Twick or Tweet?

So I went and researched my options for getting my next dental adventure (two crowns) done down in Peru. It looks like they will likely cost me about a quarter to half the cost by going to one of the best doctors in Lima, plus my insurance will cover 50% of the work done (even in a foreign country, they'll even translate documents!!), so that will be half of THAT cost! So now I just have to figure out how to get it all done, logistically, and talk with the doctor about some more details (oh yea, he speaks fluent English, of course). I wonder if he'll have the awesome DVD goggles to keep me entertained while he's giving me new teeth....

Summer seems to have arrived - at least it did last weekend. So, we celebrated it in style, starting immediately at 5:00pm on Friday. We headed down to Brooklyn to catch a sushi dinner a theater performance with some friends of ours. I thought it was some nice classical music performance, and it was Bach, which was impressive. It was St. Matthew, the Divine. Ever seen Passion of the Christ? Yea, it was like the movie. Only it was all done in opera style, and there was no acting :o|. Three hours of chorus singing interspersed with solo performances, and only one intermission. Yikes, it was rough. No wonder two of the four of us fell asleep (not me, I survived through it, counting down each minute).

Saturday, we slept in a bit until 9:45, when I had to get up to hook my laptop up to my TV and watch the Liverpool game. There's been some pretty crazy games with them lately, unfortunately not in their favor, but they did the job on Saturday, knocking around the opposition in a 3-1 fashion. Afterwards, Erika went to get her haircut for the first time in the US. Being that we live in a heavily Euro/Brazilian immigrant neighborhood, she got a referral from one of her friends to get her haircut at a super-Euro, Croatian place called Gigi. It was great, full of fashionable gay guys with mohawks, techno music blasting, wine or beverages available to the guests and clients. And, to top it off, Erika got a great haircut and walked out looking like Paula Abdul. Which is not a bad thing!

We had some free time then, and it was hot out, so we decided it would be great to take a mass-transit road trip to check out some beaches. Three subways, one express bus, and two hours later, we ended up at the Far Rockaways, where we were met with cold gusts of wind and NO heat! We were lost in the middle of nowhere after cruising through some serious ghettos to get there. Every other building was either shuttered, an African braid salon, or a laundromat. Thank got I live in Astoria! We got off the bus and started walking and asked a guy we were walking by, "Where's the beach?". Of course, he didn't speak English. Having about seven languages covered between the two of us, we asked him what language he wanted to converse in and he said "Russian". We started doing hand-hyrogliphics and using words like "water", "beach", and "why don't you know English, you live in freakin Far Rockaway!" Anyway, after a very anti-climactic visit to a cold beach, we got back on the local bus and I proceeded to fall asleep until we got back - to Jamaica, Queens (another ghetto-fantastic neighborhood). That's a long ass trip home!

Well, at least there was one positive thing to do on the way home. Since we were taking the E-train home, we got off in Jackson Heights to try to find our Peruvian Restaurant of choice - Pio Pio. There are several elusive restaurants that we tried to find using phone-a-friend, but Jackson Heights is in desperate need for jacksonheights.citysearch.com . We walked all over JH trying to find Pio Pio and ended up really enjoying the neighborhoods there. Big, roomy, historically protected apartments, leafy streets, 182 languages spoken (fact!), more restaurants than you can imagine from more countries than you can imagine, and still relatively close to NYC. I think we decided that if we were going to settle down in the NY area (a BIG if), it would probably be somewhere like JH. A pitcher of sangria and a pollo a la brasa later, we were feeling good, so we got on another bus that took us to the ghettos of Astoria, from where we could walk home and crash after a long day.

Sunday was even hotter than Saturday, reaching a full 90 degrees! It was gorgeous, as was our plan for the day - entertaining out of town Vince by giving him a whirlwind tour of some of what Astoria offers the occasional tourist. Naturally, we started off with pitchers of imported Czech beer at the very popular Czech beer garden. There must have been at least 600 people there with the sun shining through the giant, overhanging Euro trees that provide just enough shade to prevent my chalky skin from changing into a pigment of red. Further stops included a self-proclaimed Greek-fusion restaurant for Greek beer, and a hip burger cafe aptly named Fatty's for some righteous, original burger flavors (that would provide me with 2:30am heartburn) and some fresh German hefe-weissen to whet my whistle (that would provide me with a 9:00pm bedtime).

A glorious weekend it was. And now, onto the subject of this blog. Twitter. Do I need it? No. Really, who cares what I'm doing every day? Who wants to read, "wow, just read an interesting article about industrial espionage" (besides Ryan), or "I just found out that E*Trade is paying 2% on their savings accounts" (besides Cathy and Melissa), or "Sweet, Adriano is going back to Flamengo!" (besides Daniel), or "Stefan just bought a new computer to install Linux on so that I can install an awesome photo album software" (besides Roland), or "Just finished an hour of downward dogs" (besides Paul). Really, do people want to read my "tweets"? If the masses want it, it will come! Comments please....

J. Riley, "just finished writing my blog"