plaxoed!

I’ve been quiet here on my blog for quite a while now because this past weekend, I took a short vacation to Austin and San Antonio, Texas with Rose. Rose is from Texas and went to University of Texas so she was able to show me around the place. She also has a ton of friends in the area still, so we got to hang out with a bunch of them too. A special shout out to Erin, who hosted us while we were in San Antonio

We flew into Austin on Friday and headed straight to San Antonio for Niosa, a fun night festival that had tons of food and music. It was super crowded, but they had food of all different cuisines - i had roasted corn, beef on a stick, fried chicken on a stick, shrimp quesadilla, some strange deep fried meatball, and a German vanilla pudding eclair thingy all within a few hours.

The next day, we started off at a fun TexMex restaurant called La Fogata. Both the food and drink were excellent

The weather was decent and we were able to sit outside where they had an interesting fountain. It was cool to sit outside, but they had hanging plants and when the wind gusted, little pieces of plant would fall all over our table and into our food! Ah well, extra flavoring I guess…

Strange thing is, I hear Texas is usually burning hot, but while we were there, it was relatively cool. Perhaps Rose and I brought the relatively chilly Sea/SF weather with us.

After lunch, we went to play at the Riverwalk in downtown San Antonio. We followed the man-made river around the bend and found ourselves at the Alamo!

Now, I’ve never studied Texas History (apparently, this is a required class in middle school there), so I had no knowledge of the story of the Alamo. But if you’re into history, this is definitely a fun place to go. They have a lot of neat relics and everything has an information placard next to it. They even have guides that tell the story all day long and big displays that trace the entire history of Texas.

AFAIK, there isn’t anything like that in Michigan. I guess some states are just cooler than others…

The next day, we went to Austin and checked out Liquid. The main pastor, Gideon, is an old friend from Michigan so it was great to see him again. They’ve got quite the post-modern thing going on, so if you’re more artsy (or, in my case, if you think you are artsy), it’s a great church to check out.

After church, Rose showed me around campus. UTexas has lots of cool buildings and facilities, but the strange thing is that sometime in the middle of the 20th century, they decided not to follow the master plan. Thus, you have a lot of ugly 60s looking buildings in the middle of the nice Spanish architecture buildings. If you ever visit, you’ll notice what I’m talking about. Here’s us at the UTexas stadium gate:

Finally, as any local will tell you, no visit to Austin is complete without a trip to a BBQ place, so we went to The County Line.

The BBQ was quite good, especially the brisket and the beef ribs. Plus, the bread + honey butter was to die for. Mmm… I’m getting hungry just thinking about it. Time for a midnight snack