After we woke up this morning and had leftovers of barbeque and fajitas we all went to the Messina Hoff brewery in Bryan Texas for a tour.  Just me and ten other people, mostly Germans, a couple of Nebraskans (?) and Texans.  When we were substantially inebriated it was time for us to head back to our homes... so I loaded up the car and got ready to drive back to Austin.  It was strange being the only Texan, or even American, in the car.  With me was Adriana, Jörn and P.  I just met P last night.  She's from Germany, but has been living in West London for the last three years and has the accent to show.  I had never met anybody like her (and hopefully never will again).

It was a little embarrassing to explain to everybody that my car didn't have air conditioning.  There's no best time of day to drive in Texas when your car doesn't have A/C.  Luckily half my passengers fell asleep within miles of College Station.  After two hours of driving and a stopover in Caldwell for ice cream and pizza we arrived in Austin.  "It smells like marijuana..." Jörn observed.  "Yep, welcome to Austin", I replied.  I love showing people around my home town, so it didn't bother me much that I couldn't impress P.  I knew that Jörn and Adriana would have a good time. It was fun trying to find something that a Canadian, German, and German-Brit like... lets see... cocktails!  So I took them to Club DeVille, my favorite cocktail bar.  Usually they play Esquivel or other lounge type music, but for some reason they were playing David Lee Roth tonight, which blew my plan out of the water to show them that we've got good music in Austin.  The next stop was to Barton Springs to go for a late night swim.  P was particularly excited by this as she doesn't get much chance to go swimming in England.  She was a little bit wary to get into the water as she didn't like "the chlorine in american pools" until I explained to her that it was a natural spring.  To further illustrate this, a local austin man reaches in and pulls out a crawdad, the staple of cajun cooking.  Looking at this thing, pinchers agape, didn't make her want to get in any more than had she thought it was filled with chlorine, but she did anyway and loved it.  Our last stop of the day was to Magnolia Cafe for a 2am midnight snack where local musicians also go after their gigs.  I chose this place because P challenged me, "I bet there's no place to go in Austin now for vegetarians".  Oh yeah?!  I was a little bit irritated that she hadn't researched my city at all.  If she had, she'd have known that there are a half dozen vegetarian restaurants that are open 24 hours.  But I know a lot about my city, and love showing it to people.  Especially to people not from the US.  It's my favorite thing actually.

dramatization.  may or may not resemble actual events.