Bobak said:
Supposed to be a fun college town with great benefits of having UT and the capital (mostly UT) --think SXSW. The only drawback might be you're living in the best part of your state (Houston/Dallas are like LA without a good beach and way hotter).
Seriously though, contact CrackerMessiah --he moved from LA to Austin a few years ago for grad school, and could make the best direct comparison.
Aside from "a few years ago" that should read "one year ago," that comparison is almost spot-on.
Almost.
Austin TX is very much like Santa Monica was about 20 years ago: friendly, (relatively) affordable, coming out of a bohemian culture that strikes me as actively trying to preserve it's artistic and carefree soul. There's an almost militant adherance to the local mantra "Keep Austin Weird," which in simpler language means 'shop at small businesses to keep them alive,' ("Weird" in this case perhaps meaning that it's rather awkward to have more small businesses than larger ones.) and the majority of people that I've met here love it. I'm partisan to their group.
The weather here is requisite Texan weather. What this means for Californians is that there are things are things called 'seasons' in which the predominate temperature of a given time period line up with certain month invervals in the year, i.e it gets colder in a time called 'winter,' which usually takes place from mid-December to mid-February. Having lived in Santa Monica, this concept was mindblowing. Also, the humidity here is damn high, and will accent whatever the weather condition is by making it feel more of what it is. Low temperature + humidity = mad cold weather. It's like MSG for the atmosphere. High 90s/low 100s are the norm of the summer (yet this one was really rainy for some reason), and we had an ice storm this past January - had a full centimeter coat of ice on my car!
People here are
FAAAAAAAAAR more friendlier than they are in Southern California. Whereas asking a stranger for more information than "What time is it?" indicated mental illness to your requisite LA-native, people here actually give much more of a damn than you'd expect. When I first arrived and went to a local large grocery store, I was asked "How are you?" in the most sincerest voice coming from minimum-wage labor. It was shocking. After telling a 7-Eleven clerk yesterday that my day was so-so, we proceeded to have a short conversation about housing leads. And there were 2 two other people in line, patiently listening to every word rather than getting extremely angry. To give you an idea of how pervasive this friendliness is: when I returned to LA for the summer, I knew I was in Los Angeles by looking at the face of the first person I saw when I was getting off of the plane: defeated and drained. Very little of that here.
Another perk of the land: if you've got a 35K a year job that you stick with for 10 years, you can actually own a home - a delusion in Southern California. A 3-bedroom house in Hyde Park - a central older area - will run you, I'm told, around $280,000. I would have to sell my soul and those of my unborn children (plural is intentional ) to a bank in order to own the bathroom of a home in Santa Monica. This is even truer of the rest of the state.
But there are some downsides too.
Bring your mosquito repellant. The side effect of all the beautiful green vegitation and space between buildings and large commercial developments is that insects and other 'pest' animals have a place to breed, rather than relocate from the concrete jungles of LA.
Also, Interstate 35 serves as a de-facto split between the affluent (West) and not affluent (East). This split also lends to old racial tensions that have survived in some forms to this day. It's a rather horrible ethnic and class split, and puts a rather distant-yet-tangible black eye on what is otherwise a nice place.
Other than those last two deals, Austin is a great place. You may miss the weather, but if you may not miss much else. Oh- and there's no such thing as a crappy hamburger here from a non-fast food place.
