My sister has spent a week in Austin, Texas, and she loved it. So she called a friend and asked, “Is it really wrong that I like Texas?”
“Yes!” the friend responded adamantly.
My sister got so much into the whole Texas mode that she even bought little cowboy boots for her daughter. She says that the thing that struck her the most about Texas is how nice, kind, polite and relaxed the people are. She lives in Montreal, which is why the trademark American politeness surprises her.
One thing that made her uncomfortable, she says, is that everybody in the service industry is either black or Hispanic. You see the racial divide much more strongly than in Montreal.
She got so into Texas that she says she could imagine herself relocating there. I’m now very curious about Texas where I’ve never been.
Clarissa's Blog 
Austin couldn’t be more different from the rest of the Texas. It is in no way representative of the whole state in terms of politics, culture, food, etc.
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We realize that, of course.
Still, a Montrealer can never fail to be shocked at how nice and polite Americans are in every part of the country. Every interaction with an American is a competition in who out-compliments the other. 🙂
It’s a mystery to me what makes the American people so wonderful to everybody.
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I’m glad she had a good experience. She’s run into some good American’s, but not everyone is so wonderful. This sounds like Montrealer’s are not a very nice people? Which begs the question, “Why does everybody love to hate the French?” It just seems to me that people are really into hating the French. Are they that despicable of a people?
I’ve met a few and wasn’t too impressed either, but I’m not given to hating on an entire country.
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Montrealers are great. But not too smiley and not big on compliments. 🙂
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Not too smiley? Well maybe they are unhappy because of the compliment shortage and it’s so pretty, but oh so cold. That would make me kinda cranky.
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I agree with Stringer Bell, Austin is not at all like the rest of Texas. It is a really nice town.
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Moving to Texas after visiting Austin would be like moving to Albany after visiting Manhattan. I’m not making any judgements about Albany or the rest of Texas. Just saying that it will not be the same experience as you had in Manhattan/Austin.
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I’ve never been to Albany but I’ve heard lots of shitty things about Buffalo so yeah I’d agree that upstate New York is to NYC probably what the width and breadth of Texas is to the 183 / 71 / Mo-Pac quadrangle.
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Austin is an island of awesome in a sea of monotonous crazy.
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Austin is a nice enough town–I was born there, but it’s more like Portland, OR than Houston, Fort Worth, El Paso or Lubbock. It pretends to better in the way that scholars at small town colleges have contempt for the townspeople who live mundane lives. Austin is the only town I’ve lived in–and I’ve lived in many–where the city council voted to remove offensive books from the library. Made a big show of it. Patted themselves on the back for being so liberal and caring.
Like every other country, state, or even county, there is a wide variety of people in Texas.
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“where the city council voted to remove offensive books from the library. Made a big show of it. Patted themselves on the back for being so liberal and caring.”
– Liberals are not the ones who remove books from libraries.
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Uh. Yeah. I’ve never heard of the Austin city council banning books, and a Google search turns up nothing on the subject. As far as I know the council is usually not concerned with that kind of thing, and banned book rallies and readings are really popular in town, so I can’t imagine that many councilmembers would keep their seats if they really pushed for something like that. Maybe you’re confusing the city council with the state legislature and the TEA board, who are voted in by people all over the state and have a history of right-wing anti-education activity. The TEA board was very proud of screwing up the textbook curriculum in 2010, despite the huge outcry from the Austin community.
Yeah this. It’s okay to not like Texas state government [most recently because of the Planned Parenthood / women’s health funding debacle…fuck you Rick Perry Administration]. But again, Austin’s another animal.
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I’m starting to feel like I need to travel to Texas to see for myself. There is a chance I will be traveling to Austin this summer, so I’ll make my own opinion widely known. 🙂
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Well I’m moving back to Austin in a couple weeks here – thank GOD after two years in south Houston hell – so I’m anxious to hear what you think. 😀
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One really negative thing, my sister says, is that there is no way to walk anywhere in Austin. You need a car all the time. I know I will hate that because what’s the point of being in a city if not to walk?
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There’s an ok bus system, and if you’re downtown you can walk most places. But getting to downtown .. that’s the struggle.
