Kids these days. They talk about checking the internet to see if they have snow days. Will never know the struggle of getting to the radio at 7am

Don’t move to austin. Weather is awful and everything is expensive

It really kind of depends on "where" in Austin you are. It pays to consider that there are communities just outside Austin that are about 30 minutes from downtown but, like, 75-80% less. I have a 2600 square foot house 16 miles outside of Austin that we bought for about 200k. A house this size within 5 miles of downtown is probably 750k.

Without traffic I'm 20-25 minutes from downtown. My work is unfortunately outside Austin the other direction, but also I WFH 3 days/week.

My son knows this but that's because every time I install some kind of technical marvel for him I can't help but telling him what I had at his age. Like when I built him a computer I told him the specs of the computer I bought when I was 13 with money I saved. When I got him a new wifi device I told him about modems etc. When I found a big box of my old games I showed him floppy disks and what not.

People saying the food is better in California must not like BBQ.

I’m just considering my options right now. The main motivator is that my gf is going back down to SoCal to start pharmacy rotations. We have been dating for 8 months and I am contemplating moving down. It’s complicated since my partner doesn’t want me moving down just solely for her. She is afraid that I will hate LA and resent her for it. Which is totally reasonable.

I've moved twice for a girlfriend, I regretted one and didn't regret the other. And actually now that I think about it, both of the moves happened within a year of each other. End of one relationship and start of another.

They must like Chinese, Japanese, Thai, middle eastern, Greek, Korean, Ethiopian, Kurdish, Filipino, Indian....

I'll give Mexican food a tie.

Also there's plenty of BBQ in LA, it's just mostly in South Central, which is fine with me but it doesn't get the same attention it would otherwise.

tex mex>cal mex

where's the office at?
If it's outside central Austin you should be able to find something pretty cheap a little further out. Houses and rent in central Austin are not cheap, but we're not land locked like the bay area so you can find something in any direction.

I've been here since 1987 and am happy to answer any questions you got.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...-best-burrito/

I don't know what cal-mex is. El Torrito? I usually just go to Mex-mex. Or do you mean Veracruzan vs. Bajacaliforniano? I'm not that well informed about this stuff, but I think Bajacaliforniano is my favorite style, though there's a lot of mole stuff here that I like - I guess that's more Oaxaqueno and you see a lot of Oaxaca stickers/flags in LA (probably in TX too). I went to one restaurant not too long ago that was specifically Jalisence (Jalisco) and did not like it. Dunno if that was just the restaurant or not. I don't really like what Central American food I've had and probably the Mexican food from Yucatan and Chiapas is more like that.

But if Tex-Mex means the Texas-Americanized-Mexican food, well, I don't think so, but I don't hate that either.

There's probably not as much variety of this as there is in the bay area, but we have all of these in austin, although I'm not sure about Kurdish or Filipino. But I woudn't be surprised to find them.

I live in the suburbs and within a few miles of me are
4-5 vietnamese places
2 korean
japanese (ok really just sushi and teppenyaki)
sort of generic middle eastern (just giros and stuff)
3 indian or more - not sure, there are a lot
a pakistani place or 2
a pretty good chinese place - not a chain or generic kind of thing. Plenty of generic ones
A thai place or 3
3 louisiana cajun places
many mexican, several italian, several BBQ/home cooking/etc

For ethiopian I only know 3 places in austin, the closest is probably 10 miles. Greek, there are many, the closest is maybe 10 miles.

I actually keep amending this list because I keep thinking of more. I live in the hinterlands of Austin, downtown is way better.

Ah, good luck. Tech jobs are plentiful in irvine if you’re willing to take the train - we have two guys that do this

I'm sure. I was just being defensive. I'm not a fan of the food wars. I think that yeah, in some places the average whatever restaurant is not good, but in any decent sized city you can find good food of many different varieties. Austin, like a lot of Cali, has become quite a place for people to relocate and I'm sure you can get NY or Chicago Pizza or Michigan Pasties or Pad Thai or whatever made by people who have been doing it all their lives.

I mentioned Kurdish though intentionally - I went to a Kurdish place in Agoura Hills (I'm in SoCal, not the Bay Area) and it's supposedly the only one West of the Mississippi.

(https://la.eater.com/2017/1/9/142096...cuisine-review)

It was really fun. They do live music and Kurdish dancing, with the customers, going around through the tables. Pretty expensive. The food was good.

LA though is really diverse and big though and for example you can go to Korea Town, where there are tens of thousands of people who speak only Korean, go to a restaurant and be the only non-Korean there and I figure you can get something authentic, whether that's what you prefer or not. Same goes for a lot of different groups and probably NY is the only other city in the US that has the same kind of thing. In CA the Bay Area isn't even close in this regard.

I actually used to live (and work) in Thousand Oaks, right next to Agoura Hills. That's the 2nd place I moved away from for a woman. I miss it occasionally. There was definitely a lot of good food there.

