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I lived in NYC for four years and now I'm in Houston. We like it here because it has all of the big-city characteristics one would expect from the 6th largest metro area in the USA: culture, diversity of people from all over the world, food, entertainment and sports, yet it is remarkably easy to live here due to the low cost of living, quality of the housing, ease of getting around, and the friendliness and politeness of the people.
The low-density, car-centric layout of Houston gives most neighborhoods a suburban character - even in the heart of the city. (the suburban Chinatown west of the city is especially odd-looking to a New Yorker). Once you get past the visual differences, you find that there are true urban amenities here.
From the freeway driving into town, Houston does not make a great first impression, because it isn't very attractive from that point of view, but once you find your way around the many neighborhoods and discover everything the city has to offer, you find that it's a great place to live!
BTW: My wife had the perception of Houston as an arid desert with tumbleweeds and was quite surprised to see the beautiful forest of pines and oaks that we live in now - plus palm trees!
I lived in NYC for four years and now I'm in Houston. We like it here because it has all of the big-city characteristics one would expect from the 6th largest metro area in the USA: culture, diversity of people from all over the world, food, entertainment and sports, yet it is remarkably easy to live here due to the low cost of living, quality of the housing, ease of getting around, and the friendliness and politeness of the people.
The low-density, car-centric layout of Houston gives most neighborhoods a suburban character - even in the heart of the city. (the suburban Chinatown west of the city is especially odd-looking to a New Yorker). Once you get past the visual differences, you find that there are true urban amenities here.
From the freeway driving into town, Houston does not make a great first impression, because it isn't very attractive from that point of view, but once you find your way around the many neighborhoods and discover everything the city has to offer, you find that it's a great place to live!
BTW: My wife had the perception of Houston as an arid desert with tumbleweeds and was quite surprised to see the beautiful forest of pines and oaks that we live in now - plus palm trees!
Does your wife know that 99-percent of all those John Wayne cowboy movies were filmed in Monument Valley along the Utah/Arizona border? That's at least a good 1,000 miles from the Texas/Louisiana border. Nonetheless, hurricanes don't happen in deserts. Neither do flashfloods nor tornados because deserts have high-pressure anticyclones. Cattle can't graze in the desert either because there's hardly any grass there.
In real life, John Wayne would be traveling through dense forests, swamps, and bayous with alligators, raccoons, mosquitos, owls, bobcats, crickets, possums, and other creatures that don't live in deserts. He wouldn't be walking amid a desert valley with ubiquitous sand, cacti, rattlesnakes, buttes, and horned toads like you see in the movies. Needless to say, he'd be venturing through lots of hills and caves with bats if John Wayne went through Central Texas where I live.
Obviously, most Americans are clueless when it comes to geography. That's one of the first things I learned when I chose my major. Now that your wife can see clearly that Houston is neither Phoenix, Tucson, or Las Vegas, I hope she has told some of her friends back in New York that the topography in Texas has a wide range with lots of variations, and the only real desert is in the extreme far west near El Paso.
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