Sightseeing in Austin with our exchange student
We have a young exchange student from Italy living with us this school year, and part of the fun of that for us (and hopefully for her) is dragging her around Austin to see, well, everything. The pink granite dome of the Texas Capitol beckoned us one day.
Texas Capitol
Triple-digit heat didn’t keep me from checking out the Tejano Monument on the capitol grounds. Ten bronze statues atop an enormous granite base represent the Spanish explorers, Mexican homesteaders, and Tejano ranchers who settled Texas as a province of New Spain and later as part of the Republic of Mexico, long before it was ever a U.S. state.
Life-size longhorn cattle seem to amble along a dusty trail, driven by a vaquero on horseback. Created by Laredo, Texas, sculptor Armando Hinojosa, the work pays tribute to the Tejanos (Texans of Hispanic descent) who helped make Texas what it is today.
Inside the blissfully cool, domed building itself, we took a free tour to learn (or relearn) our Texas history and admire the architectural details.
Don’t forget to look down.
Texans love nothing more than branding everything Texas, and that includes the old hinges on the Capitol doors.
Bullock Texas State History Museum
Another day we visited the Bullock Texas History Museum. A large terrazzo floor mural in the entry always dazzles me. The Story of Texas: Born Around the Campfires of Our Past reads the lettering around the perimeter.
Best viewed from the 2nd floor, the mural shows the people who “wrote the stories of Texas” sitting around a campfire, each waiting to tell their own story. (You can read their stories by clicking on each person on the website.) They include American Indians, buffalo soldiers, African Americans, Texas Rangers, missionaries, vaqueros, cattle folk, frontier folk, and conquistadors. More-contemporary representatives include roughnecks (oil workers) and, interestingly, the pioneering pilots of the Women Airforce Service.
Austin Live Your Dreams mural
What else have we done with our exchange student? Friday night football games, roller derby, Barton Springs Pool, and a little shopping in a Western wear store. Driving through Crestview neighborhood, we found this mural that envisions Austin the way her friends back home in Italy imagine our city: a desert bristling with rattlesnakes, cactus, and cowboys — a Hollywood idea of Texas.
The Austin Live Your Dreams mural was painted by Emily Ullrich and commissioned by homeowner Steve Puryear to cover an ugly concrete wall along his backyard.
It’s a fun mural, even though its vision of Texas is Arizona-ish.
Like the Emerald City of Oz, Austin shimmers in a bluebonnet-punctuated desert. We’ll be sure to show her real bluebonnets come spring.
Austin skyline from the Long Center terrace
Meanwhile, the real-life Austin is a fun playground to re-explore with our temporary Texan. She already likes tacos, salsa, BBQ, Alamo Drafthouse, and one Lucinda Williams song (“Can’t Let Go”), so she’s well on her way to achieving Austin citizenship. Next step is getting this 16-year-old who loves Shawn Mendes and Billie Eilish to appreciate Willie Nelson. Once that happens, my work here is done.
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Digging Deeper
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Love this post I almost cried … miss it all so much. So happy to hear about your soon to be Austinite. Please let us know how she is doing and what she is seeing. Hope we all get rain soon ( in north Alabama). No place like Austin. Daisy
Hey Daisy, greetings from your old hometown! Thanks for your sweet comment. And yes, here’s to rain all around, and soon.
Guessing that Puryear is a fairly.common name in Texas, but is Steve the mural commissioner related to the late Pam Puryear, rosarian/rose rustler? That mural’s a hoot. West Texas looks like that, though, doesn’t it?
Hadn’t realized how breathtakingly beautiful the capitol building is (in sharp contrast to much of what goes on there).
I don’t know about Steve’s Puryear connections, but yes, Pam is a well-known Puryear in these parts. As for the mural, no, West Texas doesn’t have saguaro cactus, which grows in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. We have the Chihuahuan Desert, which is more brown than red and where ocotillo grows rather than the majestic saguaro. 🙂
Oh, and yes, the Capitol is beautiful and belongs to every Texan, blue or red or in-between. I always enjoy the tour, and the gift shop is terrific too.
Getting someone to appreciate Willie Nelson shouldn’t be super hard, you’d think, but one of the benefits of cultural exchange is the realization that People Are Very Different. For a variety of reasons I’ve had the occasion several times in the last week to listen to Patsy Cline and others sing ‘Crazy’. If he’d done nothing else but write that song, he’d be one of the all-time greats. But there’s so much more… On the other hand, I’ve never heard of either of the performers your guest likes, so off to check them out in the interest of avoiding old-fogeyhood.
I love that, Nell. Yes, let’s avoid old-fogeyhood at all costs! I mentioned to my daughter the other day that I liked a Lizzo song, and she was shocked. Let’s keep ’em guessing.
I have to confess that I may be an old fogey after all: was severely creeped out by a (IMO highly problematic) Billie Eilish video.
I knew Pam Puryear. She used to communicate with me by notes written on flowery Victorian style stationary, which was her preferred mode of being.
Handwritten notes — how wonderful. I wonder if many people do that anymore.
We enjoyed a glass of wine at the new Library at our daughter Taylor’s Austin After Hours showing last week. The Library was so new Austin cool along with the whole Seaholm District. Parking under the library (after 5:00pm) was easy. I’m sure y’all would enjoy the adventure!
Oxbloods are blooming strong so summer’s over! Yeah!
I love the new library (here’s my post about it, for anyone else who’s curious), and I’m sure we’ll take her there at some point. Gotta pace ourselves!
My oxblood lilies are not showing even their snouts yet. But maybe if we get rain this week I’ll see them start to pop up.