Day 3: From Joe Biden to fried chicken
SXSW: An Australian’s story
Wow. Today’s lineup was mindblowing, from 47th Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden, to Sansa and Arya Stark… not even to mention the speaker sessions!
Unluckily for me — today was the day that my jetlag, late night Aloe Blacc antics and American daylight savings properly kicked in.
I slept (through four alarms) until 3pm.
Yes.
THREE.
P.
M.
I would have cried if I hadn’t been so damn well-rested.
I had missed everything.
Actually, while I got locked out of the Netflix talk (they shut session doors at capacity [often 30mins before the really good ones are set to begin]) I managed to stumble into the room next-door so I could still learn something.
The talk was on internet privacy — specifically a panel — where they basically discussed how no one has privacy anymore, before debating a little around the pros and cons of this.
Now this is where I stop and give you the chance to leave this blog post — ‘cos if you were seeking education, I’m only talking social [I mean being social IRL — sorry, that was a terrible pun].
Thanks for staying! Well. I found Phil and we headed to get food (remember I had only basically woken up) with our new friend-of-a-friend, Lauren.
Lauren was top notch — as was the finger-lickin’-good chicken from Gus’.
So I ordered the chicken “snack” with veggies on the side.
See those potato gems in the pic? Well. They are NOT potato gems. They’re my side order of okra [tbh these were freaking delicious with hot sauce]...
And that spinachy stuff with sauce and bacon in? They’re my greens!! To think that only yesterday I was told that Austin is the most health conscious city of Texas…
Leading to my three most important takeaways from the dine-in:
- Dark chicken pieces are your drumsticks and thighs,
- Root beer (never, ever to be mistaken for kolé beer) tastes like mouthwash,
- Always order coleslaw.
From there we decided an adventure was in order — so we headed to The Experience by Dell for some free cocktails, music and tech.
And OH BOY were we in for a treat!
It was THAT GUY from Entourage! You know, THE MAIN GUY! THE COOL GUY!
He was talking about the environment. So cool.
After the music finished, we decided it was time to head and find one of the big parties that we’d heard of. Somewhere poppin’ (as Chester would say).
Oh, we’d made another friend from NY — Chester — he was in Austin for the adventure too, so of course, he joined our little band.
Well.
The rumours are very true. The lines of SXSW live up to the legend.
We wandered past maybe 5 lines before we decided that Mashable’s Mash Bash was the one for us.
We had a bit of time on our hands (3hrs to be exact) before we got in, so we made friends with our line buddies too.
Our expanded crew now included: a video production team from Tokyo/LA and ad people from our Dentsu head office in Shinjuku!
6degrees huh.
I got really excited ‘cos they were creatives too — Yusuke has done some beautiful work as an Art Director and before copywriting, Sami used to be a pro snowboarder! My people.
We were given free pizza in line (if you hadn’t already guessed from the photos) and when we finally got inside, we danced around a bit before heading to IHOP (at 4am) to immerse ourselves in American culture.
‘Mmmmmmmerica…
Where I ended the day how I started it, with chicken (and waffles).
Key learnings of the day?
- Jetlag is a horrible monster.
- Plan your partying in advance.
