The University of Texas at Austin

The first thing you’ll notice about Austin, Texas is the humidity. I arrived off my plane in late August, and walked into a thick soup of dampness and death. The heat was, honestly, the only thing I could concentrate on through my first week in Austin, which was a blur of new faces, bureaucracy, and sweat. By the end of August, I could just about manage a walk down the main Drag (Guadalupe Street) off campus, which is occupied by food shops, bars, and, weirdly, the local Scientology centre. It’s now mid-October, and I am just starting to reach a comfortable temperature.

The second thing you’ll notice about Austin, once you’ve cooled off a bit, is that Texans love Texas. Seriously. They love Texas. Texas pride can be worked into everything – from t-shirts and bumper stickers to crisps (yes, Texas-shaped crisps are a thing). And it may be a cliché, but it’s true, everything is bigger in Texas. The roads, the strip malls, the frat houses, the portions, and the people. My most Texan experience to date has to be a visit to New Braunfels (don’t go), in which we stopped at the local ‘Bucc-ee’s’, a much loved rest stop that many people here remember fondly from family road trips past. A rest stop may not sound like an exciting tourist attraction, but this isn’t any ordinary rest stop. This is Bucc-ee’s, where there are 20 types of beef jerky to try, a handmade fudge counter with 60 types of fudge to select from, a Bucc-ee the beaver merchandise section advertising everything from Bucc-ee mugs to Bucc-ee nail decals (which, naturally, I bought), and a sign boasting ‘the largest toilets in Texas.’ We washed all these somewhat overwhelming sights down with a Whataburger (a Texan gem) and a pint of iced tea.

Honestly, I can see why people here are so proud of where they come from. The people in Austin have to be the nicest I’ve ever met. I’ve learnt that in this city, you need to be ready to talk to absolutely everyone - you will chat with the old couple on the bus, receive compliments from strangers on the street, and become best friends with your Uber driver. It’s inevitable. And yet this southern hospitality is offset by the well-known fact that Texas is one of the most religiously and politically conservative states in the country. Many people on campus will tell you that Austin is the ‘liberal bubble’ within an otherwise majority-Republican state, and many of the people I’ve met have come to Austin to leave behind conservative Christian schools and their conservative Christian parents. Austin itself is an amazingly diverse place in terms of art and culture, which I’ve been lucky enough to experience, attending Austin City Limits music festival this month, going to weekly poetry slams, and eating way too many tacos (which will blow your mind). I’m also living in a global ‘Living Learning Community’ on campus, which aims to promote global dialogue and contains a mix of international and domestic students. This means that I’m surrounded by a mix of beautiful people from both Texas and countries across the world who’ve they’ve all made me feel at home here in Austin.

With all this in mind, even the humidity doesn’t seem so bad.

By Charlotte Webster