Arielle’s trip home included some business meetings, seeing some friends, and delicious kosher meat (which she had been sorely deprived of for most of the last month). She met Sabrina for brunch, spent Shabbat Live with Malahat and lunch with Craig, had dinner with her parents’ Saturday night crew, engineered a surprise rendezvous with Kevin, went to spin and her favorite restaurant, Big Fish, with Jessie and family, had dinner with Lisa, breakfast with Denise, and a lovely Shabbat dinner with her parents and sister Cindy. It was a whirlwind but it was exciting!
Abe, on the other hand, didn’t do much besides movies, though he did meet high school friend Jon for dinner at Terry Black’s Barbecue on Thursday night after taking Arielle to the airport in the morning and picking up his SXSW credentials and getting the Bluetooth looked at and tuned a bit, which made it moderately better. He joined Austin B-cycle, one of the many local bikeshares most similar to CitiBike in New York City, which he used to get between movies throughout the week. He got a weekly bus pass which was only $11.25, but realized that it was actually more expensive than the four or so trips he took in the morning would have been since he had to take an Uber home each night due to the bus stop being a fifteen-minute walk from the hotel that would have been very deserted. He saw thirty-four movies over the course of the festival – you can read all of his reviews here. Cool actors and directors pictured below are: Xander Berkeley (24 and The Walking Dead), Timothy Simons (Veep), Jeffrey Donovan (Burn Notice), Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron, Boyz II Men at their surprise concert following the screening of Long Shot, Jay Duplass (Transparent), Tom Cullen (Downton Abbey), Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black), Kumail Nanjiani (The Big Sick), and Jacob Tremblay (Room), plus a tasty breakfast burrito, tofu grain bowl, and flatbread.
Once Arielle returned to Austin, we did spend a bit of time together. Arielle came to three movies with Abe, and we went to Amy’s Ice Creams, which was quite delicious. Arielle was not impressed by the uncool jacket that Abe had gotten after seeing Long Shot, the hilarious new comedy starring Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen. Arielle did not have a blast trying to drive downtown on Wednesday, which took her an hour and thirty minutes to go what Waze had said would be only twenty minutes. The only positive was that parking was a mere $10 for the evening, and we got to explore some of the downtown food trucks and general SXSW scene. We both scored free bike helmets from Jump, which is Uber’s bikeshare program that we didn’t use. Arielle had some meetings with local synagogues and got some fresh and delicious kosher salami from the kosher supermarket counter to put on a sandwich. She also enjoyed exploring the city by foot.
On Friday, Abe actually ate a complete meal out during the day when we drove to Sway, just a short distance away from the Alamo Drafthouse theater on South Lamar Blvd. We had a delicious Thai meal of salt and pepper tofu, vegetable fried rice, and pad thai jay. Abe took the leftovers to have for dinner. Our friend Jacki joined us for Abe’s second movie of the day, which proved to be much more crowded than we would have expected for so late in the festival. Arielle had a great meeting with The Final Acts Project and came to pick Abe up from the movie theater after his final quadruple feature of the festival. We went to sleep before our last full day in Austin and first opportunity to really get to explore the city together.
Approximate number of miles covered: Too hard to keep track!
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