James and I arrived in San Antonio Texas on Thursday after a easy start from DC at 6am and a little layover in Denver.

What brought us to the Lone Star State, you may ask?

I was slated to give a paper at FLAN, the Food Representation in Film, Literature and the Other Arts (so more like FRIFLOA). This was my first invitation to give an academic paper and I was very excited to speak on the silenced voices of the Food Network. After many drafts and a lot of loving critiques from James, I felt prepared to speak about personal creative expression, experimental learning* and female potential for subversion thorough interactions with food.

At the conference we (James paid a nominal registration fee that got him into all of the receptions as not to raise any eyebrows) heard so many though provoking speaker, engaged in great discussions and made some friends, including a Cincinnati-based artist (http://uturnartspace.blogspot.com/) and a historian from Canada whom we hung out with. They also made up the ‘under 30’ crowd of the conference. Check out the program here: http://flan.utsa.edu/foodconf/default.htm

The U of T San Antonio Campus (downtown) is one of the satellite UT campuses and housed in a super modern building, and suspiciously unpopulated with students. But that’s no surprise: all of San Antonio a ghost-town, except for the tourist-infected areas.

Our first day: -We visited the Alamo (on our ride from the airport to our hotel learned about the namesake for the Yellow Rose of Texas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yellow_Rose_of_Texas) -Walked around some of the downtown -Found the most efficient routes from hotel-to conference-to downtown -Ate at the oft-recommended (we heard it about 40 times), grossly atmospheric Mi Tierra, with desperate mariachi performers.

Friday was filled with lectures and breaks to eat Tex-Mex (see review for Pico de Gallo), further exploration of the marcados (primaraly set up for tourists), wandering around the highly commercialized River Walk, the city’s main draw, and caved and ate at a place there (Italian food, not that remarkable called Peasonos).

Today, however, we got a ride to the Pearl area which is a repurposed factory/brewery come art and restaurant space and on Saturdays, a great farmer’s market. Thank you Alice for introducing us and giving us a lift! She is also a very accomplished scholar and cool person: http://www.chatham.edu/departments/humandevelopment/undergraduate/women/facutly_get.cfm?FacultyID=222

We are now exhausted and sunburned from our long pursuit in the sun to find a post office that was open (which we never did, and instead relied on the business center at the new, fancy Hyatt) in order to send my new, fancy clothes back to DC and lighten our load. Our final meal here was at Azuca, a nuevo-latin favorite amongst those in the know (we stumbled across it and were told we must be expert stumblers).

On to the next adventure Mexico, Costa Rica and Nicaragua

(*ESG prides itself on this one:)