A Weekend in Austin

A cumulative ~$600 and 35 pounds of barbecue. Firing a .44 Magnum and an AR10. Barton Springs. Four hours in line at Franklin. Jumping off of a 30-foot cliff at Blue Hole. Night stand-up paddle boarding on Lady Bird Lake. Gus's World Famous Fried Chicken. An evening on Rainey Street. Getting pocket aces busted by runner-runner quad 2s resulting in having to do 100 pushups and eat nine slices of bread. My oldest friend and six new ones. A good weekend. A prelude to a better weekend in November.

Vietnam (i): Down and Out in Da Nang

I recently spent a couple of weeks in Danang, Vietnam for work, followed by a few days of leisure in Hong Kong. Danang is toward the middle of the country and occupies sort of what I imagine to be the middle of the spectrum of Asian development-with cities like Dili and Tokyo occupying extreme ends on either side the scale. There's a pronounced juxtaposition of conspicuous wealth and the grime of the over-population of rural-urban migration. A handful of isolated highrises splattered with neon punctuate the skyline on either side of the Han River-a facade to an interior of gritty, dense networks of backstreets, corner shops, and swarms of motorbikes and scooters of biblical proportions. I spent most of my evenings just walking those streets looking for good food, which was amazing and crazy cheap (more on that to come). Below is a handful of shots from the streets of Danang, but stay tuned for some more of my cultural annotations and a lot of food porn.

Oh, and the humidity... Oh god, the humidity...