I fricking hate the grocery bag thing, never remember to bring them and it is a pain to have to fill your cart with bags if you do. That's nothing compared to how they won't allow people in Austin to use deregulated electricity and force us to buy it from the City. Then the City inflates the price of the power to overcome budget shortfalls for their many liberal pet projects and forcing residents to pay far more than we should.

Austin is still very different than the other major cities in Texas because it is so liberal. You have Dems who run Houston/Dallas/San Antonio proper but they are more the traditional corrupt type as opposed to the crazy liberal/San Francisco wannabe style we have in Austin. They are literally successful in spite of themselves most of the time. It will be interesting as they have finally moved to having district representation as opposed to simply electing the top vote getters to the city council. There are some large suburbs that are Austin address but not Austin City Limits that will eventually be absorbed and they are very conservative compared to traditional Austin.

There is good live music with SXSW and ACL as well as just a ton of good music in the town itself. It also has some peculiarities like Hippie Hollow which is the only public nude beach in Texas on Lake Travis. It is becoming more commercialized all the time and less friendly, hell half the people that live in Austin have moved their in the last 10 or 15 years or so.