Exploring Dallas

It might be that being European, I'm too used to interesting sights, culture and more lively cities, but I still can't believe that there really isn't much interesting to see in Dallas. In my quest to find interesting places around here, I've been on two "expeditions".

Deep Ellum

The first one was yesterday (Friday) where we finish training a bit earlier than expected, and since the weather wash surprisingly nice I decided to go for a walk. Having looked at one of the maps of the city I've got, I found a place called Deep Ellum. Now this area is describes as, and I quote the map: "A hotbed of jazz in the early 1920's, Deep Ellum now swings with all types of music, plus independently owned restaurants and shops - a trendy, hip and modern area nestled within an old warehouse district.". Sounds good right? Loads of shops, restaurants cafes etc. was the image I had before I went out there. The distance wasn't that bad, I just went downtown and headed east on Main st. I did start to suspect that I should probably have taken a bus, as I slowly moved away from downtown and towards Deep Ellum. However, the weather was nice, there were still a few people in the streets, and I didn't feel too uncomfortable walking around on my own.

When I got to Deep Ellum about 25-30min later, what I found surprised me; the area was completely dead. Sure there are bars and probably swinging clubs of all sorts, but they were closed at that time and probably wouldn't open until a couple of hours later. I didn't notice that many restaurants and the only shops I could find were tattoo parlors. They might very well be independent, but it was surely not what I had expected :) In a way I was glad that most of the bars and clubs were closed, as I'm not really sure if it's a place to be seen or to be stabbed. When I concluded that there wouldn't be anything else to see, I headed back to the hotel with a short detour to the supermarket - believe it or not but I'm fairly tired of eating out breakfast, lunch and dinner. I needed something close to home cooked.

Pictures from Deep Ellum has been uploaded to my Dallas Jan 2007 - 2 Picasa album. By the way, I just read on WikeTravel that if you go to Deep Ellum on a weekday night, you should go in a small group...

Fort Worth

The second expedition was to Fort Worth today. Quite a few people from the office has said that we should definitely see Fort Worth with it's cowboys and stockades, so we were a small group of three people who set out on the 30 miles trip. Getting there wasn't a big problem except that when we checked the train schedules just before leaving the hotel, we found out that it didn't leave until an hour later and when we finally left Dallas it was a fairly boring one hour ride. Just to prove that even the scenery was boring, i shot a few minutes of film with my camera, which I'll try and upload to Google Video at some point.

We had lunch in Fort Worth, saw a bit of downtown, and started walking towards the area with the stockades etc. I had managed to get another map from the reception so we knew in which direction to go. It didn't take us too long though to figure out that walking would take hours, so we luckily got a taxi to take us the last stretch. I'm not sure how long it would actually have taken us, but we quickly decided that we were definitely taking a taxi back to Fort Worth again later.

Almost the first thing we saw was an old style saloon, people with cowboy hats (probably not real Stetsons) so we had arrived at the right place. We started wandering about a bit, and though there was a reasonably amount of cowboy stuff, it was mostly shops trying to sell all sorts of touristy junk. I would guess 90% was complete waste of money with the last 10% being the real deal, that which cowboys might actually buy. I had expected large areas of stockades filled with animals and cowboys, but like so many other things in the US, all of it was just for show. There was a "real" cowboy with hat, boots, spurs and probably also chewing tobacco, but something tells me it's been a while since he last did any real cattle driving. After having wandered about a bit, we actually managed to find a few cows. I would guess there were about 15-20 laying lazily in a small stockade, which seemed to be the only one around. Oh yeah, there was a big bull with huge Texas horns and everything on the street, but that was just one you could mount and have your picture taken with. Again not what I had expected...

Having seen the whole area within an hour or two, we started to look for other activities there might be. There was a cattle drive at 4pm each day (most likely the cattle we saw in the small stockade) where they took a bunch of cattle and drove them around the area, so once again not the real thing but just something to show the tourists. At 8pm there would be a rodeo show with bull riding and everything, but since the weather had turned on us, bringing the temperature quite a bit down, and it was only 3:30, we decided see that some other time. Neither of us were prepared to lounge around for nearly five hours in a place where there was nothing else to see or do except buy tourist junk and eat. Checking the time schedule for the train home, we decided to make a quick run for it and aim at catching the 4pm train. With a bit of luck and some "interesting" driving from the taxi driver we made it to the station just as the train drew up to the platform. After another boring one hour train ride, with nothing to do than look through the pictures from earlier today, document the boring ride and play around with the macro feature on our cameras, we arrived back in Dallas a bit past five.

So far I've got nothing planned for tomorrow, except to go back to Up Town and hang out in the Starbucks cafe and at Borders...