Kickstarting The Night

After my much baly-hooed lack of social life for the past month, it looks like things are picking up again. I guess I'm getting more comfortable talking now and am used to the hardware in my mouth, so I can eat a bit more easily and have also gotten used to not tasting too much of what I'm eating, though palate real-estate has increased because of the arch-expander widening from late last month. So when I got a rare phone call on Friday evening inviting me to go to Beyoglu with Alan and Andrea, I put the leftover rice and soup combo back in the fridge and headed out. I met up with them and Alan's childhood friend interesting, attractive friend Ayari, who's a freelance Spanish/English interpreter. She's going by her middle name now, but I had a hard enough time remembering her first name, let alone her middle name.

Of course, one of my resolutions for the year happened to be that I would not even try to find a significant-other because of all the work going on in my mouth and the fact that I have gotten reall really cheap since the beginning of the year ;o) . So naturally it would make sense that I meet this Ayari girl on Friday night and over the weekend got an email from a girl on Lavalife who found it interesting that I also had a mild obsession with Eastern Europe. She also learns languages (including German) in her free time, has considered pulling up the stakes and moving to Germany, has travelled extensively in Europe, etc. etc. Interesting stuff!

After dinner on Friday, Alan, Andrea, and I headed down to the East Village to meet up with Sean, even though it was pretty late already and Alan was tired. We ended up at the wine bar next to an Italian restaurant that I've wanted to check out for a while and had a glass of...red wine. I don't know anything about wine, so I couldn't really tell you what kind of wine it was. Maybe it was a Chianti. I think that was the first thing that came to mind - and it was an easy wine to pronounce semi-legibly. We hung out there for our wine and then trekked a block over to High Chai, an interesting Russian/French fusion restaurant that has been dead ever since we first tried it out a few months back, but that has pretty interesting cocktails.

That night, I had deja-vu: I suddenly remembered how expensive it is to go out at night here! $20 here, $20 there and pretty soon I'd spent the money I allocated for the weekend - a paltry sum compared to what I used to spend on a good night :) . But this was just Friday night, and there was lots left to do in the weekend!

In anticipation of a massive football match at 7:30am on Saturday morning, I crashed on Sean's couch since he lives a few blocks from the Liverpool FC Supporter's Club bar. At 7:00am, I got up and headed up to the bar, figuring that even with such an epic match the place would be dead. Wrong! I got there about five minutes before the match started and it was packed! And the game? A massive result for my team. In fact, when Liverpool scored the only goal in the 30th minute, I guess the cops showed up because there was so much noise and the neighbors were complaining so the bartenders told everyone to keep it down :o)

After the game, I hightailed it back to my apartment to shower and get ready for the children's rec event that I will soon be taking over. This was going to be the first time I met the current project leader and figure out if this was something I wanted to do. Working on a few hours of solid sleep and lots of energy after the game, I got ready and picked up some organic boxed drinks at the local health food store as directed by the team leader. Later in the day, he awkwardly confronted me about my organic boxed drinks because they were not cold enough for his liking. He said "who likes drinks that aren't cold?" . I bit my tongue - since he is the (current) team leader - but I'm going to insist that my volunteers bring drinks that are either room temperature (as I like them) or cold (as masochistic people who like drinks to damage their sensitive esophoguses prefer). In any event, I had a good time bowling with the kids, who were very well behaved and who had high-school / college-aged workers that the kids respected and enjoyed tagging along. I look forward to my assignment when I take it over in a few months.

After the event up at a bowling alley in the Bronx next to Yankee Stadium and after dropping them off at the community center in Harlem, I headed back downtown to the East Village again to see Chronicles of Narnia (check out the SNL rap) because Sean had free tickets. I definitely got my money's worth out of my Metrocard for the day! Of course I knew the story of the movie and the effects were actually pretty clean and well done. As I child, I remember the characters (like the fawn) freaking me out but I was able to handle it this time around. I assumed that everyone knew the whole premise of the story, but apparently I was wrong. Sean, in fact, had no idea about the religious aspects of the story until I pointed everything out to him afterwards while we ate some Japanese food at a local place called Lan. They had a plate called the Shabu Shabu that was thin slices of prime rib along with a bunch of vegetables, all of which you cook in a boiling pot of water on the table. Excellent choice, although various vegetables don't get along too well with certain wires in certain orifices....

Sunday was quite unproductive because of the fact that I had Monday off (President's Day), though I did wake up bright and early and do laundry. Since it's a pretty rare occassion to have a Monday off, I knew of a couple of events that I've wanted to check out that only happen on that night - the world famous Baraonda (an Italian restaurant) Euro-Trash parties that start at about midnight or Samba Le's (a Brasilian/Italian restaurant) free Samba lessons! Since I'm having another South American party that includes going to a club that plays a lot of Samba music, I thought that would be the perfect way to hopefully get some kind of understanding of the dance moves. My usual suspect friends were either out of town or were not interested in going, so I contemplated flying solo that night until I started chatting with the Lavalife girl, who was free that night. We arranged a meetup down there and when I arrived, it turns out that the place was totally closed up! I'd left a message on the restaurant's message machine asking them to call me and tell me what time the classes started at and the next day they called and let me know that they aren't open on Sundays yet. Gee, thanks! Good thing it was located in the East Village and I know my way around that neighborhood!


J. Riley, the gap is shrinking!