming is 7-6 tall, a giant that makes the others look like dwarfs:


The German interest in the game is of course Dirk Nowitzki, mereley 7-0 tall:


The audience was in rapture...


(I fell asleep during the game several times. It WAS exciting though, but my body thought it still was in time zone 7 hours ahead.)

I thought a maverick is a motherless calf, so why is the mascott a horse?


This is when we left to beat the traffic:


The next day we had lunch at Southfork Ranch, scene of the 80s tv series Dallas). I did not watched it, neither in the 80s nor when it was rerun later (more of a Dynasty viewer myself), but still I know the main characters and it has influenced my pictures of Texas a great deal. I guess, this is why we were taken there (even though I was told later by someone in the office that it had been especially requested by someone in our party - not guilty!).




Apparently this bath tub was used in one episode as an "olympic pool". They do it with mirrors, baby!


And this is what Texas will look like in my head forever...



That's a cool car. I don't want to know how much petrol it needed.


I feel like a stuffed Thanksgiving turkey. We had three full meals every day: breakfast at the hotel, lunch at some location and dinner at a steak house. Dallas has many steak houses. I am vegetarian. They did serve me vegetables, but I can tell you, I am not going to have brocolli for a while.

I have started to run again (have you heard that one before?), but my goal for the London marathon is down to just finishing. Over the next months I will not be able to train much and therefore need to concentrate on making the distance and not getting faster. Maybe some other year.