NASA SPACE CENTER (Friday March 29th)

I love Houston! We didn’t do exactly as much as we wanted today, but it was still an awesome day! We got up pretty early, had an awful breakfast at the hotel and then we drove to Johnson Space Center. But first we took a detour downtown because we had to put some more air in one of the tires so we got a close look at the skyskrapers. I was so amazed! Sure, New York is big and all, but Houston had good-looking skyskrapers. Every house was unique and it was just so cool. I took lika a million photos from the car and totally fell in love with the city. Unfortunately we were to tired after dinner to walk around downtown but I really hope we will be able to do it tomorrow so I can get better pictures and see more of the city.

Anyway, we got to the Space Center at noon. Started with a short live presentation about how the astronauts live in the station up in space. That was interesting and I learned that there are so many more possibilities up there with no gravitation!

Then we had lunch and I had the best chicken sandwich ever. Walnuts and grapes in a honey wheat bread. Awesome! And after that we went in to the big gift shop. I found a really nice shot glass that I bought. I also bought a key chain in the shape of a Texas registration plate with my name on it. The space center name was also printed. I’m not sure that I should show it to Alex though, because it says Alex on it, Alexandra was out.

I bought two geodes for the kids. Not much on the outside, but when you break it there will be a lot of crystals in it. I hope they will like it :).

At 1pm we sneaked in to the big seminar room where a real astronaut talked about his latest trip up in space. Ken Cameron was his name and it was pretty interesting.

There were a lot of child things to do at the center, but as adults we had a really great time too. There were two tram tours you could take. We took the one that was about the simulation testing area here in Houston. We saw big rockets too. We saw the Saturn rocket and it was ridicoulusly big!

The last thing we did at the center was going to another live presentation where the woman on stage talked about the international space station and how they manage it from the ground and stuff like that. She also told us about where all the space shuttles could be seen (one is in LA, I think I actually want to go there some day) and about the current missions. For example they will get a thingy to Jupiter in May and in 2015 another thingy will reach Pluto. Space really fascinates me, too bad I chose building and civil engineering instead…

Back at the hotel I googled up a barbecue restaurant. We managed to talk with the other four Swedish (we can’t reach them withouth Internet because of our providers) and met them at the restaurant in North Houston. I found one called Barbecue Inn and it was Houstons’ best barbecue restaurant according to best10.com and it was really good. I had beef brisket and ribs. For dessert me and Lovisa shared a coconut pie.

We said goodbye to the Swedish who are going to San Fransisco tomorrow morning and then went to the hotel. We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow and thought it better to go to bed early so we could go up early. We are going to the outlet mall first, then I think we will have lunch at Hard Rock Cafe and after that I hope we are going to downtown. It will be nice :).

Oh, I totally forgot to write one thing last night. When we drove to New Orleans on Monday we drove in the middle of the night and couldn’t see anything of the nature around us. But yesterday we saw everything and OH MY GOD! I’ve found my favorite freeway in the US, I-10 in Louisiana! First of all, it was a bridge, each direction on their own bridge. Underneath a huge swamp. It sounds weird maybe, but it was so amazing! And it wasn’t just for a mile or so, it was like that for like half an hour (or more)!!

I like America!