Giveaways
AFTER Houston, I drove to San Antonio along Interstate 10; nearly 300 km, with a stop-off in a little town called Harwood. Another thing I don’t like about the US freeways is the amount of truck traffic. I was looking forward to getting on the railways. I should have got the Greyhound bus, because the day I drove to San Antonio was a day I really didn’t need. San Antonio is an area of Texas rich in Spanish Colonial history and culture. San Antonio is the Spanish version of Saint Anthony. With a population of almost one and a half million, San Antonio is the second most populous city in Texas. It is not far behind the City of Houston, which has a population of over two million. The difference is that San Antonio is one city in political terms, whereas the City of Houston is part of a wider conurbation of six million.
San Antonio is surrounded by military bases and is also known for oil and gas industries. Tourism also accounts for a fair share of the local economy. There are some UNESCO World Heritage sites from the Spanish era, including the famous Texas Alamo.
Anyway, I drove to my Airbnb in Harwood, it was 8 o’clock and I waited for an hour and a half with my non-functioning phone. My Airbnb host had given me the street name of the property but not the number, and said she was waiting for me, but she wasn’t. It was late at night, and I couldn’t be bothered waiting around.
Before long it was 9.30 pm and I needed to find somewhere else to stay. I drove around looking for a hotel and found one: the owner looked me up and down and said it wasn’t suitable for the likes of me. This must have been a complement, to judge by the characters that were staying there; so, I was glad to move and try and find another place.
It was 11 o’clock at night before I finally found the Comfort Inn in Harwood. It was a nice place and I ended up staying for two nights. They had a swimming pool but as things turned out, I didn’t have any time to enjoy it!
I went to one place that night and got a shrimp meal for about $8 but unbeknown to me, all the staff were only paid about $2 an hour. I found that out from a guy on the wait staff who said he made about $150 a day on tips, but that was working 12-hour days. He let his mother-in-law take care of the children, both because of these long hours and also to keep her occupied because she had lost her daughter, his sister-in-law, in a head-on collision (I wonder if one of the drivers was tired from long hours too?).
What tragedy all round. In Seattle, the current (2021) minimum wage ordinance specifies a pay rate of $13.25 per hour for small employers if the employees are earning $2 or more an hour in tips. That’s not much, but better than the situation I’ve just described. They really do need to sort out a living wage in the US.
The Comfort Inn was run by a couple from Mumbai. The place was getting painted up and a lot of the people there were construction workers. All the white guys were voting for Trump, and they certainly didn’t mix with the Spanish workers; that was interesting and frankly surprised me a bit.
The first day was hot, 90 degrees Fahrenheit with 80% humidity, and I headed into San Antonio to explore. San Antonio is amazing. They have redeveloped the inner city surrounding the San Antonio River. On either side of the river there was an abundance of restaurants, hotels and gardens. It was really gorgeous. All along the river were remnants of Spanish occupation, with old historical buildings like schools and churches.
The food in San Antonio was great. I loved the steaks here and I saw lovely Mexican grills. I went into one restaurant to have an iced tea and this guy said to me that San Antonio was full of the underclass, drug addicts or whatever, they sleep on the side of the road and it’s very sad. I was surprised at his remarks. He pretty much said San Antonio is a place you just drive through because of the underclass. But whoever said that was wrong.
I saw one or two homeless people hanging out down by the river. I stopped in at a pizza joint to get an iced tea and I asked the guy behind the counter where was a good place to stay in the city. He bluntly said not too because of the homeless people, at night they wander around and play up. I thought that was quite critical and negative.
Wandering around San Antonio I didn’t think it was all that bad, and I didn’t mind it at all.
The Cathedral of San Fernando had operated as a church since the 1730s, though the current structure was more recent. I went to the Town Hall and saw some more buildings from the Spanish colonial era, which were pretty amazing.
San Antonio has good, cheap, public transport and doesn’t sprawl unduly by American standards. It is more or less round in shape, with a well-defined downtown. An urbanized corridor extends all the way to Austin some 120 kilometres distant, and beyond, on the Interstate 35 freeway. San Antonio has a very extensive network of freeways including a complete ring around the historic downtown; fortunately, the historic downtown area is not too tightly squeezed between the freeways as the inner ring still encloses an area of about ten square kilometres or so.
I found a park in the downtown and decided to walk around and then I discovered I wasn’t far from the site of the Battle of the Alamo, so I headed there which was really amazing!
The Alamo was originally built by the Spanish and was initially, and properly, known as the Mission San Antonio de Valero. Alamo, or Álamo more correctly, is a nickname meaning ‘poplar’ or ‘cottonwood’, a kind of tree in either case; and is thought to have come about because a company of locally recruited Spanish cavalry was stationed there in the early 1800s
Sitting in the hotel restaurant the next morning, I got talking to a guy named Leonard over breakfast. He was homeless and he was applying for a job at a hotel and had an interview. We chatted over breakfast while he waited until it was time to be interviewed.
Leonard had been in a well-paid job with a house of his own before he became homeless but ended up with a boarder or flatmate who stole a lot from him. Then he ended up losing his job, and then his house, because of the recession and just never got ahead.
He was living in a night shelter in downtown Austin. He seemed very well spoken and presented and I didn’t take him for having an addiction problem or anything like that: the usual, sad prejudgment we tend to have about homeless people.
I told him I’d take him out to lunch after his interview. We went to a Mexican grill, where we had steak, salads and a delicious taco dish. Leonard was really interesting, and I learned a lot from him. He was quarter Sioux and one quarter indigenous Alaskan, and his mother was in a rest home. He hadn’t spoken to her in 10 years and his father died quite some time ago. Leonard said because of high property taxes and low income, his father had also lost the family home.
I asked him why he was still homeless, and he answered my question graciously. To rent an apartment in Austin is about $1000 a month, he said. I imagined that being single and on America’s wretched minimum wages it would be hard to afford such a rate, though for a middle-class person it would have been a lot more affordable. Leonard was heading in the right track though, and he had got the job at the hotel: I was really happy for him. He said he knew a lot of the homeless people, but he wanted to stay away from them, which was understandable. It’s easy to get the idea that bad luck is contagious.
Leonard told me how in Austin the homeless people were well looked after in comparison to other places. They got free health care and there was a state-run shelter. Then he had to get going so we said goodbye, and I went out and about in the city.
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