Winter storm Juno hasn’t quite hit Boston yet, despite the predictions calling for her wrath last night. It’s fine by me, and figure a good chance for me to write about my more recent travels. Early last week I was in SF for an interview, I flew back to Boston and then flew out to San Antonio for the first ever PAX South.
I was in the Bay area from last Monday through Wednesday and landed in Boston around 10pm. For some reason (I’m gonna blame it on jetlag), I was super tired on Thursday, so I was ready to pass out. I had completely forgotten about PAX and the flight I had booked because I had been focusing so much on prepping for my interview earlier that week. Luckily, Southwest sent an email reminder about my flight the next morning, so I was able to pack and make my early morning flight.
I landed in San Antonio around noon. My high school friends Peter and Ting drove like 5 hours from outside of Houston and picked me up. We found this awesome Jamaican restaurant (Jamaica Jamaica Cuisine ) where we had some awesome ginger beer, mango-peach tea, oxtail and jerk chicken. We also had Texan-sized portions, so were able to pack the leftovers to go.
I booked an AirBnB, which turned out to be a timeshare at a resort hotel really close to the convention center. It was sort of a bummer that the pool was closed, but I guess it was a bit chilly anyway. We were able to avoid the high-pressure time-wasting timeshare pitch upon checking in cause we were all underage. Friday was otherwise pretty uneventful cause we were so tired from travel.
Saturday was the day of the nerd convention. We got there really early trying to be one of the first 50 people in line at the twitch.tv booth, but were ultimately unsuccessful (I was number 55 or so :c). We spent a lot of time on the expo floor, the PC gaming area, the classic arcade area, and the boardgame section. Unfortunately we didn’t make any of the panels we originally planned on attending—we were always preoccupied with standing in line or something or another. This was obviously the best game at the convention, I’m kinda bummed I didn’t try it out there:
One of the coolest displays I saw was this triple screen setup with ultra-wide gaming resolution:
PAX South was a lot smaller than PAX East, it didn’t surprise me that much, I suppose, as it was the first one ever. There were relatively few cosplayers as well, which was a bit surprising. The swag bags basically didn’t have anything in them, so that was a bit disappointing, but overall we still had a lot of fun hanging out all day.
On Sunday, we did the Alamo thing and walked around the area. The Alamo has basically been turned into a gun museum… there were easily over 100 guns there (not counting the concealed carry guns brought in). I was pretty taken aback at the fact that there were straight up CONFEDERATE monuments around town -___-. I find it pretty ridiculous that they wasted taxpayer money to commemorate clearly racist ideals, but it’s the south and texas, so whatcha gonna do about it =\.
I ran into a series of seemingly unlucky events during my flight back, but it all ended up working well for me. First of all, there was supposed to be a huge blizzard to hit the Boston area starting Sunday night, but luckily it ended up missing expectations. I was connecting through BWI, and my second flight was delayed by about an hour. I took the opportunity to grab some Chipotle for dinner, but decided to walk over to my gate before eating it. I discovered that BGR (my favorite DC-area burger place) opened a franchise in the restaurant, so I HAD to get one. This worked out for me cause then I was able to save my extra Chipotle meal for the blizzard. The flight delay in Baltimore allowed me to watch one of Luck’s series in the pro bowl :D.
All in all, a great trip with good food and better friends.