Skip to main content

Las Colinas

Over near Dallas is a suburb called Las Colinas, planned and built by a guy called Ben Carpenter on his family's ranch. Despite concreting over swathes of prairie (which it could be argued was going to happen sooner or later anyway) he obviously had an eye for beauty, and commissioned an African sculptor by the name of Robert Glen to create a sculpture for the centre of the community.


The subject chosen was mustangs, wild descendants of the horses brought over to America by the Spaniards, who used to roam free on the Texas plains. At 1 1/2 lifesize, they are really impressive.


There's a small museum run by a very friendly lady who showered us with advice on where else to go while we're in the country. We followed her promptings on a couple of local things, and went to see some marble cows (not half as impressive as the mustangs) and a statue of Ben Carpenter telling Graham off.


We got some lunch at Joe's Cafe, one of those home-cooking establishments that I can't think of an equivalent to in the UK. Graham had chicken and dumplings, mashed potato with white sauce (why do they do that?) and red beans; I had meatloaf with potatoes and peas, and we rounded it off with hot fudge pudding, the banana pudding having run out.

The local art center was showing an interesting exhibition of photos by black artists, and a collection of amazing quilts. I don't like to think how many hours went into them, but the end result was certainly worth it.




After a stroll by the river and a short snooze on the bank, we started driving home. On the way we passed an Indian supermarket, and just had to pop inside. It was the real thing - 2 lb bags of chili powder, sacks of rice, weird Indian snacks with indecipherable ingredients, and even Birds custard powder, Smarties and PG Tips! We browsed around in a state of bliss for a while, and came out with some naan bread and some strange spiral rice snacks. Given that two more chillis have ripened on our little plant, this is a cue for a curry, methinks.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Growing things

For those of you who are interested in my attempts at balcony gardening, I thought I'd update you a little. For those who aren't, don't skip this post. You may find something else of interest. Apart from the ever-present herbs, tomatoes and cayenne peppers are on the go this year. The peppers are really on the go - we went away for a week and came back to find them twice the size as when we left. Now they're producing fruit which is growing at a similarly rapid rate, though none has ripened to red yet. I realised I should have given you some kind of scale, so I just went out and measured. They're about 22 cm long, or 8 1/2 inches for you non-metric types. I may have to find out how to dry peppers if they all ripen at once. A couple of tomato plants are looking pretty healthy and beginning to flower. A few died; one, apparently, by being eaten whole by a bird, a trouble I've never had before. I had two seedlings left so used those as replacements, b...
2 comments
Read more

Mr White Watson of Bakewell

Once upon a time, back in 1795 or so, lived a man who was always asking questions.  The kind of questions like, "Why is glass transparent?" or "Why do fruit trees grow better in that place than in this place?" or "What does the earth look like underneath the surface?"  This last question was one that he was particularly interested in, and he went so far as to work out what the rock layers looked like where he lived, and draw little pictures of them.  Now he was a marble sculptor by trade (as well as fossil hunter, mineral seller, and a few other things) so he thought it would be even better to make his little pictures in stone.  That way he could represent the layers using the actual rocks they were composed of.  Over the course of his lifetime he made almost 100 of these tablets, as he called them. Then he died.  And no one else was quite as interested in all those rocks and minerals as he was.  His collection was sold off, bit by bit, and the table...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Normal Christian Life: Spiritual Formation Book 1

"I have never met a soul who has set out to satisfy the Lord and has not been satisfied himself.  It is impossible."   The Normal Christian Life by Watchman Nee is the first of my four books for spiritual formation that I'm reading this year.  Watchman Nee was a Chinese Christian who was converted in 1920 and was able to spend many years in preaching and evangelism.  However, after the Communist revolution he was imprisoned, and died in jail 20 years later.  The Normal Christian Life is based on talks he gave in Europe in the 1930's. What are the main themes of this book? Nee starts by saying that it's possible that the normal Christian life has never been lived by anyone except Jesus - which is hardly an encouraging beginning!  He then goes on to outline his view of such a life, using the book of Romans as a guide.   He certainly sets a high bar: for Nee, the normal Christian life is based on a knowledge and experience of death to our old self...
Post a Comment
Read more