austin: day two

this was day one of the festival, so we decided to rest up so we could last all day out in the sun. we headed downtown for some breakfast, which turned out to be harder to find late on a friday morning than I would have guessed. from breakfast we decided to play tourist for the morning and walked up to the state capitol building. being from dc I think I’m a little jaded about all of the security measures in place and have gotten used to not being able to get close to any important building in town. well, austin is nothing like that. we literally walked right into the capitol and just roamed around wherever we wanted. the dome room was pretty sweet and had the same echo qualities that the capitol building in dc has. and let’s just say that texans are so much nicer than anyone in dc will ever be. it was a pleasant surprise.

after learning more about texas than I ever wanted to know, we walked back downtown to catch the shuttle to the festival. talk about organization – wow. these people in austin sure know how to run a music festival. after about a ten minute bus ride we pulled up the zilker park for austin city limits. first stop: filling up our nalgenes at the free water faucets. then we tried to get a lay of the land, before settling in for our first show of the festival: vampire weekend! just as we expected their hour long set consisted of every single song on their debut cd, plus a few new ones. it was a really fun set, dampered (is that a word?) only by the hot, hot sun.

after vampire weekend we frolicked around and by the end of the day we had seen: del tha funky homosapien (my coworker’s brother!), delta spirit, jamie lidell, m. ward, googol bordello, jenny lewis, n.e.r.d., antibalas and g. love & special sauce. well, we also heard the mars volta as we were walking out of the park, but they were no one we wanted to wait around to see. plus we had other plans on the agenda: another night out in downtown austin.

so, when you spend ten hours outside in the sun with sunscreen on walking around in a dusty field all day you are bound to get pretty dirty. i wasn’t really ready for the black grime all over my body by the end of the day, but what are you going to do? that shower friday night was one of the best showers of my life. a five dollar cab ride later, we were back downtown and ready for some food and drinks. seeing as there was a ut game on saturday, the streets were already pretty packed with people (in fact they shut down the streets to cars after a certain point). and i might be exaggerating a bit, but it felt like there were a hundred different bars in a five block stretch on sixth street. knowing they have some competition, all the bouncers are yelling at you when you walk by to try to get you into their bar. but, they’re all the same – cheap drinks, loud music and lots of college kids. good times.

keep austin weird of the night: a guy (who later introduced himself as keon) came into the bar and grabbed susie’s hand and proceeded to dance with her. it was great.

keep austin weird II of the night: some guy sitting on the curb throwing rose petals on the sidewalk. seriously.