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I’ll tell you why it’s not Ok to like Texas, Austin or not: look at their School Board, the ones that are changing the whole school curricula and the textbooks. I cannot like a state that sets those educationals standards. And by the way, people are very nice in the South, too, specially if you are white.
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I agree on the horrible politics of Texas, of course, and so does my sister. This is why we feel so weird about her liking it. 🙂
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To be honest, while I like Austin, if I had to move to Texas I’d rather live in Houston. There is something too pretentious in liberal college towns (regardless of their size). And i don’t like living in islands. Houston doesn’t have the charm of Austin, and it’s chaotic as hell, but I like it. And if I am not mistaken, they have an openly lesbian mayor (whether she is good or bad, I have no idea).
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I enjoyed Austin, although how could one truly assess how different it may be from other cities, if one doesn’t live there. I’ve also visited El Paso, San Antonio, Fort Worth and Dallas and few other areas too–Texas Hill Country. From a visitor’s standpoint most Texans seemed fairly friendly, but I’m certain there’s variety in the populace too. ErisGuy makes a strong point–one that I agree with.
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I’ve heard Austin dwellers described as liberal hillbillies. Definitely a lot different from most of Texas.
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I am a bleeding-heart liberal, yet I must admit there is something charming about Texas. I go to Austin and Houston a lot for work, and have also been to Dallas, Arlington, College Station, San Antonio. I know better than to move to Texas, but I like the vastness, the heat, the desert. As I wrote in a comment on another blog, it makes me want to put on a 10-gallon hat, get on a horse, and ride into the sunset. And the barbecue! Yum.
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I had no idea that Texas would be this popular as a topic. 🙂
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Houston is pretty decent if you restrict yourself to the Hospital district/Rice U. district. Outside of that, all bets are off.
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Just FYI, we don’t all live in the desert and ride horses. 😛 In fact I haven’t been on one in years … though my partner used to barrel race at rodeos. The Hill Country is absolutely gorgeous, though. Got to give the Hill Country much love.
Kreuz’s brisket in Lockhart is the fucking best.
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“Just FYI, we don’t all live in the desert and ride horses. ”
– No??? Weird. . . 🙂
My sister was actually shocked at all of the people in cowboy hats. We’d never seen an actual person in a cowboy hat in our lives.
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I love Austin. Austin and San Antonio are wonderful places. I am told that Beaumont is, also. However, the rest of the state is not a place I would want to live. I would attend an academic conference anywhere in Texas, but I would consider living in Austin or San Antonio. Nowhere else, I think.
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🙂 I just love, love the desert. Did my PhD in Arizona and have been longing for the desert ever since. AZ, NM, TX, cacti, snakes, it’s all good.
The quality of public schools and the general redness of the populace are different topics, though. So as much as I love the heat and the desert, I would never move back to the south or southwest.
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Please realize that Texas is huge. I’ve never lived there, and haven’t been there since I was two years old and my parents took me along for a trip (and of course I remember nothing), but I considered once moving there and did some studying up on it and it is a very big state with more than one type of ecosystem. There are the deserts of the southwest, the beaches, the Piney Woods, the prairie (I’m doing this from memory of my research), and so on. And the major cities are also much different from each other.
Also you’ll probably need a car to get anywhere. That’s a problem of most American cities — they started out as small towns, then we started making a lot of cars, and the cities were designed to accommodate the cars. Also since Americans all want individual homes on land, cities tended to sprawl if they could. New York and San Francisco are anomalies due to their geographic setup. Most American cities and towns spread out, and in a big state like Texas walking isn’t an option.
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I forgot: if you move somewhere in the US based on its politics, you’ll end up as miserable as you thought you wouldn’t be because the town you picked had a female lesbian Democratic mayor. Because the year you moved they voted her out and put a Republican pro-life evangelical Baptist white guy in the seat. What I am trying to say is politics in the US is a mug’s game. Don’t get too involved or you’ll get an ulcer. Move some place because it has lots of bike paths and ethnic restaurants (or lots of churches and low taxes). Don’t worry about the politics. Americans just talk about it all the time because we love sports (me excluded, I hate sports) and we bring the same “go team!” mentality to elections that we do to football games.
