Wednesday, September 06, 2006

The UT Tower (re)visited and the other stuff that I did on Saturday...

...without Jadita. I was sad that she went out of town. I missed her so. She could have come with us and done all the amazing and wonderful things that we did. I love her post, though.

What did I do this weekend, you ask? Well, this weekend I went with my sister-in-law, Amber, and Jose to do some fun things around the great town of Austin. First, we went to the Cactus and Succulent Plant Show at the Zilker Botanical Garden.

There were plants on display...

...and for sale.

This one has a teensy little flower.

I bought my own "Lithops." A.k.a the living stone. Mine is Lithops bromfieldii. I didn't buy one of the pots pictured, I got a little bitty one. It was cheaper. Oh yeah, the Lithops plant is from Namibia. I feel so close to Brad and Angelina now.

Notice the enormity of these two cacti. That's a chair to the left of them.


After about 30 minutes of staring at various and sundry cacti and succulent plants, we went out to the "Oriental Garden." It is a very pretty garden there and it had the biggest koi that I have ever seen. They were HUGE!


The coolest thing that we did was that we went up to the observation deck of the UT Tower. About a month ago I wrote about Charles Whitman and how he went up there and was shooting people. Well, it does have a great view, but it's also pretty eerie to have read about what happened there and then basically walk in Whitman's footsteps. We went down the same hall, up the same elevator, then up the same 3 flights of stairs. We saw the bulletholes left by the people who were shooting at him from the ground. They were plastered over, but you can still see them clearly. We saw the waterspouts that he used as turrets. We saw the view of the drag (Guadalupe St.) where many of his victims were out shopping and enjoying the day. It was all more than just a little surreal. Freaky is more like it. Apparently, the tour guide director was a witness. She has instructed the guides not to talk about the incident in their official schpiel, but they can talk about it if asked. While we were up there, both of the tour guides were asked about it and were in two different corners of the deck telling the story to 2 groups of tourists. There were a lot of foreigners in our group. The place will always be marked by tragedy.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

My living stone bloomed! ;o)