Travel notes from Austin
- Insane product variety. For everything you might want to buy: toothbrushes, milk, kombucha, anything, there’s like 20 different options, brands and flavors of it.
- Incredibly lose posture towards trash. I ordered 5 tacos at a place and even though I ate at the place, not takeaway (and I told him so when I ordered), the tacos came wrapped in foil in pairs of two, in a paper bag, with 2 sauces in 4 individual little plastic cups (out of which I could only finish two) and 6 napkins (out of which I used two). It didn’t come with any fresh lime, so when I asked for some, he cut me up a full lime and wrapped it in foil before handing it to me (I only needed about a quarter of a lime). When I ordered two more tacos, they again came wrapped in foil, in a new paper bag, with more sauces and napkins, and another half lime cut up and wrapped individually in foil. Holy cow.
- Ice cold AC. I don’t know how people do it, but I need to go everywhere with one or two extra layers of clothes. Outside it’s super hot (35-40 degrees Celsius, it’s a hot week for May), but when you go inside anywhere, it’s ice cold. I can’t just stay in t-shirt, so I’m bringing at least a pullover, sometimes two pullovers wherever I go. Also, when I got into my hotel room, the AC was blastin, I’m assuming all day. The first thing I had to do was turn off the AC and turn on the heater (think about that) because it was ice cold. In my hotel room, I left the AC off for 95% of my stay and was completely fine.
- It feels hard to find any bar, indoor hangout spot (like a bowling or billiard place) or casual restaurant that does not shove a TV into your face. In most restaurants and bars, there’s like 17 TVs in every single and angle of the place.
- On TV, whenever anything is playing, there are 1-2 additional bars of text on the bottom of the screen with news, advertisements, info about other channels/programming. People told me that’s usually only for sports or news, which is what they have playing most of the time in bars etc, but still quite unusual. It’s like TikTok but for TV. You can’t just watch whatever is playing, there’s also 3 other things they’re telling you about at the same time.
- Eggs are refrigerated.
- Everything has benefits on the label, eg. “high Omega 3 eggs”. In Germany, it’s just eggs.
- Everyone is SUPER nice. And it feels genuine. Asking you about your day, how you’re doing, etc. Quite easy and nice to strike up a quick convo with your barista or cashier.
- You'll find more super "healthy" looking people and super unhealthy looking people, not as many in between.
- I put "healthy" in parentheses because it feels like being healthy in the US comes with a lot of bells and whistles: special-named diets, special-named workouts, biohacking, smoothies, supplements, rigid routines, yoga pants and Stanley cups. Trying to be healthy feels almost a bit cultish.
- More extremes in general, in both directions.
- Prices. I paid $36 dollars for a toothbrush, a pack of granola bars and a pack of water, which feels very high. But then on the other hand, Uber feels surprisingly cheap. I paid $15 for a 20min ride across town.
- This is maybe fully on me having just newly arrived, but I felt like even during the day in downtown Austin, which is very safe, I was always a tiny bit on edge. Definitely lots of homeless people. Maybe there is some amount of objectivity to it because there’s more than one regular bar or shop that hires private security to stand outside the door.
- There were more than a few, what felt like, redundant jobs. When I arrived at the airport, there were two people whose sole job was to tell people which line they should get into for immigration. And that was just for our gate/terminal, not for the whole airport. Feels like a sign would’ve been enough (and they had signs). And even if you feel like a person is a better experience, you definitely don’t need two people for it. Another one that probably every European immediately notices is that almost every supermarket has baggers. So you have your cashier who scans your items, and then there is a second person whose sole job is to pack your grocery bag for you. I can see how it’s kinda nice, but very awkward if you’re used to just doing it yourself. I think it’s usually older people or pensioners to supplement their income.
- Size. What would be a medium or large pizza in Germany, is a small pizza in the US. Some for coffee and lots of other things.
- Which also means that most coffee drinks (cappuccino, latte etc) have at least 2 shots of espresso in the US, while most regular coffee drinks in Europe have 1 shot. In consequence, I'm pretty sure I basically doubled my coffee consumption while here, because I'm still gonna have my 2-3 coffees per day.
- Self driving cars. It’s one of those “the future is already here” moments. With Waymo, you have tons of self-driving taxis all over town. It’s a normal thing. You order a taxi, and a car arrives with no driver in the front, no one there, and you get in and it takes you to your destination. The craziest thing is almost that it doesn’t seem like a crazy thing to people here anymore, it’s fully integrated into normal life, you see old people, etc just get into an unmanned car.
- No public transport. Except downtown Austin, which is very walkable, everything else you want to get to is by car/Uber. And it’s just normal to do, you grab a quick Uber to go from a bar to say a place to grab food.