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“Move some place because it has lots of bike paths and ethnic restaurants (or lots of churches and low taxes). Don’t worry about the politics.”
Until, of course, politics starts intruding in your daily life. Like, if you send your kids to public school, certain books get banned (see Tucson, Arizona), and your kid will receive a “skewed” (to put it mildly) version of history unless you switch him to a public school. When the priorities of what gets funded or not imply that a lot of public libraries branches close because “why should I subsidize what other people read? If I want a book, I go to B&N and buy it” (actually heard it, from a conservative living in a very Republican area). And don’t get me started on debates about public and alternative methods of transportation. Bike path don’t come out of the air. Politics matter, and they matter a lot.
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I agree that book banning and teaching history badly is wrong, but what is stopping you from acquiring the book yourself and giving it to your kid to read, and talking to your kid about history? Okay, my father was a history teacher, but even parents who aren’t are allowed to talk to their own kids about it. Do parents not talk to their kids anymore? I can tell you that I didn’t rely on my school to teach me everything. I read myself, and talked to my parents, and formed my own ideas — all this long before the internet existed. My parents let me read any book I wanted. They had tons of books in their house, including some of Anne Rampling’s (Anne Rice’s pseudonym) erotica, various favorites of radical Sixties favorites, and so on. I was never looked at askance for reading “above my grade” — rather, I was praised. You should be against book banning because it is wrong in the first place — not because you can’t get the book for free or have someone else teach your kid about it.
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@the twisted spinter:
Nothing is stopping me (well, the fact that I don’t have kids). I just don’t want to live surrounded by people who think it’s OK. And though I am white, I am a foreigner and I refuse to set foot in places with Xenophobic state laws.
In the end, my problem with your position is the right-wing has realized how important politics are at a local or state level, and with the “don’t worry about politics”, you are allowing them that space without posing a challenge. See, as a consequence, the attemps to defund Planned Parenthood. Giving up on the public sphere will not avoid me an ulcer. Maybe because I don’t bike (my city is too hilly), and there are things that I value more as far as quality of life goes than good ethnic restaurants. Like public transportation, for example.
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On the quasi-positive side, at least Illinois voted for Romney over Santorum in the primaries today. My state is not completely nutso!
I was not into Romney at first but compared to Santorum, he even looks passable. (Not that I want him to win the elections, of course.)
Compared to Santorum, even Palin looks like Einstein. How come they are getting worse each year?
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Spring would be a nice time to visit–the wildflowers, so beautiful. I enjoyed a visit to the Wildflower Center too and the Hill Country. A car is helpful, but you can walk around the downtown area in Austin. Be prepared for humidity in summer, so special. When I visited a business associate took us out on the lake in a houseboat. I enjoyed that and it made the humidity more bearable. I was somewhat disappointed in the Alamo though–it just seemed so small. It’s silly…I know.
I agree with twisted spinster…rather silly to move somewhere based on politics, given that can change.
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Oh, humidity. I’m now canceling my plans to travel to Austin. I cannot survive humidity.
I like Florida where it’s warm in summer but not humid.
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“I like Florida where it’s warm in summer but not humid”
??? Where have you been?
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I’m talking about the humidity, by the way.
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The places that I’ve visited in Florida were very humid, but then I live in a dry climate. The talk about local politics having an impact on your life is interesting, and very true, although people experience that realization in very different ways.
I wouldn’t cancel your plans, unless you really feel that it would spoil your trip, and if you can visit during another time. I would just be aware of it. When I visited it was in August and so yes, it was hard to deal with, but I’m glad that I went.
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Things such as public school quality and the general political and religious composition of the population do not change very quickly (they take decades). Everyone I know who has a family has factored the quality of public schools in their job decision. It’s misguided to think that the local and state-level politics do not affect your quality of life; they do, severely, and probably more than the federal politics.
