Last week was a grand coalition of UT's spring break and the (apparently) world-famous South by SouthWest (SxSW). The mission: attend obnoxiously loud bands, see indie film screenings, witness the future of technology, party hearty all night 'till the sun comes up, take a 2 hour nap, rinse and repeat. Sprinkle in a few trips to an Austin-esque restaurant and you've got the gist.
My favorite group of patrons to watch and jeer is the hipsters. They seemed to flock in full force - giant RayBan frames, skin-tight cutoff jorts, matted hair and all. The worst part of it was that they didn't stick out. They blended quite well with the indie "feel" of Austin, except that suddenly there was an abnormally saturation of them.
I had a friend come to visit me during this great event on the seasonal calendar of most categories of people. My goal was to show her the grand sights of the city, visit the institutions that keep Austin weird, and hang out in my price-inflated apartment. (I don't have the party stamina of the city's other inhabitants.) The first day was manageable - we went to a wing bar and tuckered out early. The second day was full of adventure. I had to pay a parking ticket, so I had to venture downtown. Naturally, there is no parking to be found because (1.) SxSW patrons claimed their parking spots at 3:24am so they could be in line by 3:30am for a 12noon performance and (2.) Austin has horribly neglected the fact that the city moves by car yet has nowhere to put them in the intermediary. So we stashed my car on the University campus (I have a parking permit) and walked downtown. Dodging the piles of puke and beer bottle refuse, we made it into the heart of the hip/alternative scene. Crowds of Toms-wearing bearded men and vintage blouse clad women ignored crosswalks as they flocked towards one of the four concert venues. Much like a gas station, there was one on each corner, and it was literally a tent erected on an otherwise empty plot of land.
After the fear of losing our hearing and my excess bank account funds were depleted, we visited the capitol. I was hungry, so we stopped at a Subway. The place was 84% empty, so the wait should have been minimal, but it wasn't. The reason for this was an abnormally talkative woman in front of us. As she ordered her decadent sandwich with far too many toppings for a savory dining experience, I responded to a question with the word "Oui." This woman with a zebra-print cross stitched on to a cloth purse turned around and exclaimed "Oh, do you speak Italian?" I promptly gave a condescending glare and said "no, I don't." She turned around and paid for her lunch by handing her Dallas Cowboys themed credit card to the cashier, making sure that we all noticed her pseudo fingernails, painted bright pink.
We ate our food and left. We had had enough of Austin's extremes for one afternoon. There are the crowds who are far too pretentious to discuss anything (perhaps because "it's so obscure, I'm sure you've never heard of it"), and then there are the crowds that talk loudly in a restaurant and think Target is high-class shopping.
I love Austin. It gives me so many people to watch.
