Restaurants

One well known fact about DC is its variety in people, the larger variety of people, the larger variety of restaurants, and I have been to a few. I wanted to talk about some of them, mostly so that I can remember them when I want to remember where I was at, but also just in case you find yourself in DC and was a good restaurant to go to, I can give you a heads up on what you are in for! I will not tell you all the restaurants I have been to, that would be redundant and we both would get bored, so here are just a few...thus far...

Ted's Montana Grill
Some Italian food on King ST.
Cafe Asia
Kabob Palace or something with that name
Pho 75
Simply Asia

Ted's Montana Grill--a hometown guy restaurant that serves Bison. Good hamburger, fries okay.

Italian on King St--I don't remember what I got, but it was good. Chicken penne or something of the like.

Cafe Asia--Really good, I had the Panang curry, and it was served with rice. It was spicy and tasted delicious.

Kabob Palace--This restaurant is right in Crystal City and is DELICIOUS, probably one of my favorites. They give you this spicy cucumber sauce to dip bread in...very good. You could probably get anything there and be happy.

Pho 75--Very good as well, I went to the one off the Rosslyn stop, you will have to walk a bit, but it is worth it! It is a soup with noodles, meat, green onions, cilantro, and I threw in some jalapenos...very good food.

Simply Asia--good food on a tight budget, the meal was $6 and it came quickly.

This is all for now, but I will update and repost the more I eat, or I will make a new post, I guess I will just have to surprise you!

Philly 4

We went to a Ben Franklin museum, got our friends a PCS and headed to the Masonic Temple, which we found out closes its doors to the public at 12 (it was 5 by now). We got there and saw that it was huge! Took some pictures and went across the street to a giant-sized-board-game playground. The dominoes were HUGE, so were the Sorry pieces, and the chess pieces, and the Monopoly pieces (all games listed are their own respective trademark). Once we were done taking pictures there, we went across the street and went to the LOVE waterfall or something like that. It was nice to cool off by the water. The drive home was nice; we ended up putting 6 people in one car, because we didn’t want the others to get stranded on a bus late at night. The trip was a huge success and apparently took a long time to tell the story, I apologize, not for the length, but if I made it too boring, sometimes you gotta do, whatcha gotta do.

Philly 3

I have to back track a little bit and give a little story about a bus ride that two of our friends had to take. We had a total of 11 people go with us to Philly, and we had two cars to take them, and each car had 5 seatbelts. If you can do the math, and I am sure you can, that leaves one person left without a seatbelt. That was not going to happen, so two people decided to take the bus to and from Philly. We decided two, because then one wouldn’t be left alone on a bus. So they go on their merry way and get to the bus stop upon which they waited in line, and when they got up to the window, they heard a man say in a heavy Chinese accent, “We are sold out, sorry.” So we (the ones in the car) get a call from them, and we tell them to get to Philly any way they can, because we were all going to pool our money together and even out the money load so that two people don’t have to bear most of the cost. They ended up catching a bus, but the bus didn’t leave the station until 10.30, which is ok, so we tell them to take it. They get on their way and about 30 to 45 minutes after they get on the bus, we get another call, “Uh, guys, we are stuck here on the side of the road, we won’t be able to make it for a while, because the bus had a flat tire.” That is just funny! First, they get shafted on a ticket, and now they shafted on the bus ride to Philly! It was crazy luck. Anyway, they did finally get there, after we had already visited most of Old Town Philly.

Philly 2

Moving on…we then went to the former home of Betsy Ross (she sewed the US flag). That was interesting. The stairs were narrow and seemed rather precarious, but I made it up and down them alive. After that, we walked by the US Mint and also by where Ben Franklin was buried. It is an interesting feeling standing by the grave of someone who has done so much for the United States. We didn’t stay there long, because we had to go to our tour of Independence Hall. That was pretty cool, but I was expecting a little more. We went into one room, and then went into the room where men committed treason by signing their name to the Declaration of Independence, which document started our freedom from “taxation without representation.” I remember hearing a story about the signing, that the men in the room would close the windows while they were discussing and arguing (and probably when they were signing the document too), so I thought it would be kind of interesting to take a picture looking out the window to see what they would have seen had they looked outside. It turns out, the picture I took looked nothing almost nothing like what they would have seen, because all I could see were tall buildings…oh well, the picture turned out nice (thanks Dal for the compliment).
After we saw the enjoyable Independence Hall, we went and saw the Liberty Bell. That was very interesting, the display had a long of significances about what a bell means, but I can’t recall why they call it the Liberty Bell. It was cool to see though.

