This is the second time that I find myself in Texas, but the first that I would be staying overnight. My friend Dan again let me know that for part of his work with trading the stock market that he would be coming out to his firm’s Austin office. He invited me to stay with him for the week.

Split some costs and see Texas. What’s not to love? So on Monday I departed my parent’s place at 4 am and took an early morning flight into Dallas then drove 3 hours in a rented car to Austin.

This post is going to start off a little differently. First, let me write a bit about what I knew about Texas going in.

A Few Things I Thought About Austin

1) Super liberal enclave in the middle of yee-haw Texas. Texas is like the most conservative of conservative right? Well supposedly Austin is the only part of Texas that has consistently voted Democratic.

2) Super cheap. Like seriously near Taiwan levels. Being in Dallas for such a short time but seeing prices so cheap there, I presumed that Austin would be similar.

3) Great food I asked a friend and my cousin - who went to UT Austin for her masters - for things to do in Austin. Most of what came back was “Eat”. This sounds also a lot like Taiwan. Considering that I had ate a whole lot when I was in Orange County with my parents, I wasn’t too keen on doing this. “Just eat the tacos,” they told me. I was like, “I just came back from Orange County which isn’t chopped syrup when it comes to Mexican food.”

So let’s get it out of the way: Here’s some words about what I ate while I was here.

A Few Things I Ate In Austin

Huevos Rancheros This is what I ate most often for breakfast. Nothing else was open as early. I got up at like 6-7 AM every morning to have breakfast with Dan before he headed off to trade the markets at 8:30.

This one was pretty good but it had a very strong tomatoey flavor. The refried beans were remarkable though.

This one is from a different vendor, Magnolia Cafe on South Congress Ave (which my cousin tells me has a great mix of brunch places).

Migas

So this is something that I have never heard of before, but Migas are like huevos rancheros except they cook it with tortilla chips. What the heck? How does this work? Yet somehow it does. I enjoyed eating this. I am not a person who really enjoys crunchy foods but the chips worked out great. It is not the kind of thing that you see on the West Coast so I am real thankful for the chance to try it.

Brazilian

This came from a single Brazilian food truck - Boteco on 1403 E 7th Street - that we tried out after everything started closing at 5 PM. They had a few appetizers but just one main dish which fortunately turned out to be amazing: A steak+eggs rice bowl with yucca flour. Yucca flour (is that how you spell it?) is this thing that, as the restaurant proprietor told me, that all Brazilians put on their leftovers to make it thick and heavy. As a result it helps you feel full at the end of the day. I am considering getting some myself. This and the “Dirty Sanchez” taco at Torchy’s Tacos were the best things I ate while I was in Austin.

Tacos

Two different people recommended Torchy’s including my cousin, who threatened to vote for Trump if I didn’t try it out. They had a number of different tacos - all named rather bizarrely - but I took my cousin’s selections and was really pleased with what I got. The first one, called the Democrat, was real good but the real star was the Dirty Sanchez, a magnificent genius of a taco made from scrambled eggs, fried chile (how the hell does that work?), carrots, and cheese. I loved eating it every second I had it in my mouth.

Louisiana Fried Foods

I worked two days of the week while I was here so I wasn’t in the mood for sightseeing. I just needed something to eat to satiate my hunger. I went around the corner and there was this place called the Big Easy Bar and Grill on 12th Street. The food there was pretty good Louisiana food. The reason I first walked in was because they advertised fried oysters and you know me, I love them fried oysters.

This is pretty good, with the blackened fish rather than the fried oysters being the real star of the show. At the same time, I ordered a jambalaya with red beans, rice, and sausage seasoned by cajun spices. Pretty good but all the while I was eating it I was thinking to myself, Jesus I can make this myself. So I went on Amazon right that very moment and ordered a bag of dried red beans. I will try it out later this week.

Barbecue

Texas is famous for BBQ and it was the thing I had a craving for when we first arrived in Austin. After eating at Sam’s BBQ I was done with BBQ for the rest of the trip. Didn’t even think about having it again. I got the mutton and the ribs. Great first impression - it is a delicious first bite - but after eating bite after bite of nothing but fat and fat you just get tired of it. Then you think you might get sick.

I was seriously worried that I was going to get off to a bad start to my Austin trip - after all that is how the BBQ at my Dallas trip ended (with 4 days laid low due to norovirus or whatever else it was I got but that was no normal gastro).

Alright with all the food done, a few things that I think about Dallas and Forth Worth.

