Snippets of Austin

Well, well well. What a busy few days we've had in this small town. After having thoroughly explored the central area, I can say that Austin, TX is a pretty cool place. Lots of hip young folks (especially now the music part of SXSW has begun) - lots of skinny jeans, tattoos, sunglasses and cowboy shirts.

We had out first famous Texan BBQ the other night and it was pretty good, but not amazing, but it was a free one put on by the event, so they were catering for like 3000 people, so that might explain it. Something I found far more appetising was the meal we had in a little place called Woodland in SoCo (that's South Congress)...it was so cool, with these cool green panels on the wall, and the food was recognisable (we even managed to get ourselves a fresh green salad - something we have struggled with thus far).


In other news from Texas, I decided to join the legions and get myself some second hand cowboy boots:


They're not as decorative as some, but I tried some full-on embroidered ones on and the girl in the shop was like - you have to own those boots and if you don't own them you won't be able to make it work. What can I say? I just didn't think I could own them - but these boots here, I totally own those boots (I owned them so much last night I now have deep sore blisters on the pads of my little toes).

Which brings me to the first night of the music stuff which began last night - it is mental. There are 2685 official SXSW music events and 2427 unofficial ones - that's over 5000 gigs in 5 days!!!

It's pretty hard just knowing where to start. Last night's highlights were Ladyhawke (go NZ!), and Camera Obscura who played in a huge church which made a nice change from the Texan bars...awesome.

Austin, TX

Well, here we are - we've been here a day or so and it is pretty nuts. Can I just say that I wish I had discovered the joy of anxiety medication ages ago - they made flying a whole new experience - I didn't sweat, or cry, or gasp when the plane got bumpy and I actually slept - SLEPT - while on board which is a first for me (yes, last year when we went to Paris I stayed awake the entire time so that I could be really ready for when the plane plummeted from the sky). So I arrived in Austin, TX feeling vaguely normal, which was a plus.

We are staying in a really cute little house South of downtown with a pretty sweet set up - the woman renting it to us was so excited about have some New Zealanders staying there she went and bought us some "Wallaby Yoghurt" to make us feel at home. Nice.

The conference started yesterday - at the moment it's mainly just the film and interactive arms and Matt and Tim are here for the interactive part - can i just say that I didn't realise just how geeky they are. Actually, I didn't realise how geeky the whole world has become - i thought I had my finger on the geek-pulse what with my maths degree etc, but man, technology is advancing the geek network at the speed of light (well, not quite that fast but pretty darn fast).

Here are the geeks:


I tagged along to a coupld of seminars (and sat there knitting) and man I didn't have a clue what they were talking about - the only word I understood was 'blog', but there were tumblrs, flickrs, twitters, microblogs, interfaces blah blah blah blah. I thought I was a huge nerd, but I've got nothing on these guys.