Austin native Rebecca Rosenberg has been living in South Korea teaching English, and she wants to share her experiences abroad with all of Austin. Austinist believes that we could all use some Korean culture. The other morning I woke up with one of those hangovers belonging in a special class. I call it a please, someone, shoot me in the face morning. Sure, it was a Sunday after the Boryeong Mud Festival [dear lord,......

LAist is experimenting with blogging dates from J-Date, but finds the best men are found offline. Some date vicariously online and that is one reason why porn is big -- really freaking big -- so they ask if they should cover XXX since the heart of it lays in the city's San Fernando Valley. A writer grapples with her food porn photography obsession, another gets censored on Flickr, one gets scooped by the LA......

If you're hiking, consider charging up your iPod, as Seattlest finds out that a man lost during a hike was found by the glow of his iPod. That cleverness seems to be devoid in cops who were using police cruiser instant messaging clients - although we imagine IMs "so are you nakie" to be included in cop shows, just for realism. If only the cops were busting the Hummer-driving jerk who made a poor......

Austin Earth Month continues this weekend with Austin Nature Day, a "celebration of the beauty, vitality, and diversity of natural resources that contribute to our high quality of life." All around town tomorrow, over twenty local eco-conscious and/or cultural organizations have set up various events -- and, holy crap, there's a lot going on! Some of the events that we think you outta check out include the Xeriscape Garden Tour (Umlauf Sculpture Garden, 3:30pm-4pm), Westside......

It has taken almost 20 years to reach this point, but the city of Austin will soon have its very own central park right in the heart of town. You have probably seen the bulldozers and construction workers and excavation going on near the Palmer Events Center over the past few months. That was Phase 1, and with it complete, work on Phase 2 will begin in the next month or so and is......

Northwest Austin's Bull Creek Park is a, idyllic, quiet refuge replete with ancient trees, a bubbling brook and a nearby hiking trail that winds lazily through the hillside. On Saturday mornings we like to take our dog there for a dip in the water. It's a nice spot to reflect quietly on the week's insanities. And, evidently, it's also a great place for wild group orgies. Yesterday Austin police arrested 16 people after an......

With the weather finally cooling down, this weekend affords the perfect opportunity to venture out to Texas Hill Country, which will be playing host to several wonderful Fall-flavored events: There's the start of Texas Wine Month: for a mere $25 you can nab a 2005 Wine Trail Passport, which gets you into ten Hill Country wineries for the entire month and the opportunity to win mixed cases of Texas wine. Then there's Fredricksburg's Oktoberfest,......

[This post by future Austinist contributor Ami]Have you ever been hiking on the greenbelt and noticed all those crazy people climbing the rock faces along the way?  Well, we have.  Not only that, but we’ve also noticed all their cool gear and how much fun it looked like they were having.  So we decided that we, too, wanted to learn to rock climb, dammit.  To that end, we signed up for lessons at Austin Rock......

Drive north out of Austin, past the Round Rock suburban enclave, past the Americana kitsch of downtown Taylor, and finally past the somber, looming corn refineries in Circleville, and you'll find Granger Lake. A large manmade lake fed by the San Gabriel River, it's fairly well known for good fishing and boating. What's not as often recognized is that it offers a spectacular hiking trail as well. Known as the Comanche Bluff Trail, the......

This weekend's sunny respite from last week's uncharacteristically muggy weather offered Austinist another chance to head out to the Hill Country for some Spring trail hiking. This time we headed out to Inks Lake State Park, about an hour and a half's drive northwest near the city of Burnet and Canyon of the Eagles. The drive out there is picturesque, as you pass through a half-dozen small towns along US-183 and HWY 29 before reaching......

High on Austinist's list of things we love about this city are our countless lakes, springs, and rivers. Diving into Barton Springs is the perfect remedy for a scorching summer day, and in any season Town Lake provides the ideal backdrop for an early morning run. On a higher level, we feel that natural resources like these serve as the cornerstones of our outdoor community. Without them, we'd likely be as desolate and dry......

This past weekend, exhausted from all the goings-on of Friday and Saturday nights, Austinist temporarily fled Austin to seek refuge in the Great Outdoors. We headed out west along HWY 290 to Pedernales Falls State Park, where we hoped to go on the 4-Mile Loop hike. Upon arrival at the Park's Headquarters, we were dismayed to learn that the river was too dangerous to traverse, what with all the recent rain we've had. As a......

For a couple of months, we've noticed that when police or fire trucks pass nearby, there is a cacophonous response from Blunn Creek preserve in Travis Heights. It seems that there is an urban coyote population in Austin, and it's not just in North Austin. Faced with increasing complaints from aggressive coyote behavior, the city has set up a program to deal with the problem. Unfortunately what that means in Texas is that they'll be......