Austin: The Kid, Day 1

Ok, obviously this is very long overdue, but I have a bottle of homemade Sicilian orange vodka and...

And I just spilled some on my keyboard. Like, seriously. Thankfully it's a crappy cheap one, and I'm moving anyway, so I might as well replace this piece of hardware too.

Oh, right. I just learned (yesterday) that I have to move. The flat is no longer available. And I love this fucking place. It's home. Sigh.

Anyway, I can process that later and elsewhere. Back to the roadtrip. Austin. The couchsurfing adventure begins.

We arrived quite late in the day, towards 6 p.m. I remember that our host's flat was located in the north part of the city, and that it was a very nice area. Quiet, with low, two-story brownstones. They weren't really brownstones in the big city sense of the word, but they were made of brick, and the brick was brown, so I'm not sure what I should call them. Our host was young (23-ish, I think) and accompanied by someone else whom I took to be his boyfriend. The supposed boyfriend was thoroughly American in the sense that you really don't see bodies like that outside the US and American TV shows. Later it turned out that he was actually another couchsurfer, from San Diego, and that he was in town to attend an acroyoga workshop. Acroyoga, in case you were wondering, is a combination of acrobatics and yoga (I know!) And from what I gathered, and then saw - as we were given a show - it mostly consists of juggling people using your legs.

The guy actually had a good sense of humor, and seemed like a really nice, warm person, slightly in the vein of Rudy from Generation Kill - talking about taking care of yourself, good energy, etc., but as we were leaving I asked if I could get his personal information so that we'd be able to find him on Facebook and ask for sightseeing tips for San Diego (since that was on our route), and he said yes, but then refused to accept my friend request, so that has retroactively tainted my image of him. I mean, come on, he could have just said he won't be in town, or will be busy, or whatever. It felt a bit like a "oh, so I guess all this time i thought we were getting along pretty well, we really weren't" type of deal. But that only came later.

We put down our stuff and headed out to the opening events of the Interactive section. I've no idea why, or whose idea it was (it might have been our host's), but we did. As it turned out, the showcase was winding down, and we didn't have the credentials to get into the Interactive parties, so we headed downtown and stood in a random line to get into some other, more generic party. Later we were told that badge-holders (i.e. me and Gosia) could cut in line, but we didn't want to leave our host, so we persevered. Which is how we met an insanely talkative Pakistani girl and her reserved, but very nice, IT friend. Who accompanied us for the rest of the evening, which was actually quite a fortuitous thing in that whenever we ran out of things to talk about we could note how talkative that girl was. (She really was intense).

An hour and a half later we were in. At some... party. Promoting something. We never learned what it was, but who cares, the booze was free. I mostly remember grabbing something to drink and making my way past throngs of people somewhere. That somewhere turned out to be the roof. All around us there were downtown Austin skyscrapers. There was some sort of screen showing a not exactly engrossing visualization, an absurd amount of strange people, and a profound sense of being somewhere not home. In a good way. It was the sort of sensory overload that carries you with it, wide open to anything that might happen next, and screams "memories under construction!"

Eventually we got drunk and tired enough to make our way out, and try to catch a cab home. Apparently catching a cab in Austin during SXSW is... I don't think it ever occurs in nature. Eventually we managed to call one, and got back home, only to have our host put us in his own car and drive us to late night burgers at some drive through. Totally shitfaced. This was the first (of several) instances in which I was made aware that Europeans approach drunk driving quite differently than Americans. Apparently in the US it's no biggie - I mean, how else are you gonna get those late night burgers, right? There's no public transport! And nobody walks! Thankfully, I was still inebriated, and carried by the "Advernture!" current, so I didn't mind a bit and just took it all in. Weirdly enough, I remember the burger very well. At our host's advice, I ordered something chicken-based. It was dunked in batter, and almost sickly sweet, either because of the bun, or the sticky sauce. Weird. Foreign. Delightfully so.