Fourth of July in Austin!!

Bonnie and Olga invited me and JC, my boyfriend, to go to Austin with them for the 4th of July. We left Friday morning and got to Austin in about an hour and a half.

We had lunch at a small Thai place near campus. Olga and I had never had Thai food before. It was pretty good. After lunch, we drove through the University of Texas campus. We parked illegally to take some pictures by a fountain.

(Bonnie, Olga, and Mary at UT)

Then we went to see the capitol building. We stayed for a while and took pictures. Bonnie took this picture of JC and me. (Thank you Bonnie!)

This is me in the Senate Chamber.

Sixth Street during the day
We went to 6th Street to look around. Bonnie and Olga bought some Texas t-shirts, and we looked in the Hard Rock Cafe. Several homeless people asked us for change, so I started worrying about how to help homeless people. We had dinner on 6th street, and then we left to catch the shuttle to the park for fireworks.

Fireworks and the Symphony!
We got to the park around 8, got a good spot to sit, and listened to the Austin Symphony play for an hour. They had cannons synchronized to go off at certain times during the music. At 9:30, the fireworks began, and the symphony continued playing. The fireworks were really cool.

After the fireworks ended, we tried to hurry back to the shuttle. With 100,000 people at the park all trying to leave at the same time, it took us at least an hour to walk to the shuttle. The pedestrian traffic was just standing still a lot of the time because there were too many people. We left Austin sometime close to midnight and we got back to College Station near 1:30.