| a wonderful nightlast night, i went to park my car over in west philly as i always do. i locked my club on the wheel and started walking away, obsessively checking for street signs that might be hidden behind trees - a habit i developed whilst having my car towed, ticketed, and hit-n-run - when i spontaneously had the idea to call pacci. amazingly she was free! and so began our best night ever... our first stop was at pod, which is right across from her dorm. the bartender was really sweet and apologized profusely for keeping us waiting. she made us two yummy, colorful cocktails. i had expected to drop the car off and go straight home, so i was wearing sweats and holding a big package of japanese cookies, HAHA. we talked and finished our drinks, and then went out to meet dani, who had called to say she wanted to join us. dani was hungry, so we headed over to new deck, which is a pub, to get some food. the moment we stepped in, this guy who was missing a bunch of his teeth wanted our IDs. pacci explained we just wanted to get food, but the guy would not let us in. dani is italian so she doesn't have a driver's license, but she had her student ID from temple with her picture on it, and an italian ID with her name and birthdate on it. we showed them to the guy, explaining the situation to him, but he wouldn't even look at them! by this point, dani and pacci are both getting pissed and asking to speak to the manager and telling the guy he isn't doing his job right and explaining that nothing like that has ever happened in all the years they've been going there. meanwhile, i'm standing off to the side, a little surprised by the turn of events. i think if we had stayed much longer, dani would have done some serious damage to that semi-toothless dude, but a big group came in and i wanted to avoid making a scene, and nudged our little group out the door. by this point, it's around 9 PM, it's cold and windy outside, and dani is especially mad, saying how such things never happen in her country, haha, and making squirrel faces to imitate the toothless dude. she kept wanting to go back and finish the fight. we go over to cosi to get food, and stand around waiting for a while, only to find out that they're completely out of bread and there's no more table service. we walk over to 40th and locust to go to greek lady, which always seems open, only to find out it's closed. well, we think, maybe it's just a philly diner sort of night... so we go to philly diner (it's open 24 hrs, yay!). pacci orders a sandwich and dani and i share a big breakfast platter. our waitress is totally out of it, so pacci walks around picking up a ketchup bottle, mustard, syrup, salt, etc for our table. a place mat, utensils, napkins... all these things, we get up and get for ourselves. when the food finally comes out, pacci gets the wrong sandwich and our breakfast platter looks totally sad. the ham was burnt, the bacon was a color i've never seen on bacon before, the eggs were raw on top, and the corned beef hash was mush. it was past 10 PM, so we were starving and started eating ravenously, but at some point, we stopped and looked at each other and were like, this food is really gross. the manager drops by our table to ask if everything's OK, because he knows the waitress got pacci's order wrong, and dani looks at him and says, "the food was really bad." hahaha. i was a bit shocked, but pacci and dani convinced me that it's important to let people know when they're not doing their jobs well and not to reward bad behavior. as we were leaving, there was a big group of kids outside the door and pacci turns to them and says, "don't go in there. it's not worth it." pacci and dani both concluded that it was perhaps the worst dining experience of their lives and promised to go home and drink lots of green tea. but the story doesn't end there! after dropping pacci off, dani and i got on the trolley headed in the wrong direction, which we had waited quite a while for in a dark, deserted station with no one else except a big guy sitting on the bench beside us. but thankfully the woman driving the next trolley believed us when we explained what had happened and let us on without having to pay again. we got home safely and went to bed. oh, but before we went to bed, we gave pacci a call and she was indeed drinking her green tea. on another note, i just watched the holiday, which was surprisingly good and well-acted. it actually brought tears to my eyes during more than one scene. i liked how all the characters were subtly flawed. just stumbled upon this quote today. i really like it. "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence." - Albert Einstein |
