How to become a shopoholic.

This place is pure madness. Correction. People are mad. They demonstrating frightening symptoms of fixation, retardation and Britishism. Ok, this latter one is not really a problem, it is something rather unusual around here.

Yesterday I (and some other fellow international students) finally moved in to our rooms for the academic year. Well, I thought these are college dorm rooms even if they are singles and we only have to share the bathroom with one other person but the first impression most of us had was... outrageous. So we decided to get go down to Wal-Mart to pick up some cleaning products so as to make up for the cleaning the apartment managers insisted they have had done. Clearly someone visited the rooms and tried to do something about them, but this was certainly not the best cleaning job I've seen. We tried to call everyone we knew had a car to give three of us a lift to Wal-Mart. They were either out of town or didn't pick up so I thought we'd do this the next day. But the one of the guys insisted he could not go to sleep until the cleaning is ready and he doesn't mid staying up all night long cleaning the toilet. But this was a FRIDAY NIGHT! Noone can be so needy on a Friday night. Except for booze and women. This guy was persistent. So we went down to Wal-Mart by taxi. $10 for each of us. Then we asked the driver for his cellphone number and begged him to stick around to pick us up later. (The charm of one of the girls riding with us helped a lot in that department...)

Now if you think girls can shop for a long time, you're wrong. This guy and the aforementioned girl together were just.... (I can't even find words for it. Slow is like lightning compared to these two.) Not that they didn't move around fast enough, it's just that they kept changing their minds about everything. And this guy, who has lived in England for the last 4 years or so, just wined about how awful his bathroom looked for almost one straight hour. It wasn't funny after a while even though his rather British accent and choice of words. (Like "This toilet is dreadful. I haven't seen anything so dirty in my entire life." "Oooh God, what am I going to do now?!")

Oh, and by the was, never dare to buy blueberry juice ever. I tastes awful.

Once finished with this shocking shopping I joined another crew for dinner at a Mexican restaurant in another part of town. Another guy and myself went out with two other girls (both magnificent if I may do say so myself...) and yet another Spanish speaking guy. We grabbed a cab and headed for Midtown. Luckily, the driver had absolutely no clue where the restaurant was, didn't own a GPS and was constantly looking at a map with a flashlight through the whole ride. But we got there and it seemed we made no big errands. The food at the restaurant was fabulous. We had real good time, one of us convinced a mariachi that it was a girl's birthday so he sang songs to her for almost half an hour. Her face went red in an instant and stayed that way through the whole performance. :)

We then went to a club next door. (In Midtown there is virtually nothing else but restaurants and clubs all over.) The worst kind of Ibiza style techno dominated the place. But the others wanted to stay (because the other option would have been to go home and nobody wanted that really). After some beer it wasn't so bad but I could only enjoyed it after so many tequilas that I couldn't have stood still.


Today, however, was different in some way but basically not that different. We decided that we want to check out the shopping mall Galeria downtown. Since neither of us has a car and we tried to avoid being ripped off by some taxi driver, we thought it would be good to try out the (not so dense) puboic transportation system. It took us over an hour to get there. We had to change buses three times. But once we got there, it was like Westend, Mammut, Arena Plaza and 5 more of these put together. This would not be such a big deal except that the first floor was stores like Ralph Lauren, Cartier, Dior and the likes, the whole ground floor was just restaurants (not necessarily too good) and the second floor was mid-level stores paramount to Springfield (Abercrombie & Fitch for those of you who know these). Since I didn't bring too many types of shoes (and I was fed up by having my basketball shoes on nearly every day) I invested in a new pair of tennis shoes, and also bought some T-shirts. The Swiss guy bought some watch for about $600 and various items, it was sales tax holiday in Texas after all. (This means that on this one day the State of Texas did not collect sales tax on certain items like clothing so as to assist families buying stuff for their kids for the upcoming schoolyear. This generally meant a nearly 10% discount on everything but most stores also added their own discounts or had clearence sales.)


So much for extending my closet collection. I guess now I need to find out how to do my laundry around here. :)