To cut a long story short, I actually typed out another draft posting of our weekend in Austin. But due to a fluke incident, it was wiped out and I've got to start anew, trying to tax my swiss-cheese memory (thanks to pregnancy...) about what I wrote earlier. Louis and I set off for Austin towards Harish's place the 2nd day of my arrival. En route, we stopped at the Prime Outlet in San Marcos with hopeful expectations that I could perhaps start my maternity clothes shopping. Afterall, I only brought along a half dozen of tops and 4 bottoms to tide me through for the next 2 months and I was badly in need for more. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of choices for pregnant moms and sadly, the only maternity shop sold clothes so frumpy that I wouldn't wear in this lifetime. In the end, we headed over to Harish's place ahead of the appointed time becos we finished walking the mall (the 3rd best place to shop in the world according to ABC) in less than 2 hours.
It was nice spending nice with Harish and his wife, Kavita. And as with all Insead reunion, reminiscing over the good 'ole days. We had dinner at a Thai restaurant and I was surprised to see that they had satay on the menu. I had thought satay was very much a Malaysian/Singaporean/Indonesian dish. The satay turned out to be grilled breast meat on skewers with a thick, fine satay sauce, kind of like the Indonesian version of gado-gado sauce rather than the cruncy peanut sauce we were familiar with.
After dinner, we took a walk downtown, onto the pub-lined street. Austin's the capital of Texas, but its a bit smaller and cozier than Houston. Oh... we learnt an interesting fact about the state capital from Harish. Texas is also known as the Lone Star State becos of the single star on its state flag. The lesser known fact was that when Texas joined the Declaration of Independence to become one of the 50 states, it signed with the option that it could have the flexibility of becoming an independent republic if it so desires. Apparantly, the option is still valid together. Hence, don't mess with the Texans :)
After an early night, we woke up the next morning to take a car ride of Austin. Harish brought us to a nice look-out point when we could have a panaromic view of the entire skyline of Austin and Lake Austin. And from a very very far distance, he pointed out the home of Michael Dell, sited exclusively at the top of a hill. Soon after lunch, Louis and I left to start our 3-hour drive back to Houston.