A Few Things I Think I Think About Austin and Fort Worth

1) Not as cheap as you might think

Gas is ridiculously cheap, about $1.40-1.50 depending on where in Austin (and in Fort Worth we were seeing some low $1.30s). However everything else is more comparable to SF, including the cost of food. If you are not eating cheap fried foods and fast foods (which you can get in SF anyway for about the same price), then you are paying about $10-15 for each meal.

Housing is a step level cheaper than SF, but at the same time houses aren’t exactly as cheap as one might think considering the salaries that you can expect to get here. I checked out RedFin while I was in Austin and houses in East Austin, where I stayed in my AirBnB and is supposedly on the up and up, and prices seemed to be about $400-500K, with a few starting to hit the $600K range. I didn’t check downtown Austin (which looks super nice and a lot like a cleaner, slightly more restrained SF) but I suppose that it is about the same.

Now SF is still ridiculous with $1.5M and above, but salaries are high and if you are willing a little farther out in SF then you start seeing 700s. I don’t know what kind of world we are living in when we say $200K difference (when the average house price in the US is $180K) is “not that far off”, but this is how I feel.

2) You gotta have a car, man

Texas is goddamn big. I mean like seriously big. I read in the state museum of Texas that the single biggest business that they had at the start of the Republic of Texas was the selling of land. Well goddamn they right to make it do so because there is enough land here to settle every person on the planet (not joking. At the density of NYC, you can settle the entire 7B population of the planet on Texas).

This means that you gotta drive everywhere or else you are screwed. It is hard to get anywhere without a car and so everyone has one. There is just a huge sprawl and it is worse in Fort Worth than Austin but Austin has it pretty bad. I can’t imagine walking anywhere in Fort Worth. There are empty parking lots there more vast than anything that I have seen before. In Singapore or Taiwan, such land would have like 10 supertall towers or housing units. In Fort Worth, it’s just a parking lot. A parking lot for like those types of people who can’t pee at the stalls next to each other because it is so awkward so they all go and space each other out. There are lots on this lot that are just for those types of people to space themselves out! What?!

3) The Texas drawl is fun to mimic

People of course have differing levels of the drawl. Not everyone is from Texas, but the older people have it quite thick. I listened to a nice little old lady tell me about the open and closing hours of the State Museum of Texas and I could not help but be amused. It is not the best way to transmit information - it comes out at about the speed of a 24kb dial up modem with AOL. I was at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library (beautiful place) listening to tapes of LBJ speaking to people and Gawd he was taking so long.

It took me everything to reply to this super nice, super polite old lady with her own drawl back at her. Oof, sorry SF guys when I come back and have that Texas drawl. I just cannot help it.

4) Moontowers. Beautiful name, beautiful sight.

As we were driving about in Austin, Dan and I started to notice lights suspended up in the air. Too high up to be a regular light pole - they were over a hundred feet high but they aren’t descending so they cannot have anything to do with airplanes. I had seen them before too but figured that they were just regular radio towers until I saw a couple of them sharing the same street and that didn’t make sense. Just these intense bright lights … but tall.

He asked me to Google it so I Googled, “tall light towers east austin” and right there was the Moontower. Here is what one looks like in the day:

(You can also how stupid cheap gas is there in Austin. WTF?)

Austin is the only city in the country to still have moontowers. They were more popular where it was too expensive to have regular light poles but they pretty much do the same thing: Shine light on peeps.

A few details that I really like about these in particular:

• They are about 150 meters tall, which for Attack on Titan fans is as tall as the Walls. Gives you a real sense of the story’s immensity

• There is a (false) urban legend that they were installed as a counter to the Servant Girl Annihilator, a famous serial killer who operated a few years before Jack the Ripper and like Jacky was never caught. The Servant Girl Annihilator (who uses this word anymore?) was the subject of a fantastic article that I read a while back called Capital Murder in the July 2000 edition of Texas Monthly.

5) Everything shuts down at 5 PM or it goes all out, 24/7

I had morning coffee at a great place called Bennu, where they were open 24/7 all the time. And like I mentioned above, I had breakfast at a 24/7 location.

But if they were not 24/7 then there was nothing open around the areas we frequented. This was especially the case in Fort Worth, in where everything was closed off as soon as the day started to fade. For miles we would drive and it would be nothing but just empty buildings.

6) It was hot, but not too bad

I found the weather while I was there a lot like SoCal, a sort of dry heat. My friend tells me that it gets super hot in May and the summer. Considering that I have lived through SoCal summers where it got to 110 regularly, I can only imagine what Texas is like.

Conclusion

This was a great trip and while I am not so sure that I would return (Dan says that he is going to go back in mid-March) it was a cool time. I am going to remember it, especially with all the photos that I took.

Next after this (unless I take a random trip somewhere in March) is the mattress topper: Japan.