So, thanks to those of you who were kind enough to comment on my rapid-fire judgements about the boringness of Austin, Texas, and those of you who were cruel enough to privately e-mail me and suggest that I would have seen more of the sights if my head weren’t so firmly lodged up my ass.

To be fair, things really did improve over the course of Friday, once we had the chance to look around and get a feel for the place. It’s really a shame that it was so miserably cold; when we rolled in on Tuesday night, it was like we had caught a flight from Toronto and landed in May, it was so warm and comfortable. I can only think that’s what was keeping the streets barren and lifeless, though it still seemed strange to someone who can go downtown in January and still see miniskirted women lining up outside of nightclubs.

We went and saw the State Capitol, and we walked through the Lyndon B. Johnson memorial library over at the University campus. From a distance, I took photos of the clocktower from which Charles Whitman shot fourteen people, almost forty years ago. I took pictures of stadiums and architecture, of my co-workers in some colorful places, of a touring group of students who collectively flipped me the bird from the 2nd floor of the Capitol building, of a trailer park that we found when we accidentally rode the free transit bus way the hell out to the wrong side of town.

We became troubled.

Over the course of the three previous days, it had become habit among myself and my co-travellers that we could make fun of the city we were staying in for whatever reason we chose — if the breakfast buffet wasn’t appetizing, if the bus was running late, if a homeless guy followed us for two blocks shouting state capitols to us, anything. And yet, sitting out on the free bus that had just driven us (with violent speed and efficiency) from one side of the city to the other, looking at the trailer park on one side of the street and the school across from it, we started choking on the smarm.

“Ha! Check out the trailer park!”

“Yeah, uhm, there it is.”

“There sure are a lot of trailers.”

“And how!”

(long pause)

“That girl next to us sure was nice, offering us directions like that.”

“Yeah.”

I’m not sure when exactly it happened, but at some point after we’d made it back into town from the boonies, we realized that Austin was a genuinely nice place. I disappeared off for a minute from my little group, leaving them to chat with a bus driver while I experimented taking pictures of a little waterfall outside of a bank, and by the time I got back, I was dealing with converted men.

“You know how much the bus fare is here? Fifty cents!”

“That guy said that you can buy yourself a decent-sized starter home for about a hundred Gs. I know he’s understating it, but Jesus — that’s good.”

“Fifty cents! Even with the conversion to Canadian fucking chump change, that’s amazing!”

“Impressive, if you think about how relatively small the core is, here. The commute’s probably not more than twenty minutes, if you take your time.”

“Do you know how many times I could ride the bus here for the same fare I pay in Toronto…? A lot!”

And so forth.

At some upsetting point in the journey, we had become comfortable. Maybe it was the fact that we didn’t see more than a single McDonald’s on our little gadabout, or that the University campus seemed so genuinely open and friendly and full of fit women, I don’t know, but something made us feel less uptight about things. Less up and at them. Less culturecentric. Less Toronto.

See, the thing is, we come from a city where there’s generally a lot to do — and it’s desperate for you to know it. I’ve discovered over the course of my twenty-five years that Canada is a magical mosaic of self-consciousness, and Toronto overcomes that by being as outwardly fantastic as it possibly can. Try turning on the television here without being told about all the amazing stuff you can do every single day, no matter what you actually try to do. Try mentioning that you live outside of the city, without getting scornfully dismissed and labelled by your area code.

I’m almost sure that there’s no-one in Austin who knows what it feels like to be called a 905er, is there? To feel a stab of shame when they have to give out their phone number, and reveal that they live — sob! — north of the highway. I’m surprised no-one has started marketing patches with 905 in embroidered onto them in bright red, so Toronto suburbanites can be properly identified and shunned.

Other Canadians are aware of this, and depending on their self-confidence, either dismiss it or react to it with blinding hatred. Toronto, as a rule, simply continues to broadcast how truly awesome it feels it is, despite what all the other mosquito-ridden, Franophoned, oil-drilling cowtowns in the rest of the country might think. Good God, we even have R&B artists making up songs calling us the T Dot.

T Dot, people. Our city refers to itself as the T Dot. Our city has a dorky white rapper name.

It’s a hard transition, flying down from a city that has its own dorky white rapper name to a city that has a 10 PM curfew. It’s hard when you’re so completely used to scorning places like this, and doubly so when you’ve spent most of your adult life trying to cover up coming from a place like this –a generally pleasant, affordable, industrious city that doesn’t seem at all ashamed that it fails to offer at least four different varieties of Estonian cuisine. It’s hard to shake all of that off.

And yet as Austin hummed very contentedly around us, with its shockingly inexpensive transit and a Texas star on every flat surface our eyes could find, we found our Torontonian superiorty very much under siege.

“Enh,” one of my cohorts said, his programming still strong. “It’s nice here, but in Toronto I can find everything I want. I can go walking and dig up just about any kind of store or restaurant I’d need.”

“Except,” the other responded, “I could get used to a place like this. It’s nice! It’s a nice place to, you know, to live.”

And I laughed, because it finally clicked, because that’s exactly what Austin was. We flew in expecting Mardi Gras, and instead we found a bustling college/capitol town in the middle of the week, going about its business during a cold snap. We drank too much, caught a comedy show, ate steaks and criminally tasty pasta, and walked home without too much fear for our safety. We landed in a place where contented people live and work.

I know it sounds like I’m damning it with faint praise, but coming from someone who grew up in a suburb of Toronto, self-proclaimed center of the Canadian Universe, it was like coming home. It was exactly like that, and so I finally know what to say about Austin, without trace of irony:

Great place to live, but you’d never want to visit there.