20 things every San Antonio resident is a certified expert on for some reason

The reason there’s more traffic than normal
Nobody is better at assessing the cause of traffic jams and slowdowns than San Antonio residents. We can tell you why Loop 1604 near Potranco Road has slowed to a crawl at precisely 3:22 p.m. We can also tell you that traffic flow through a certain stretch of downtown has never been the same since the city jackhammered up a whole stretch of Broadway. And we know that only the brave or stupid should try to navigate the intersection of Loop 410 and San Pedro Ave.

How to pronounce our local street names
San Antonio’s deep German roots mean we have many cumbersome streets names with pronunciations open to broad interpretation: Huebner, Toepperwein and Wiederstein, for example. Don’t worry, a local will have no trouble telling you exactly how they should be uttered. We’re also experts in whether local Spanish street names should be pronounced correctly, like Culebra, or completely Anglicized, like Blanco.

The NBA
San Antonio Spurs fans are anything but the fair-weather variety of sports enthusiasts. That means we always have an opinion on why our team isn’t getting the respect from the NBA it deserves. In the years the Spurs make the playoffs, we speculate that the league’s behind-the-scenes manipulators are trying to keep us out of the finals because we’re a small media market. When we lose a close game, it’s time to blame the referees. We’re also armchair experts on which players Coach Gregg Popovich should have on the floor at any given moment and what he should or shouldn’t be saying to the media.

Why a local restaurant went out of business
Want to know why a local restaurant shut its doors? Turns out nobody has more answers than San Antonio residents, especially ones dropping juicy truth bombs in local news comment sections. In this most sacred of spaces you’ll find kernels of wisdom like “maybe they shouldn’t charge $10 for an enchilada plate,” “their assistant manager is always so condescending” and “when they got rid of the mango margaritas 10 years ago, I knew it was all over.”

Breakfast tacos
As San Antonians, we’ll never agree which taqueria has the best breakfast tacos or even which variety is truly the best, but we can all agree on one thing: Austin’s suck. Further, we all know our neighbor north on I-35 needs to quit pretending it had anything to do with the creation of breakfast tacos.

Which H-E-B store-made products are best
San Antonio-based grocer H-E-B excels at offering its own brand of everything from pasta sauce and frozen dinners to chips and sodas. Locals know which ones are worth repeatedly stocking up on and which are just “meh.” We’ll even fight over this shit. Everyone’s an expert when it comes to what they put in their stomachs, right?

Spooky shit
Some towns have one of two places that are reputed to be haunted or possess an unsavory history. Not us. San Antonio's got so much spooky shit it's hard to even keep track — the Dancing Devil, the Donkey Lady, the Ghost Tracks and that dude who flushed the lady down the Gunter Hotel toilet one piece at a time ... to name but a few. Just ask anyone in SA about their favorite urban legends, cryptids and haunted spots, and they'll regale you with more bone-chilling tales than Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe and Shirley Jackson rolled together.

Street food
It’s a safe bet that nobody eats more street food than San Antonians. Hell, we’ve got an annual, 11-day citywide party pretty much devoted to it. Ask us and we’ll tell you the absolute must-try food booths at any Fiesta event, and there’s a good chance we even know which of our favorite vendors will be showing up at non-Fiesta gatherings.

Fred's Fish Fry
Residents of the 2-1-0 are baffled by the continued longevity of the Fred's Fish Fry chain, which never appears to be particularly busy yet operates stores all over town. We all have our theories about its business model — including the completely unfounded claims that it's a money-laundering front and that it's operated by shapeshifting aliens from another galaxy — and we're more than happy to share them. In fact, the more outlandish the explanation, the better.

Which famous people went to what San Antonio high school
Any local can rattle off a list of every famous person who attended their high school, it’s probably the only history San Antonians can unanimously agree on.

Selena
The Queen of Tejano may have been from Corpus Christi, but San Antonio has claimed the late singer as our own. No other city boasts such a rabid Selena fan base, after all. We know more about her than fans elsewhere, we’re more ready to line up for free Selena swag and you better not be standing between us and the dance floor when a DJ puts on “Como la Flor.”

The rules for cascarone combat
When Fiesta rolls around and family members, friends and coworkers sneak around breaking confetti eggs over each others' heads, rest assured there will be plenty of lawyering over who is and isn't fair game, what rooms are off limits and what constitutes dickish behavior. San Antonians apparently invented egg-to-head combat, so stands to reason we're experts in its governing rules.

Classic Heavy Metal
San Antonio wasn’t called the Heavy Metal Capital of the World for nothing. We were once the nation’s most metal-obsessed city and helped break bands like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and Triumph in the United States. Although that enthusiasm has waned — or maybe just the rest of the country has caught up — we can tell you anything you wanna know about classic metal, from which Judas Priest album “Saints in Hell” is on (Stained Class) to what year Budgie reformed to perform a one-off show at La Semana Alegre (1995). And if we don’t know the answer, we can always check with our tio who’s seen Saxon 23 times and actually partied multiple times on Legs Diamond’s tour bus.

What to do with a grocery cart
Anyone from San Antonio will tell you that the correct way to return a shopping cart is to either leave it next to your car or ghost ride it into a nearby bush, hedge or curb. Some grocery stores offer “cart corrals,” but these are more of a suggestion, and it will be a cold day in hell before we walk across a hot parking lot to return a grocery cart for those H-E-B fat cats.

Which downtown restaurants aren’t tourist traps
If you’ve lived in San Antonio for any length of time, you know that downtown, especially the River Walk, is chock full of dining spots that are way overpriced and primarily exist to serve bland food to tourists. Anytime we’re talking to an out-of-town visitor we won’t hesitate to tell them which downtown eateries are for chumps and which serve “real San Antonio food.”

Accordions
Accordions may be butt of jokes among musicians in other cities, but not here, Jack. Thanks to the conjunto sound that grew out of the combination of Mexican folk music and German polkas, we’re all about squeezebox love. Some of our most-beloved musical exports — hello, Flaco and Santiago — are masters of the instrument, Grammy-nominated polka hotshot Alex Meixner relocated to the San Antonio-New Braunfels area because we love accordions so much and we’re even home to a shit-hot punk band with an accordion, Piñata Protest.

How to dress a beer
Ever tried to order a beer in another city and ask for it “dressed?” If it was anywhere north of the Texas border, the bartender probably gave you a blank look. Here in SA we know so much about dressing beers that we’ll tell you exactly how much salt goes around the rim of the glass (all the way around or artfully applied to just a half or a third), whether it’s best to squeeze the lime into the beer and drop the whole sucker in or just squeeze and set it aside) and how many limes are needed per ounce.

Murals
San Antonio is about to gain a 50-foot tall Spurs mural downtown, which is likely to make a focal point of local public art, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of other murals around the area for us to have strong opinions about.

Barbecues
Any backyard gathering in San Antonio is likely to involve making a fire and charring animal flesh, and that means anyone with an urge to look manly will offer instructions on the proper way to serve as grillmaster. Whether or not one needs the help, a friend or family member is guaranteed to hover around to let you know exactly how to arrange the charcoal, how much lighter fluid to squirt on it, how long each food item should be kissed by fire and whether you screwed up your marinade by adding too much black pepper.

Who the idiot drivers are
As residents of the Alamo City, we have experienced bad drivers of all kinds — from douchey speed demons in muscle cars who whip in and out of traffic to guys in overloaded pickup trucks who insist on driving 50 in the fast lane. We’ll tell you who’s driving too fast, too slow, what lane they should be in and whether SAPD should be pulling their ass over. It’s our civic duty, after all.