People from Austin claim to be more liberal, open-minded and fun loving than their fellow Texan citizens. There definitely is something about the city that made us appreciate it very much even though we didn't meet any real Austinites and even though we saw a lot of former governor George W. Bush dvd's and biographies in stores :-)
It was the week of Halloween (right that's already two weeks ago) and we were pretty excited to witness a real American Halloween night. We bought some candy, hoping kids would come 'trick-or-treating' at our CS hosts' door as they live in a nice suburb with big family homes. Luckily we bought things we like as well because around eight no kid had banged on the door...So we left the house and had a look in the street. We quickly figured out that dressed up kids only knock on your door when the house is creepily decorated. And lots of the neighborhood families had actually invested in that, some went as far as changing their whole place into a horror house. Kids would walk in through the front door, scream their lungs out to whatever they saw inside and run out the back door a couple of minutes later. It was really terrifying and when a woman asked me if I wanted to come inside, I instantly refused. Another thing that startled me a little was that some kids did the whole candy tour by car. Mum or dad just stopped in front of every house with a pumpkin, let their little spiderman or skeleton out to grab their candy and then dropped them off at the neighbors five meter further. Welcome to America.
Something Austin is known for in the rest of the country is the 'food truck'. No need to go to a restaurant, just walk down the street and you'll find at least one truck within a mile radius. These trucks are selling pizza, roasted chicken, Thai food, vegetarian stuff, cupcakes and so on...There are more than 2'000 of them in Austin, some have their own spot , others just move around all the time.
Another curiosity in the city is the bat colony that lives under the Congress Avenue Bridge. More than one million bats call this place home between March and November and every day they fly out, all at the same time to catch insects. This happens exactly 15 minutes before sunset and people gather up and under the bridge to watch them. It's really very spectacular even though the smell of one million bats is almost unbearable!
We spent the last night of our stay with Arvin, a lovely Indian couch surfer. (First two nights, we were hosted by two Mexican girls) For some reason, we started to talk about carrying weapons in this country and he was very proud to show us his own collection: a rifle, an automatic machine gun that fires 40 bullets at once and there was another secret gun that he didn't want to show us. I had never seen all of that from so close and it gave me a very uncomfortable feeling. (maybe because we got a demonstration while watching 'Un prophète', a very dark and violent french movie) Upon asking why he had so many guns, he answered that everybody in his neighborhood had them and that no-one would ever try to break into his house but if one day someone would, he'd shoot this person right away. So beware, criminals of Austin, I am pretty sure our host would love to try all his weapons at once!
Students trashing cars for charity...
Part of the bat colony.
With Arvin, our second CS host in Austin. He brought us to a cowboy bar, unfortunately it was the day after Halloween, so no cowboys were in the mood for a beer.
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