The New Thing Campaign: San Antonio

I added another state to my list of places visited last week: Texas. My friends Eric, Angie, and I presented the results of a qualitative study on the effect of pre-trip activities on the attitudes and experiences of study abroad students at a conference in San Antonio. The conference is a small one, and it felt like half of the attendees were from my college. The best part, though, was that my friend and former colleague, Heather, came down from her home in Austin to spend the weekend with us. The weekend was a nice mix of professional business and pleasure.

San Antonio is an interesting city. This was my first trip to the southwest, so it was a new thing for me to hear Spanish spoken so widely in a US city. The heat in October was a new thing, too. Eighty six degrees with very high humidity: that was a shock to the system after acclimating to the cool temps in a Cincinnati autumn. We adjusted by walking a lot. One of the first places we headed was to the river. I'd heard a lot about the River Walk before I went. The San Antonio River runs through town, and the city planners--or somebody--turned the banks of the narrow river in the downtown stretch into a long tree-lined stretch of restaurants and bars, all of them with charming outdoor areas to enjoy a little al fresco dining or drinking. The curving river looks like a serpentine canal. It's covered with stone foot bridges and lined with benches and gorgeous landscaping. The trees were just wonderful, some of them with massive trunks. I think the big ones were Cypress trees.

We had lunch at one of those restaurants along the River Walk, and the server made some fabulous guacamole right at our table!

On Saturday, after the conference was over, we did one of my favorite things: we visited a National Park site--or, more accurately, a National Historic Site--to do some sightseeing and park passport stamping. The San Antonio Missions are just lovely. Here's a little history from the NPS website on the Spanish missions in south Texas:

"For the Spaniards, the acculturation of the native peoples was a major means for securing their claim to vast lands in North America. With very few soldiers and settlers, Spain's claim to these areas in the face of encroachment by France and England, depended upon the success of the missions. Church and State were very closely linked, and the Spanish monarch granted various religious orders of the Catholic Church permission to found mission communities. Through instruction by these religious, communities of native converts were to emerge as part of an essentially medieval peasant society loyal to the crown on the frontier."

We visited two of the missions: Mission San Jose and Mission Concepcion. Here are some photos of Mission San Jose:

In it's early days, the entire mission would have been covered with a colorful geometric pattern, but that's almost totally gone now.

The front of the mission is carved beautifully.

Here's Our Lady of Guadeloupe:

There's some unfortunate carving in the soft stone and clay, though:

The inside of the Mission church was just lovely:

Of course the mission was more than the church. Here's the inside of a convent room on the grounds.

We even got to see a 15 year old Latina-American girl having her Quinceanera photos taken. The "Quince" is a right of passage celebration that ushers young Latinas from childhood to womanhood.

The next stop was Mission Concepcion, another beauty.

Here's an outdoor shrine on the mission grounds. I sat here and rested while my friends went off to do some geo-caching on the mission grounds. If you don't know what that is, see this site: http://www.geocaching.com/guide/