I was about 20 when I moved there, from Dallas. Dallas has a lot of good international food, too, but LA was the first place that I ate a lot of things I really like, like good Udon.

ETA: I've travelled a lot, and although the US has a lot of food diversity, it's still sort of localized in big bundles. Like there's really only sort of 2 varieties of Indian food in the US that I've seen (north/south) but there are many many regional cuisines in india. Same for mexico, really. I travelled all throughout the mideast and in each country you find good regional cuisine that you basically don't see anywhere else. I particularly liked an Iraqi restaurant I went to, which is sort of somewhere in between Indian and typical "middle eastern"

Today I'm making an Indonesian curry for dinner. Until a few years ago I'd never had any food from Indonesia or Malaysia or Singapore, but I found a nice restaurant in Amsterdam of all places.

GTFO if Sadie’s in Albuquerque, NM isn’t on the list.

I don't like these lists for arguing - taste is subjective - but I haven't been to either Al and Bea's and will try it.

I've been to La Taqueria, I recognize it from the pics and went there with a friend who lives in SF, but I don't remember the food. I may not have had a burrito though - or it could have been awesome and I still forgot.

So, on the job reporting front, I did pretty much get a handle on the stuff I've been doing for real work and they're talking about bigger more important projects and me going 5 days instead of 3 when this project is done. It's not for sure and I still have some solar commitments and stuff I want to do, so it's really not sure, but I'm happy it's that and not getting another project.

The Dutch colonized Indonesia so it kinda makes sense, in the same way that you can find great Indian food in the UK.

I also had Indonesian food in Amsterdam, and my enduring memory was standing up from our table and somehow finding that my head was perfectly placed in between two ceiling slats that I miraculously did not hit somehow. It was not built for tall people.

Christmas
Your Birthday
Six Flags Day (or whatever your local amusement is called)
Snow Day

That's the Mount Rushmore of a kid's life. And only one of them is a surprise.

I feel sorry for kids who grow up w/o the sheer unadulterated joy of a snow day - not only do you get off school, but you get to go sledding all day until you almost get frostbite. It really doesn't get any better.

As a KC native living in SF then LA for the last 23 years, I might be an expert on this subject.

Yes, I miss the BBQ, and I miss breaded pork tenderloin sandwiches - but everything else is better.

Mexican food could maybe be considered close - in that the best Mexican in KC is really good and pretty close to the best Mexican I've had out here.

But on average - as in a place you just walk in to, or your local place which is ok - LA is gonna be 10x better.

Also there's a place called Jerusalem Cafe in KC that's been around since the 70s and has amazing middle eastern food.

I guess the takeaway is that you could have some of those types of food be good in a lot of midwestern cities. But you literally have insanely good cheap versions of all of those - just in strip malls in Torrance. I'm guessing the same with Queens.

Austin is SF or LA for people who hate California. It's probably the best haven for ethnic food like that between the coasts? Maybe Houston or Chicago, but it has to be close.

I think you'd be surprised - every big city in the south has picked up a lot of ethnic food in the last few decades. Austin is possibly one of the better ones.

Houston arguably has better versions of international foods that correspond with big populations in the city, such as chinese and vietnamese. (there may be others, I haven't lived in Houston for almost 20 years).

Dallas has a lot of good fine dining but in my recollection is was mostly traditional - italian/french/new american. But again I haven't lived there in 13 years either. There's a lot of good thai/vietnamese/chinese in Dallas because again there are big populations of chinese and vietnamese living there.

The largest cities in the midwest have basically "caught up" also, I have cousins living in Omaha, Cincinatti, Indianapolis, etc and most of those cities have at least "standard" versions of chinese/vietnamese/thai/indian.

I remember going to a chinese restaurant in Cairo once and being sort of surprised that there was a chinese restaurant there. But after all, yeah, it's a few thousand miles closer to china than america is, so ok

(and yeah, I hadn't remembered that the dutch had colonized Indonesia, that makes a lot of sense in retrospect. I love indonesian food - it sort of bridges a few other cuisines so it's like... a fusion restaurant where unlike fusion places in the US, one half is not western. The rendang curry I made was amazing, btw, it was from this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot-dmfBaZrA)

I remember living in Dallas my local ATM had the standard Texas language choices (english and spanish) but also "hmong" which I had to go look up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hmong_people

My girlfriend through college was from Wichita Falls, which is a medium sized town in north texas with a really surprisingly large vietnamese population. I guess it all comes down to chance. A lot of vietnamese came to the US during/after the vietnam war, and they sort of ended up wherever, because aside from like New York and LA, what do they know about where to live? And then other people they know from vietnam move to that town and some places just build up populations of them. And so you end up with Wichita Falls, which was fairly... rural... last time I was there, also had a bunch of vietnamese and chinese restaurants and a lot of vietnamese people, and everyone was just pretty much used to that.