As my time here in Texas draws to a close, I want to share with you a few interesting things I’ve done/seen/experienced:
- When I first arrived at the Mercy Ships HQ, in the orientation package, there are 2 pages of warnings about the natural hazards in the area. These include various venomous and otherwise snakes and spiders, poison ivy, fire ants, and scorpions. Welcome to Texas! After the initial urge of grabbing my bags and going home subsided, I figured that since it’s winter, I probably won’t see any snakes. I’ll wear jeans and boots and stay on the paths to avoid poison ivy. I’ll steer clear of any mounds of red dirt as they’re fire ant hills. I’m not afraid of spiders, but I’m not sure how I’ll react to scorpions, as I have never seen a real one before. Then one day, I found this right outside my room. It’s a fairly small scorpion, but it still got a mean looking sting. If the baby scorpion was hanging around my room, I dread to speculate where the mama scorpion might be!
- First Monday Trade Day – the world’s biggest flea market. It takes place in the weekend before the first Monday of every month, about 15 minutes from the Mercy Ships HQ. It is GINORMOUS! You can find everything under the Texan sun there – food, clothes, furniture, artworks, cosmetics, pets, farm animal, farm equipment, and even farm equipment manufacture paraphernalia!
- Cross Brand Cowboy Church – a bona-fide cowboy church attended by cowboys, wranglers and ranchers, where 80% of the vehicles in the parking lot are pickup trucks, where kids practice calf roping in front of the church, where the pastor uses saddle horns and jeans and pickup trucks in his analogies, and where even the toilet paper holders are made of horseshoes!
- Texas longhorns – a breed of cattle with really long horns (duh!), and is a symbol of Texas. I had the good fortune to see two type of said animal on the same day, one made of bronze, and the other made of flesh and bone.
- Southern words such as y’all, big old, fixin’
That’s all for now from Texas. I’ll be in the Dominican Republics for field service for the rest of this month. I will update this blog and post more pictures upon my return, so check back in March for more of Eddie’s adventures.
1 comment:
eddie, have a safe trip to liberia, and best of luck with everything.
i'd imagine you'll be passing through belgium soon, but i won't be seeing another airport for close to 2 weeks. it's all trains for me now, until i head home. my week at belcolade is almost complete, and it's been all i was hoping for.
but again, have a safe trip, and best of luck.
-adam
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