As a self-proclaimed Beyonce connoisseur, I was excited to see exactly what her hometown is like.
Houston is a massive city with a very strange plan. I have never seen anything like it. Apparently, there is no zoning in the city of Houston, which implies that anyone can put up a store or school or house in any place they want, and it shows. The first thing I noticed were a lot of strange strip malls with independent store that sold very specific products, like carpets or lamps exclusively. We also went a really strange mini mall with a bunch of fake purses and jewelry.
There's one section of the city seems like a giant knotted ball of yarn, but it's really a bunch of freeways piled on top of each other. I found a picture on Google.
My favorite part about the city was how multicultural it is, and how that translated to food. While I was there for three days, I had awesome fajitas at Ninfa's with fresh and soft flour tortillas, Chinese dumplings and milk tea, and awesome barbecue (which was actually ironically in Columbus, Texas).
Keep Austin Weird
I went into Austin as a skeptic. We were warned by Houstonians about all of the strange things we were set to see in Austin. With its long-standing unofficial slogan "Keep Austin Weird," I wanted to know just how weird it could be. As a girl who grew up hopping around the world and living in carnivals, I needed to know exactly what made this city so "weird."
As we drove into the city, I immediately saw some stereotypes of the city walking around on the streets. Women in carefully composed outfits made to look like a clean 1970's hippies were traipsing along, while fit bearded men in their twenties rode bikes to their jobs at app development firms. It truly is a hipster central, especially in the wake of the yearly South by Southwest festival, which brings people from all over the world with interests technology and live music. I personally really enjoyed all of the promotional bits of SXSW, because we got a lot of free stuff and got to do fun activities.
The city itself has a very manageable and cool feel, without feeling too big like other metropolises I've visited before. The public train only has two cars, and a man we met (at his hip app development office that I mistook for a small apartment building, of course) said that he took the train in to work from another nearby neighborhood. Overall, I find Austin to be a city that a lot of young people would enjoy spending time in.
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