VIP

Guys. This trip is ridiculous. I have been living like a celebrity. Watch this post veer from normal awesomeness (which is Austin) and insane perks (which is my life for the past day).

We begin with breakfast tacos in the sunshine. Yesss.

El Chilito (the little chile!) is the younger, casual, outdoor sibling of El Chile, a popular Austin taco chain.

First thing was to combat airplane dehydration with some deliciousness. I ordered myself some horchata. I'd had a small sample of its deliciousness last time I was in Austin and decided it merited a full glass. Well, a "small", which in Texas, where everything is big, looks like this:

My cousin compares the taste of horchata to leftover cereal milk, which is pretty accurate. It is awwwesome.

I also had a breakfast taco a la Mex, with egg, serrano, tomato, and onion on a corn tortilla. It was good.

Then I added my salsa (and actually, after taking this picture, Richard's salsa since he's English and likes his breakfast tacos weirdly bland). So so so so good. I have a hard time eating salsa other places when I remember how good it is here.

Crazy VIP number one: then I went to a movie set.

Rachel and Richard's friend Sturge is Robert Rodriguez's sound guy, and they were filming (sort of, it was mostly setup and he was incredibly bored). So, spoiler alert, there is a car chase scene in Spy Kids 4 involving a SmartCar. Also, Jessica Alba's stunt double is way hotter than she is.

Morning finished with, we hit up the festival, and my VIP experience continued. Know how I ended up in Austin? Email from cousin: Hey Ileana, I have free tickets to ACL from work. Want to come?



















But wait. Wait. Free tickets that got you into the VIP backstage area. With (guys, anyone who has ever been to an outdoor music festival is going to gape with awe and jealousy right now): air. conditioned. bathrooms.

This is the nice life, my friends.

There were also complimentary beverages (Kyle introduced me to this iced tea and it is seriously the most delicious canned beverage on earth, I think. Sooooo mintlicious!

So we started off just by catching some shows. We were sort of roasting in the sun (I have a skunklike stripe between sunburns down my back where my racerback tank top was). I saw a crazy dude dressed as Green Man from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia despite it being like 90 degrees. I am sort of concerned I couldn't pass a drug test right now due solely to passive inhalation. Pete Yorn is vair cute and I like his new album.

Then it was time for lunch. Lunch was a dizzying and awesome food court. I gravitated to the organic tamales:

I got a black bean and goat cheese nomnomnomnomnom.

With two kinds of salsa, do I even have to tell you?

And my cousin got a pimiento cheese (which always reminds me of Sarah, the girl who still hasn't gotten in touch with me, ahem) and cucumber sandwich from Hyde Park Bar and Grill that she gave me literally like a third of. It made me happy to be alive.

They also made battered french fries, an item for which they are justifiably famous. Oh em gee. So delicious. Also so massive. This was to split amongst three of us and we ate maybe half.

But okay food, sweating, watching shows from the audience were great. Butttt by far the most amazing perk was, duh, going backstage. Really close backstage.

Yeah. Yeah. Ridic.

I got to see Broken Bells up close (who were extremely sexy, though admittedly I generally have what might one call a musician problem.) Also setup for some upcoming acts:

Who I ended up getting to see awful close anyway:

For Gogol Bordello I started off impressively close to the stage but then people started to drift out and I got even closer:

Gogol Bordello is so ludicrously energetic! I don't know how they do it! But man was it an awesome show!

MIA was... very very loud. But she can shimmy! We were leaving early due to fears of busted eardrums and also siezures from the lights... but ten she played Paper Planes and we stayed for that :D And it was great- during all the "Take ya money" stuff, there were all these exploding things on the jumbotron, very exciting.

We concluded with a pretty Austin vista: