Between the fallout over Fallout and holiday madness and shopping madness and the whole 'uproot your life across the US' thing, the weeks just flew by.
So I've already commented on how very not-New-Jersey this place is. But I kept hearing people talk about Austin like it wasn't a city that should be in Texas. Which sounds exactly like the sort of place I want to go.
And that's exactly what I did. I spent a few days down in Austin and celebrated the T-Day with family at a restaurant that's arguably fancier than any place I should have been in. If I had known it was that sort of place, I might have actually considered shaving. Maybe. The food, at least, was amazing. Expensive and fancy, but awesome.
Which sort of describes my entire experience with food across Austin. Like any good city, they have an obsession with food trucks. Any Rutgers graduate (hell, anyone from Jersey) knows the importance of the grease trucks and the legendary fat sandwiches. They do indeed have a fat sandwich place, and though it isn't in a truck, the place is still right off the college campus and crappy looking enough that it probably could be a truck. The sandwich was, of course, amazing. My experiences with the actual trucks across the city were pretty much the same. Crazy coffee shops, Voodoo donuts... yeah, it's a good place to go eating.
Speaking of wandering around the city, holy crap does this place like murals. They've got everything painted up, and there's a massive graffiti wall where artists apply and reapply their mark on the world.
Which comes around to the city's slogan of "Keep Austin Weird." It certainly is a weird place, but someone gave me the quick tl;dr about it. Apparently the little local businesses united against having major franchises come in and take over the city, which is why so many strange little shops have managed to survive and thrive. Or something along those lines. Whatever it is, the place is strange. 6th Street borrows a page out of Bourbon Street's book (or Key West's Duval, since the two are basically the same place), and SoCo borrows a touch of SoHo in name and spirit. Still, they've got a whole life of their own and are totally worth checking out.
And then, of course, there's the capital building. Austin is still Texas, and they still do things big. Show this picture to someone who doesn't know better, and they'd think this was the US Capital. I think they said it's bigger, too.
And they keep the place frickin' spotless. Very impressive. More signs of people giving a crap about their jobs, which is something we totally do not do in the northeast.
All in all, a worthy stop on my journeys around the port of Texas. I'm still not entirely sure I can ever get used to people being nice, but at least Austin scratched that batshit crazy New Yorker itch. Cities that do that are few and far between!
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