Philly

I just realized that I am going to have to publish multiple posts in order to get the pictures the way I want so, here it is!

Well, what can I say that I have done since my last blog entry? I have done a lot of stuff—that is for sure. There has been a lapse of about 2 weeks, maybe 3, I don’t know I don’t really count. I think I will just write about what comes to my head. The first thing that comes to my head is that I love my wife. She is a great wife and I love her for that. (Yeah, I just did the wife shout out) The second thing that comes to my mind is my trip to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. That was quite a fun trip. We left sometime around 7.30 and got into Philly around 10.30. It was quite an experience. The first thing we did when we got there was get tickets to go to Independence Hall. We got our tickets for 1.45 or so. Then we went and got something to eat. When we were looking for something to eat, we obviously knew that we were going to be eating a Philly Cheese Steak, because when you are in Philly, you have to do that at least once. So we asked around and found out that Campo’s was the best Cheese Steak around. I don’t think that was my first PCS, but I do know that it was delicious!
After we were done with that, we went to Christ Church and saw a bunch of really old and cool stuff. One really old and cool thing was about 600 years and was, I believe, a baptismal font. It was kept from the public by one of those really nice removable guard rails. It was a carpet looking thing. Pretty cool stuff. While in Christ Church, I also got to sit in the Presidential Pew. That was pretty cool, when Presidents would go to that church, their pew would be already marked off for them—they sat among the crowd. I also got to sit in the same seat that Ben Franklin sat in. The church itself was about 200 feet tall and was, at the time, the largest building around. You could see that church from far away…assuming you have a good line of sight. One of the workers told us, that this church was probably the tallest building that George Washington saw. I don’t know if it is true, but it sure is cool…

Glenn Beck Rally

I know that I have to recount one story, this is the story of the Glenn Beck rally. If any of you have heard of it, you should not be jealous that I went and you didn’t. To make a long story short, it was a religious revival rally with an undertone of support for our troops and politics. It was about bringing America closer to God, some did it better than others. There were several speakers, it was humid and the temperature felt like 100+, there was no shade for me, my legs were getting burned and I had to stand for roughly 5 hours in one spot and another 3 or 4 while walking. I am not complaining, because I was glad that I went, but I am saying that if I know what I know now, I probably wouldn’t go again. The trip getting there was fun though. There was a LOT of people. I don’t know what the official report came to, but there were a LOT. When we started getting closer to our destination, we wanted to get a little bit closer to the reflection pool and when we started to go down that path, we met a few hostiles. These people had “been here since 6 pm” the night before and “you can’t take that spot.” Yes lady, this spot that you have cordoned off with police tape does belong to you and I apologize for walking in front of you while trying to find a way around it. We finally did sneak our way down and met a couple of care-free hippies with strong political opinions. Even though I “was” paying attention the whole time that dude was talking, I wasn’t. I have no idea what he was talking about. I do know that he slept on a sailing boat the night before and that the boat is apparently his, even though he doesn’t know how to sail. That sail boat was his “insurance policy just in case things go to hell in a hand basket.” The wife of this man was, back in the day, an avid Woodstock goer. (Yes, I know it only happened once, that is why I wrote it the way I did, it is much funnier this way than to say—the wife went to Woodstock) Anyway, it took me and my roommate about 45 minutes to get home, which wasn’t bad, considering it would have normally taken about 20 to 30 minutes.

...

Okay, so here is the deal. It turns out that I have good intentions, however, my good intentions will not get the internet in my apartment. As it stands now though, I have found a 3x3 square in which I can simultaneously sit and write on my laptop while being on the internet. I know it sounds funny, but if I go out of my bubble...BOOM...no more internet. I guess boom was not the right word to use, but it was funny (to me) nonetheless.

I apologize for not getting on and posting things more often. I will try to do better in the future. I think I need a name for my 3x3 square...anyone have any ideas? If you do, and I use your name, I will give you the credit, the absolute full credit. Anyway, it is not much to read and it is probably not even interesting to most of you, but it is my life and it has been fun to write about some of my experiences while here in DC. Keep on Keepin' on.