SoOver SoCo

Since we aren't meeting Neil Garrett, our realtor, until tomorrow, today we drove around just looking at different neighborhoods. First we went to SoCo again to find a lunch place, and went to Vespaio, this little Italian "trattoria" place. I had a pastrami panini that was actually good, but the desserts were atrocious. We went to SoCo, and the "maze of streets around 38 1/2th Street, and over to the East Side, basically all the places that Adam recommended. I really should have been driving around with a printout of his email.

We went past Jessica's "cute East Austin house." That woman honestly has to be out of her mind. It's right on 12th Street, which is really run-down, and a main thoroughfare, so just the neighborhood alone would, I would think, put the house on the cheap end of the spectrum. But besides having a crackhouse on each side of it, the house is absolutely tiny. And she wanted $1300. Meanwhile, all the other houses in the neighborhood which are bigger and nicer are around $900. I wonder if anyone ever rented it. She is just dumb. I hate her.

For dinner we thought that we would walk along 6th Street, which is (self-titled) Austin's Bourbon Street, it's where all the bars are. We figured, with all that traffic, there have to be restaurants. But there aren't any. Literally not one. We walked from one end to the other, all the way to North Congress where everything was expensive or closed, and then back, only seeing two like, walk-up pizza stands.

Right at the beginning of 6th Street, we walked past these two pretty drunk-looking men sitting outside of a bar, and one of them said "Heeeeey laaaaadies," in that way that doesn't merit a response, one would think. Maybe we were mistaken because we ignored, and he starts yelling after us, "You're mean! I hope you step on a rock! I hope you fall and hit your knee!" Those are word-for-word the "curses" he was yelling after us. GOD FORBID I step on a rock, and am slightly irritated for about half a second. So odd. After that we smiled and said hello back to everyone who addressed us on the street, which was most people, apparently while in New York or Boston there's an unspoken agreement where you pretend that everyone else on the street doesn't exist, here you have to acknowledge everyone, even people whom you have absolutely nothing to do with. That's gonna be really tricky.

So since 6th Street was a bust for restaurants, we went back to SoCo, which I am already so bored of, and went to Home Slice Pizza which had been closed the night before. It's supposedly New York pizza, and they have instructions for folding your slice in half on the menu. It was pretty good, obviously not really like New York. Then we walked next door, well not really next door it was down the block where the sidewalk disappeared (and I stepped on a rock), to this ice cream place that's supposed to be "so incredible," like everything else in Austin, but we realized they probably wouldn't take cards, and since who even carries cash, we went back to the hostel.

Tomorrow morning we're meeting Neil to look at houses !