One of the first things I heard about you was nothing good. At least that’s what I thought at the time. It was in a pub in D.C. when a friend told me over a beer that you were just “weird.” I would understand what he meant over time, he assured me.
At the time, it sounded like a warning to me.
Today I know it was a promise.
The day I arrived, it rained. After that, the two and a half months I spent living in you, never again. Weird. I almost wanted to interpret it as a metaphor, as a sign against my presence. But probably, I think today, it just has to rain in Austin sometimes. So that your people don’t forget to appreciate all of your sunshine.
I am used to rain. I am from Germany. It rains a lot there. I’m used to other things in Germany, but you don’t have those. Functioning public transport, for example. When it rained, on my first day, I stood at the bus stop. I waited and thought: Well, there will probably be a bus in the next 10 minutes. There was not. Not for the next 20 minutes either. I got soaked. I only took the bus once more after that. It took almost an hour to cover a distance that would have taken less than 10 minutes by car. After that I gave up.
I still don’t understand why I-35, that time-shredder of a highway, and its traffic don’t mobilize all your residents into a spontaneous revolution demanding an express construction of a tram system. I still don’t understand what you, Austin, actually have with all your cars. How beautiful the city would be, I sometimes thought as I walked around the neighborhoods, if everything wasn’t filled with fat SUVs. Sometimes it seemed to me that this city was made more for cars than for people. And now there are these cars self-driving through your streets without any people behind the wheel. Weird.
I was constantly afraid that they were going to run me over. Because the programmers might have forgotten that there are such things as pedestrians in traffic. Which is easy to forget in Austin. Because there are almost none. The only people I saw walking in the city were not really walking but staggering. College students in very tight pants on Sixth Street who, it sometimes seemed to me, thought that partying meant injecting so many free shots, nicotine, and sleep deprivation into their bodies that they were in fact physically incapable of partying. Weird.
I don’t have to tell you that Barton Springs is perhaps the best place in the world.
You learn a few things when you walk around Austin. One is that even though everyone hates Elon, you’ll always see at least two Teslas at any random location in the city. You also learn that sometimes sidewalks just end. For no comprehensible reason. Several times I found myself at a loss in front of multi-lane roads or fences. As if to remind pedestrians that there is no room for them here. Literally. Weird.
I have really taken the people in you, Austin, to my heart. In the beginning, I was still scared when someone randomly asked me how I was doing, out of nothing. Or greeted me on the street even though we didn’t know each other. It’s probably an internalized fear from Germany that people who approach you for no reason will surely want to sell you insurance or convert you to a cult or something. But the people of Austin are just nice, I guess. One of my favorite anecdotes someone told me is that you are obligated to smile on Texas driver’s license photos. I am not sure if that is actually true. I want to believe it is. In German passport photos, you have to look as expressionless as possible. Weird.
And I admire you, Austin, for your music scene alone. I’ve seen the best musicians I’ve ever come across play in half-full bars. I’m still amazed when I think of all those nights at C-Boy’s or the Gallery above the Continental Club. I have a video on my phone of a jazz trio covering “A Thousand Miles” as if it had always been Bill Evans playing that song on the piano rather than Vanessa Carlton. And now I can hardly imagine a tune more touching. Weird.
Also, that bands play and then young people come and dance to the music. That doesn’t happen in Germany or literally anywhere else I’ve been. At the Broken Spoke, I’ve seen high schoolers twirling around the dance floor like they’ve never done anything else. In my school days, when we were supposed to dance in PE class, I almost got an F because I refused to dance. I thought dancing was embarrassing. When I saw these children spinning, catching each other, I in hindsight found my 15-year-old self embarrassing.
Of course, Austin, I don’t have to tell you that Barton Springs is perhaps the best place in the world. I can’t imagine seeing a sunset over a skyscraper panorama and an extremely lousy tattoo of Van Gogh’s Starry Night on a right butt cheek at the same time anywhere else on the planet. And I think that’s beautiful. Weird.
And of course, I don’t have to tell you that you’re weird, Austin. You know it yourself, you’ve made it your slogan, printed on T-shirts that tourists can now buy in soulless stores at the airport. However, after two and a half months with you, I sometimes wonder if that’s really true. If you’re really the weird one. Or if I am. If it isn’t the real weird thing to think you need better public transport and more sidewalks. Because when I actually imagine you having a subway, I think, no, that wouldn’t fit your smoothies-for-breakfast-in-your-cupholder vibe. Weird.
I will miss you. Your sidewalk shreds. Your jazz. Your water. Maybe even your I-35. Although, no, really not that one. But everything else.
See you soon,
Jonah
Jonah Lemm is a journalist at Der Spiegel and a recipient of the International Center for Journalists’ Arthur F. Burns Fellowship. The Austin Chronicle has hosted Burns Fellows for two-month stays in our newsroom since 2012.
This article appears in October 25 • 2024.