Austin Impressions
"Keep Austin Weird"
There are a lot of young people in Austin, especially on a Sunday walking or jogging on the trail along the river. Lots of gay guys.
Lots of young women wearing tight shorts. (My wife tells me that they are wearing Lululemon or something in that style). You wouldn’t recommend the fashion for someone middle-aged or obese, but then there aren’t many such people compared to what you see in other places.
As senior citizens, we worried that we might have difficulty feeling like we belong. We did see a few homeless people in our age bracket, but I don’t think that’s where we fit in, either.
“Keep Austin Weird” is a slogan, particularly in this neighborhood. We don’t have this sort of thing back in the suburbs of Maryland. In Austin, there are plenty of other funky properties, both commercial and residential. But there is a trend for wealthy folks to buy up old houses, tear them down, and put up mansions.
There are a lot of Waymos. They move with much more assurance than I remember seeing in San Francisco a couple of years ago. There, the Waymos were hesitant and tentative, like someone driving in a foreign country and scared of making a wrong turn.
Is everybody in tech? In the HEB (I’m curious why groceries are competitive in Maryland and a monopoly in Texas), I saw a guy wearing a University of Texas economics T-shirt and thought I would ask him if he was on the faculty. He said that he was only a former undergrad econ major, and since graduation he had gone into tech, starting and selling a series of businesses.
At intersections, the recorded voice would be a man saying something like, “Wawk sahn is Awin to Crowse Fifth Strait,” but we didn’t hear much drawl from the humans we encountered.
We could not get into Zilker Park, because they were setting up for the Austin City Limits festival. We were back in Maryland by the time the festival was supposed to get underway.
High temperatures were around 90, and we regretted not packing bathing suits. We’ll be back in January-March, and locals tell us we will need winter coats.
I’m not sure if your monopoly comment was a joke. In case you were serious, HEB doesn’t have a monopoly in Texas or even in Austin. It competes with stores like Kroger, Walmart, Aldi, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Fiesta, and Albertsons.
Gay guys in central Texas, at least those under 30, are extremely swishy, prone to somewhat forced bonhomie though perhaps drugs play a part, and pile on the PDA for reasons known to themselves I guess. I was trapped on an old school bus returning from a float trip recently and guys blaring dance music somewhat unnecessarily, as it was now raining hard, quite deafeningly, were making out across our seat, over the heads of my friend and me, squashing us in the process. I am sure they scarcely saw us, as such, being women - so this may have been for the benefit of the one or two straight guys similarly trapped. I'm ready for the world to move on.