Thursday, April 6

Downtown part 1

Hi y'all,

I finally managed to see some other parts of San Antonio. My dear friend Tom took me downtown on Friday after work and showed me some of 'his side ' of San Antonio. It was great, I really enjoyed it. The city itself has a great feel. I'll have to spend more time there to really work it out nut first impressions were kind of like the St Kilda side of Melbourne in the 70s, combined with 50s/60s America straight from cowboy films and something else... Lots of trees, huge old houses (stunning) and remnants of industry on the outskirts. The inner city was a max of tacky-land tourist (but that's all below street level on the riverwalk, and yet there's something magical about the riverwalk at the same time - I loved it) and some kind of suave home of business men in suits c1960. Like a john brack come to life (with a severe Mexican influence). I know that whole mental picture doesn't make any sense so you'll all just have to come to visit and see what I mean!

San Antonio hosted the first world fair 'HemisFair' in '68 and I think that was a bit of a boom time for the city, and it looks to me like a whole sections haven't really changed since! It's kind of cool. Makes me want to go to a barber though...weird.

I'm a bit deficient on downtown photos at the moment though...it got dark before I really got into the heart of it, but I have a few. These first two are of the place we went to first, called "La Tuna". It was great. The brown bits all over the ground aren't dried leaves, they're years worth of bottle caps, millions of them!




This is the flour mill just near La Tuna, still working too! One of these has a shot of a rock train in it too. Noisy, but I like em. Huge trains (length)




This is the tower of life. Only one of the cool buildings in town but a good representative (too dark to get the others by the time we had dinner)



Finally, a little taste of the riverwalk area. Lots of places to eat along this section and heaps of people. No railings either, so walking along the edge is a high concentration affair!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It's cool to get a glimpse of downtown San Antonio. We've been loving all the pics. That restaurant with the bottle tops on the ground is amazing!! What a strange feature to have...And those rock trains look huge! I can remember how comforting the sound of trains passing by at night was in Tennessee. Or are these just too loud to be comforting?! Texans don't seem to do "small", do they :) ?