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I’m from Houston (well, ages 10-18, anyway, with frequent visits afterwards), and big cities in Texas are amazing. I feel like a card-carrying Texas apologist a lot, but really: The quality of life in Houston and Dallas, especially, is really, really high compared to most American cities. There’s a really developed, international culture, and cost of living is low enough that you can take advantage and live better than you could in many other parts of the US. The food in Houston, especially, is better than anywhere else I’ve eaten in the United States — Tex-Mex, every single variety of Mexican, Cajun, Southern, Barbecue, Vietnamese, Creole, standard good stuff. Love it.
Re: behavior : I don’t think people in Texas are necessarily nicer than anywhere else, but I think people are more polite and friendly with strangers than in a lot of the US. It’s just a way that people interact with each other — ma’am, sir, please, no thank you — that I think makes social interaction a lot easier.
I wouldn’t live in rural Texas, but I’m not a rural person. Texas is really big (it’s slightly bigger than France — I once drove from a few hours east of El Paso back to Houston, and it took about eighteen hours, going 85 on straight highway all the way to get back). In the midst of that enormousness, some parts are nicer than others.
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I felt people were polite and friendly. A man I knew had taught school in Texas and had relocated to Washington. He was originally from California like the other man who was a part of the conversation. I inquired if he liked living in Texas and his observations about Washington. He said that he really loved living in Texas and said the same thing about people being very friendly, polite and helpful. His assessment of people in Seattle/Washington was that they were cold and distant and not very helpful. He felt that it was mainly due to the weather and also the culture.
It’s true that Texas is huge and I really like what you said about in the midst of that enormousness, some parts are nicer than others. I think this is true of a lot of states, including California. Growing up there–there were some places that I wouldn’t even think to live.
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Politics does not change as readily as we might hope. According to a colleague of mine from Texas, Texas was the only state before the Civil War to put secession to a popular vote. The statewide vote was 70% for secession and 30% against. The counties containing Austin and San Antonio were the only two counties in which secession did not get the majority: The numbers there were reversed, 30% for secession and 70% against secession.
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I find Austin to be deeply conservative, just with a lot of hippies and rockers also there, and enough yuppie culture so you can get gourmet food. I do like some things, like the Violet Crown theatre, and there’s plenty that’s fun to visit (you must go swimming at Barton Springs! and go hiking on the bluffs above Mo-Pac, look at the glassy river way below … and this is right in town!). But I think the claim that it is so alternative is overblown.
Texas does have charm, and you can feel its Mexicanness, and there are things like ancient Indian mounds, and I enjoy Houston although I am of course, when there, a denizen of Westheimer and so on (the hip zone) and not familiar enough with La Vida Real.
What they are doing with the schools / libraries is scary – these resources are public goods; B and N only sells new books *that sell,* they’re not designed as a repository of knowledge the way a library is.
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Is the area called Arboretum considered a good place in Austin?
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I haven’t visited it. It’s in the north and it has a big mall. Nouveau area, where the industries are. I’m more Bohemian than that and I like the zip code 78712.
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I find Austin to be deeply conservative,
Results of the 2008 presidential elections, Travis county (i.e. Austin, TX):
Republican 34.23%
Democratic 64.42%
Libertarian 1.34%
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Yes, Austin is full of Democrats! I still say, largely conservative / traditionalist town.
But, I meant, 78704 zip code!
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I looked up the zip code but I didn’t get why it was special.
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Barton Springs which was a swimming hole and sacred place also before Columbus. Arty. Bicycle-y. The lakes, funky cafes, easy to get to Mo-Pac and the bluffs / hiking, and to music venues, etc. There’s also east Austin which is Mexican and/but gentrifying. I’m much less interested in the north, so new and so industrial, or in the way south, so suburban.
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Ah, thank you for explaining! I’m very ignorant about most places in the US. A very prim and proper friend from an extremely conservative family told us they live on Height-Ashbury in San Francisco. Everybody laughed but I had no idea why it was funny. I had to do research to understand.
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Plenty of old solid bourgeois live in the Haight. My family’s address was on Ashbury Terrace.
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I am in San ANtonio right now for a conference. I will give you ma travel impressions soon.
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Have fun at the conference, mon cher ami!
Why is everybody I know in Texas all of a sudden?
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